Fuzzy Sets and Mathematics Education

L Introduction While it is still a general belief in society that mathematics is an "exact science", at the educational level it is generally accepted that it may be just as important to learn about the mathematics of approximations, errors, expectations, statistics, probabilities, etc. This can be seen today in mathematics cmricula at all levels but was not so clear just a few years ago. It took a long time to convince mathematics educators about the need to teach some elementary facts of probability and statistics (in fact, it is amazing to realize that in some textbooks at the secondary school level, chapters devoted to such questions are located at the end, following the old teaching tradition that "in cases of lack of time forget about the last part"). Since 1965 the new theory introduced by Lotfi A. Zadeh in his celebrated paper, "Fuzzy Sets" (Information and Control, 8 [1965], 338-353), has generated a growing interest both in the theoretical mathematical fiamework as well as in its practical applications. The aim of this paper is to give some ideas on the interest that the mathematics educational process may have in the introduction of some basic facts arising from Fuzzy Sets theory.