Euclid Transmogrified: A National Scandal tells the extraordinary story of how in the mid twentieth century, in a well-developed European country, a mathematically solid system of geometry was altered to such an extent that more than one million students were taught foundationally flawed geometry over more than a quarter of a century. The almost unbelievable situation came about in Ireland in the wake of early postcolonial developments that gave rise to an impressionable and unqualified civil service in a position of power over a nation’s educational development. This is a multifaceted tale of a perfect storm within mathematics development in Ireland whose result was so destructive that its ramifications continue to be felt into the twenty-first century, forty years after a report of a Royal Irish Academy commission of professors of mathematics described the matter as a national scandal.
