Ever since the beginnings of modern engineering education at the end of the eighteenth century, mathematics has had a prominent place in its curricula. In the 1890s, a zealous “anti-mathematical” movement emerged among teachers in technological disciplines at German university colleges. The aim of this movement was to reduce the mathematical syllabus and reorient it towards more applied topics. Its members believed that this would improve engineering education, but many of them also had more ideological motives. They distrusted modern, rigorous mathematics, and demanded a more intuitive approach. For instance, they preferred to base calculus on infinitesimals rather than the modern (“epsilon delta”) definitions in terms of limits. Some of them even demanded that practically oriented engineers should replace mathematicians as teachers of the (reduced) mathematics courses for engineers. The anti-mathematical movement was short-lived, and hardly survived into the next century. However calls for more intuitive and less formal mathematics reappeared in another, more sinister context, namely the Nazi campaign for an intuitive “German” form of mathematics that would replace the more abstract and rigorous “Jewish” mathematics.