Hans Freudenthal was born in 1905 in
the German town of Luckenwalde, the
son of a Jewish teacher.
Even at a
young age he was interested in
differential equations and integration,
but by the age of 13 he had also read all
the works of Goethe and Schiller. In
1923 he went to Berlin and Paris to
study mathematics. After gaining his
doctorate he moved to Amsterdam, in
the Netherlands, where he became
assistant to L.E.J. Brouwer, the famous
mathematician, in 1930. Shortly after, he
married Suus Lutter, who was a
pedagogue.
Thanks to his marriage to
an Arian Dutch woman and a certain
amount of luck, Freudenthal was able to
survive the Second World War.
In 1946 Freudenthal became a
professor in Utrecht, appointed to a
chair in pure and applied mathematics
and the principles of mathematics. In his
time Freudenthal was an accomplished
and well-known mathematician, and he
made substantial contributions to
topology, geometry and the theory of Lie
groups.
As a teacher he acquired international
fame and significance as the founder of
realistic mathematics education, which
is based on problems taken from
day-to-day experiences rather than on
abstract math rules.
Single-handedly
Freudenthal saved Dutch education from
the American teaching method of New
Math, which was introduced in many
countries from 1960 onwards. This
formal, logic-based method turned out to
be unsuitable for most students.
Freudenthal preferred to send his
students on a tour of discovery. His
motto was that you learn mathematics
best by re-inventing it.
His students were
not given abstract bare problems to do
but well chosen practical problems from
daily life, and in solving these they
gradually developed mathematical
understanding. In addition, Freudenthal
thought the recognizability of the
problems would lead to the students
automatically becoming more interested
in mathematics.
In 1971 Freudenthal set up the IOWO
(Instituut Ontwikkeling
Wiskundeonderwijs, Institute for
Development of Mathematics
education), now called the Freudenthal
Institute (FI).
The FI continues to be one
of the driving forces in the renewing of
mathematics education, both in the
Netherlands and abroad.
Deep at heart Freudenthal was really a
writer.
He wrote countless columns over
many years for Dutch quality papers,
such as De Groene Amsterdammer and
NRC Handelsblad, on topics which
included language, history and politics. In
addition, after his death many
unpublished works - poems, plays and
novels - were found in his estate.
Hans Freudenthal, the education reformer, died on 13 October 1990. He was found on a park bench by children playing there.
Foto: Werry Crone, TROUW (1987) from the website of the Freudenthal Institute