Jesuit Education and Mathematics

The book reviews recent literature on diverse aspects of Jesuit education including its historiography, pedagogy, teaching, philosophy, and Mathematics in its curriculum. The time frame studied has been divided in four main periods. Origins; encompassing the founding of the Society of Jesus in 1540 to the publication of the Ratio Studiorum in 1599. Expansion; covering the publication of the Ratio to the suppression of the Society in 1773. Restoration: covering the period between the 1814 Restoration, until the beginning of the Vatican II Council. Renewal; covering the Society in the post- Vatican area to the present day. The Spiritual Exercises inspired their mission and the pedagogical process. The University of Paris gave them a model, and the Italian Humanists an orientation for their education. The Constitutions gave them the focus and direction to implement their network of schools. Their system had provisions for mathematics instruction that survive to the present. Mathematics played an important role in the beginning of the Scientific Revolution, and it affected the work of influential minds of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.