Ewald Fettweis (mathematician)

Ewald Fettweis (* July 23, 1881 in Eupen ; † July 24, 1967 in Aachen ) was a German math teacher and math historian. He was a pioneer of ethnomathematics .

Fettweis studied mathematics in Münster and Bonn from 1902 to 1906 and, after passing the state examination for higher teaching qualifications in 1911, became a mathematics teacher (teacher) at the higher education institution for teachers in Düsseldorf , where from 1920 he was senior teacher at the Auguste Viktorie school. In 1927 he received his doctorate at the University of Bonn (Calculating among primitive peoples) . In Bonn he was a student of Eduard Study and the philosopher Adolf Dyroff , but his dissertation was based on research that he carried out on his own initiative since 1920.

From 1926 he was a lecturer at the newly founded Pedagogical Academy in Bonn. From 1928 he was a specialist mathematics advisor at the provincial school college in Koblenz . In 1932 he became vice director of the Fürstenwall-Oberrealschule in Düsseldorf, which he remained until 1945. Fettweis was a professor at the Pedagogical Academy in Aachen from 1945 to 1954. Heinrich Winter was his pupil and successor to the professorship in Aachen .

He dealt with mathematics education and ethnomathematics. He was a pioneer in the latter area (it only became a common research topic in the mid-1980s). The Italian Olindo Falsirol, who introduced the term ethnomathematics into the literature in an essay in 1959, referred explicitly to Fettweis.

He also included the history of mathematics and ethnomathematics in his lectures for teachers (he gave a seminar on ethnomathematics in Aachen) and promoted their use in the school curriculum.

Although he also used the linguistic usage of the time in his articles (race, lower cultural levels, etc.), he did not advocate an ideology of racial superiority, but believed that one could learn from indigenous peoples in the calculation methods, and even saw them as superior in terms of spatial imagination on.

The mining engineer Günter B. Fettweis is his son.

Fonts

• As one used to calculate. Teubner 1923.
• The arithmetic of primitive peoples. Teubner 1927. (Dissertation)
• About the first emergence of simple geometric shapes. Archive f. Business Math., Natural sciences and technology. 1929, pp. 113-121.
• What does our calculation method learn from the calculations of indigenous peoples? Pedagogical Control Room, 1929, pp. 157–161.
• About the relationship between mathematical thinking and mystical thinking on lower levels of culture. Archeion 1932, pp. 207-220.
• Arithmetic, race and culture. Archeion, 1935, pp. 64-75.
• Ethnology and History of Mathematics. Anthropos, 1937, pp. 277-283.
• About the development of spatial perception among peoples of non-European races and in European prehistoric times. Scientia, Vol. 31, 1937, pp. 13-21.
• Instructions for teaching space theory. Schöningh, 2nd edition 1951.
• Didactics and methodology of arithmetic instruction. Schöningh, 4th edition 1965 (edited by Heinz Schlechtweg).

literature

• Joseph W. Dauben , Christoph J. Scriba (eds.): Writing the history of mathematics , Birkhäuser 2002, p. 427.
• Christoph Scriba, obituary in the German Society for the History of Medicine, Science and Technology, Volume 19, 1969, pp. 17–18.
• Karin Reich, Menso Folkerts, Christoph Scriba: The list of publications by Ewald Fettweis (1881–1967) including an appreciation by Olindo Falsirol. Historia Mathematica, Volume 16, 1989, pp. 360-372.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Falsirol, Per una maggiore attenzione all Etnologia Matematica , Rivista di Anthropologia, Volume 46, 1959, pp. 262-266
2. ^ First in 1929 as: Methodology for arithmetic instruction