Pay It Forward: Practice and Progress in Post-Secondary Mathematics Education
Tara Holm, Cornell University
MAA James R.C. Leitzel Lecture

Friday, August 8
MAA MathFest 2025

Abstract: I will share vignettes from my time as a student, a nascent instructor, a practiced professor, and a community leader. A key theme running through these is providing all students with mathematical experiences that help them achieve their aspirations. To accomplish this, we must make a coordinated effort across the broad mathematics community. This process begins by assessing our current curriculum and pedagogy. We identify innovative practices and pathways for students. These must then be adapted and scaled to suit local needs. I hope this will be the beginning of a conversation about how we can advance our community of practice, for the sake of our students’ futures.

Biography: Tara Holm earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics at Dartmouth College and her PhD at MIT. She has been an NSF postdoctoral fellow at UC Berkeley, an Assistant Professor at the University of Connecticut, and is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Cornell University. Holm’s research focuses on symplectic geometry and its connections to algebraic geometry, topology, and combinatorics. She has been a Simons Fellow and Smithies Lecturer at Balliol College, Oxford; a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study; and a Visiting Fellow at Clare Hall, Cambridge. She currently serves on the Board of Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (tpsemath.org) and as the President of Pro Mathematica Arte, the non-profit corporation that runs the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. She is a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and has been awarded Cornell’s Morgan Chia-Wen Sze and Bobbi Josephine Hernandez Distinguished Teaching Prize.