Shahshahani, Siavash M. Siavash Shahshahani received his University education in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1960s. He returned to his native Islamic Republic of Iran in 1974 and has been a member of the Department of Mathematical Sciences of Sharif University of Technology since. He was also Deputy Director, Institute for Studies in Theoretical Physics and Mathematics (IPM) since its establishment in 1989 for 13 years. During his tenure at the Institute, Shahshahani was involved in establishing the first Internet connectivity for the Islamic Republic of Iran; IPM was the sole Internet provider for the country for some time. He continues to head the .ir Internet registry in the Islamic Republic of Iran. As an educator, educational administrator and popularizer of mathematics, Shahshahani has served in numerous capacities, written and lectured widely in the Islamic Republic of Iran and has had considerable impact directly or through his former students on the mathematical landscape in the country. He headed the Mathematics Curriculum Committee of the Ministry of Science, Research and Technology for a number of years and has been the Chairman of Editorial Board of Nashre Riyaazi, the leading expository mathematics journal in the country, throughout most of its existence. More recently he has been involved in investigating the impact of emerging new ICT technologies on mathematics education and research Shahshahani’s technical research in mathematics has centered mainly in the area of dynamical systems. He has trained a number of PhD and MSc students in this, as well as the related areas of global analysis and geometric group theory. He was a pioneer in the application of dynamical-system and differential-geometric methods to the study of continuous models of population dynamics. His name is attached to a metric he devised that provided the first rigorous account of some results in this area.

EMERGING ICT AND THE FUTURE OF MATHEMATICS EDUCATION

In every age the dominant philosophical attitude toward a field of intellectual activity inevitably trickles down to the practice of teaching and training even at the most elementary levels of that field. Where the educational implications of this attitude are in conflict with the empirical evidence of the educators, more often than not, it is the educators who bend in to the contingencies of the leading paradigms. An outstanding example is the once rampant ‘new math’ movement. On the other hand, philosophical attitudes in every field of science are themselves shaped not only by the normal internal developments in the field but also by external pressures and the availability of new tools that facilitate development in new areas and re-shape the mainstream.

It will be argued that the emerging developments in information and communication technologies will and should lead to fundamental changes in the way mathematics is taught from elementary school to college. Two basic reasons for this change will be delineated. One obvious reason is the changing trends within mathematics itself and in the work of leading practitioners where powerful computers and ICT are vastly expanding the possibilities of mathematical experimentation and opening new vistas of research and activity hitherto considered impossible within the traditional paper-and-pencil medium of mathematicians. Another, and perhaps more radical reason, that will have its greatest impact at the most elementary level, is tied up with the psychology of learning and practicing mathematics. It has been argued by many philosophers and mathematicians, from Plato and Kant to Brouwer, that mathematics is an essentially non-linguistic activity. Educators such as Piaget have discovered that mathematics is best learned by children through hands-on experiments of self-discovery. On the other hand, throughout history, the spoken and written languages have provided the dominant medium of communicating mathematical ideas to children, a practice that has inevitably failed to awaken mathematical intuition and appreciation, and has instead instilled apprehension and estrangement among all but a few. ICT provides a challenge to educational technologists, psychologists and mathematicians to create learning tools that will provide a natural and conducive medium for the teaching of mathematics to future generations and to bring about a convergence of empirically-supported educational propositions and current paradigms about the nature of mathematical practice. Perhaps after many centuries of uneasy existence among Homo sapiens, mathematics will find a natural niche among the emerging homo digitalis.