PME and the International Community of Mathematics Education

The International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education (PME) was founded in 1976 in Karlsruhe (Germany), during the ICME-3 Congress. Since 1977, the PME group has met every year somewhere in the world, since then, and has developed into one of the most interesting international groups in the field of educational research. In this paper, after a short introduction, we draw some main features of the unique essence of the PME as a research group. We focus on and analyse the change and development of the group's research over the past 40 years, and exemplify these changes and developments by tracing on a few main research lines. Based on specifics of PME research, we describe the more comprehensive lines of PME research, its change and progress in the past four decades.