In the May issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society, Underwood Dudley posits that the purpose of a mathematics education is to teach people how to reason. This would suggest that the purpose of a liberal arts mathematics course should be, more or less, to have students perform calisthenics in reasoning. We could teach mathematical push-ups and sit-ups or we could package the calisthenics into activities that have the greatest chance of maintaining student interest.

To maintain student interest in physics, David Goodstein of Caltech created a course that intertwined history and experimental observation. Maybe liberal arts mathematics courses should follow his hueristic.