Ethnomathematics: A Culturally Responsive Approach to Learning

By Shakiyya Bland, Ed.D. Who gets to decide what mathematics is and why it must be done in a particular way?  That question has followed me since I was a student. I remember sitting in middle and high school math classes, flipping through the pages of my textbooks, pausing at the photos of the authors,...

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Calculus for Teachers: Complex Integration

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. Once we get into complex integration, the theorems become much more technical, so in most cases I will simply state the result, possibly with some indication of why it makes sense that it would be true. For anyone...

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Low Stakes, High Rewards: How a Corequisite Course Improved Student Performance in Intro to Proofs

By Ekaterina Yurasovskaya With its highly abstract material and proof-writing that students encounter for the first time, Introduction to Proofs often turns into a gatekeeper to a mathematics major. At the Mathematics Department at Seattle University, we achieved significant results by creating a lecture-free, problem-solving ungraded co-requisite course called Mathematical Communication and Reasoning (MCR). The new...

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When Water Isn’t Really Water

By Lew Ludwig The hamburger graph has become my unexpected companion this summer. It first appeared in a workshop I was co-facilitating, comparing the water usage of AI prompts to beef production. Then it surfaced again a few weeks later - and that's when I realized we weren't really arguing about water at all. The first...

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Where do our numbers come from?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social The numbers we use every day are so familiar, and so much a part of life, it’s easy to forget that they are a recent invention, having been introduced in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Sure, humanity has had some form of numbers for at least ten thousand years, and...

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Grades are Violent: A Reflection on the Negative Impacts of Grades

By Mallory Dolorfino Since I started undergrad, I have witnessed the harmful effects, the ineffectiveness, and the simultaneous overuse of the grading system in higher education. This year, as a first time graduate teaching assistant, the phrase “grades are violent” has become increasingly resonant. The following is a reflection, based on my own experience as...

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Calculus for Teachers: Complex Differentiation

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. It was Cauchy in 1821 who first began studying complex-valued functions defined on the complex plane. He was actually sitting on almost 70 years of what amounted to research into these functions. The input defines a point in...

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From wandering to wayfinding: Moving Beyond Shiny Object Syndrome

By Lew Ludwig "The deep breath before the plunge" - a sentiment Gandalf shares with Pippin in the Return of the King. This phrase often runs through my mind as the last days of summer break wind down and the new school year is about to begin. To be clear, I do not see the new...

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Complement (bottom-up) learning with top-down activities to develop mathematical thinking ability

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social Sometime in the early 2000s, my primary care physician offered me the option of no longer having an annual health checkup in person. Rather, I could just call into my nearest walk-in testing lab and have a blood draw, followed up a few days later by a quick video-chat. (They also wanted...

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Leveraging Data About Math Departments

By Dave Kung When I was department chair at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, we carefully tracked data about how we were serving students. Regularly updated spreadsheets showed how many students were in each course we offered and we used them to look for enrollment patterns and adjust our offerings as needed. We were particularly...

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