School Mathematics Project
The School Mathematics Project arose in the United Kingdom as part of the new mathematics educational movement of the 1960s. It is a developer of mathematics textbooks for secondary schools, formerly based in Southampton in the UK. Now generally known as SMP, it began as a research project inspired by a 1961 conference chaired by Bryan Thwaites at the University of Southampton, which itself was precipitated by calls to reform mathematics teaching in the wake of the Sputnik launch by the Soviet Union, the same circumstances that prompted the wider New Math movement. It maintained close ties with the former Collaborative Group for Research in Mathematics Education at the university. Instead of dwelling on 'traditional' areas such as arithmetic and geometry, SMP dwelt on subjects such as set theory, graph theory and logic, non-cartesian co-ordinate systems, matrix mathematics, affine transforms, Euclidean vectors, and non-decimal number systems.