students alike. People like Conant rose to prominence due to the successful launch of the Sputnik satellite by the Soviet Union in 1957. As a matter of fact, the passages of the artificial satellite were recorded by the Boston newspapers and viewed with the naked eye from rooftops. This surprising Soviet success demonstrated to the Americans that their education system had fallen behind. Life magazine reported that three quarters of American high-school students took no physics at all. The U.S. government realized it needed thousands of scientists and engineers to match the might of its ideological rival. On President Dwight D. Eisenhower's direct orders, science education underwent major reforms and the federal government started pouring enormous sums of money into not just education but also research and development. Private institutions, such as the Carnegie Corporation and the Ford Foundation provided funding for education, too. Authors felt inspired to cater to the physics textbook market, and one of the results was the Berkeley Physics Course, a series for undergraduates influenced by MIT's Physical Science Study Committee, formed right before the launch of Sputnik. One of the most famous of textbooks from the Berkeley series is Electricity and Magnetism by Nobel laureate Edward Mills Purcell, which has gone through multiple editions and remains in print in the twenty-first century. Under the 'New Math' initiative, conceptual abstraction gained the central role in mathematics education. Students received lessons in set theory, which is what mathematicians actually use to construct the set of real numbers, something advanced undergraduates learned in a course on real analysis. Arithmetic with bases other than ten was also taught. However, this educational initiative faced strong opposition, not just from teachers, many of whom struggled to understand the new material, let alone teach it, but also parents, who had problems helping their children with homework. It was criticized by experts, too, such as physicist Richard Feynman, mathematician and historian of mathematics Morris Kline, and mathematician and educator George F. Simmons. In any case, academic performance reclaimed its importance in the United States. At the same time, large numbers of young people desired to go to college due to population growth and the needs of society for specialized skills. Prestigious institutions were able to handpick the very best of students from massive pools of applications and consequently became the training centers for a growing class of cognitive elites. Indeed, the share of