Abstract
The Imperial College of Engineering, Kobu Daigakko, is a predecessor of the College of Engineering of the University of Tokyo, and was established in 1873 under the name of Kogakuryo to educate engineers for service in the Department of Public Works, Kobusho. All professors were invited from the United Kingdom. It was a six-year college of technical education. Theory and applications, teaching and learning at school and practical training outside school were unified together in the curriculum. It was an ambitious attempt to establish a technical institution, and it was succeeded. Mathematics was divided in two parts: Elementary Mathematics and Higher Mathematics, and the main contents of the latter were analytical geometry, differential and integral calculus and differential equations.
The curriculum, syllabus and examination papers recorded in the “Calendar” of the College, as well as the “Catalogue of Books in the Library of the College” give us information about the actual state of mathematics education at the College. For instance, the examination papers show that mathematics taught there is a ‘regular’ one and not the one which is merely application-oriented, and the level of mathematics taught at this College has been raised year by year.
