Burt Kaufman (who went on to become IMACS principal founder) attended a six-week National Science Foundation Institute at the University of Notre Dame as part of a class of 75 practicing teachers together with 25 gifted high school mathematics students. In Burt's words, the high school students "were quantum leaps ahead of us in knowledge, interest and ability to learn. They made us look bad and humbled us." Inspired by this experience, he decided, "If there's an opportunity in my life for me to create a curriculum similar to what I'm studying now, I want to." Thus began the journey that continues today with IMACS.

While serving as Mathematics Coordinator at the then-experimental Nova High School in Davie, Florida, Burt Kaufman was charged with the task of designing a multi-track secondary school mathematics curriculum. The textbooks chosen for the fast-track students were proving to be too lacking in rigor to be used effectively with pre-college students, so Burt and a colleague began the challenging task of rewriting the texts for a younger audience. A number of American mathematicians and mathematics educators were recruited to act as advisers, a role in which they would continue to serve for decades to come. It was during this period that the idea of starting students off with a solid foundation in mathematical logic took hold. The expectation was that early familiarity with logic and logical reasoning would so simplify the learning of the mathematics normally taught in secondary school that a significant amount of time would become available for learning more advanced material.

In 1966, Burt Kaufman moved to Southern Illinois University in Carbondale, Illinois, to continue the curriculum development project he began at Nova. The project would come to be known as the Comprehensive School Mathematics Program (CSMP). During this period, Burt met a number of eminent European mathematics education reformers and invited them to join the CSMP advisory group. In 1967, the Central Midwestern Regional Educational Laboratory (CEMREL), a federally funded educational research and development center, agreed to take CSMP as one of its projects. CSMP generated quite a stir in the mathematics education community, prompting several more notable mathematicians and educators from Europe and the US to join the effort. In 1970, Edward Martin (who went on to co-found IMACS with Burt) joined CSMP straight out of the University of Cambridge, England.

As this international team of mathematicians and mathematics educators came together under Burt's leadership, the material that was to become the Elements of Mathematics (EM) series (and the foundation for the IMACS mathematics enrichment curriculum, including most of the Logic for Mathematics courses offered through eIMACS) began to take shape.

In 1974, Edward Martin became Senior Editor of the EM series in addition to maintaining responsibilities that included teaching students, training teachers on the EM materials at CSMP's summer workshops, and providing ongoing teacher support. The following year, CSMP moved from Carbondale to St. Louis, Missouri, where CEMREL was located. In 1978, with CEMREL's help, Burt Kaufman set up the first federally funded Project MEGSSS (Mathematics Education for Gifted Secondary School Students) in St. Louis to reach a middle and high school audience of much broader geographic scope. By 1980, he had reached his immediate goal of establishing a functioning model of EM usage. (Project MEGSSS of St. Louis continues today as a tuition-based, not-for-profit company.)

Also by this time, CSMP's developmental work at the elementary-school level had essentially been completed. Burt felt that the time had come for him to relinquish the reins of leadership at CSMP and move on to the next challenge, namely that of developing possible models of use of the EM materials. He returned to South Florida in 1981 where his task would be to persuade a large, centralized school district with numerous middle and high schools to establish a similar program — a second Project MEGSSS in Broward County.

Burt Kaufman and several of Broward's top mathematics teachers whom he recruited welcomed the first class of MEGSSS students in January 1983. In 1985, Burt was rejoined by Edward Martin, who had just led a two-year mathematics curriculum development project based at the University of Bath in England. Ed's colleague at Bath, computer science specialist Iain Ferguson, also joined the team to develop the MEGSSS computer science curriculum. Following insightful interactions with Dan Friedman, professor of Computer Science at Indiana University, the decision was made to design the course using the programming language Scheme. (This curriculum evolved into what now serves as the basis for the University Computer Science courses offered through eIMACS.)

Project MEGSSS of Broward County thrived for 10 successful years, turning out class after class of students who went on to study at some of the nation's most prestigious universities. A statewide budget crisis in 1992 forced the elimination of public funding for various special programs, including MEGSSS. Parents formed a not-for-profit organization, the Project MEGSSS Foundation, to provide funds for the continued operation of the the high school portion of the program through the 1992-93 school year, whereupon the School Board of Broward County definitively wound up the project.