This book tells one of the greatest stories in the history of school mathematics. Two of the
names in the title-Samuel Pepys and Isaac Newton-need no introduction and this book draws
attention to their special contributions to the history of school mathematics. According to
Ellerton and Clements during the last quarter of the seventeenth century Pepys and Newton were
key players in defining what school mathematics beyond arithmetic and elementary geometry might
look like. The scene at which most of the action occurred was Christ's Hospital which was a
school ostensibly for the poor in central London. The Royal Mathematical School (RMS) was
established at Christ's Hospital in 1673.It was the less well-known James Hodgson a fine
mathematician and RMS master between 1709 and 1755 who demonstrated that topics such as
logarithms plane and spherical trigonometry and the application of these to navigation might
systematically and successfully be taught to 12- to 16-year-old school children. From a wider
history-of-school-education perspective this book tells how the world's first secondary-school
mathematics program was created and how slowly but surely what was being achieved at RMS
began to influence school mathematics in other parts of Great Britain Europe and America.The
book has been written from the perspective of the history of school mathematics. Ellerton and
Clements's analyses of pertinent literature and of archival data and their interpretations of
those analyses have led them to conclude that RMS was the first major school in the world to
teach mathematics-beyond-arithmetic on a systematic basis to students aged between 12 and
16.Throughout the book Ellerton and Clements examine issues through the lens of a lag-time
theoretical perspective. From a historiographical perspective this book emphasizes how the
history of RMS can be portrayed in very different ways depending on the vantage point from
which the history is written. The authors write from the vantage point of international
developments in school mathematics education and therefore their history of RMS differs from
all other histories of RMS most of which were written from the perspective of the history of
Christ's Hospital.
