General – Page 3 – Mathematical Association of America

Featured Resources

Getting Your Career into the Game

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College I’m a professor of mathematics and computer science who specializes in sports analytics. Professional teams and national media outlets call to get help from my students and me. Sound like a dream job? It is to me. But the best part isn’t the bright lights—it’s the everyday work of using...

Students are struggling. Why?

By Dave Kung The kids are not alright – at least not in terms of their mathematical preparation for college. That’s one thing nearly everyone agrees on in the wake of a recent UCSD report about their incoming freshmen. The Senate-Administration Workgroup on Admissions (SAWG) report paints a shocking enough picture of students’ math skills...

An Applied Mathematician’s Apology

This short book – really a long essay – offers an apologia (in the sense of a defense or explanation) of applied mathematics from the author’s perspective. The title mirrors G. H. Hardy’s A Mathematician’s Apology, perhaps rather ironically since Hardy was no fan of applied mathematics. The author reflects on his career in applied...

A Panoply of Polygons

MAA Press published A Panoply of Polygons by Claudi Alsina and Roger B. Nelsen on January 30, 2023. A few weeks later, on March 20, 2023, David Smith et al caused quite a stir announcing their discovery of an aperiodic monotile. The timing of the publication of Panoply was fortunate in that the book came out just as there is heightened interest in polygonal...

Algebra the Beautiful

We have all seen the coffee mug, card, or sign which reads “Well, another day has passed and I didn’t use algebra even once!” Such thoughts and attitudes are often expressed by many of those who found algebra to be perplexing and baffling while studying the subject in school. Author G. Arnell Williams demystifies algebra...

Felix Klein: Visions for Mathematics, Applications, and Education

Robert Fricke once compared Felix Klein to a triptych whose central panel concerns Klein's mathematical research, and whose flanking panels concern his interests in education and his organizational skills. As Tobies explains in her preface, "the goal of this book is to put this triptych into words and enrich it with a human dimension". Mathematically, Klein is...

The Primacy of Doubt

The author is a mathematical physicist, a distinguished leader in ensemble forecasting for weather prediction and climate forecasting. Paraphrasing Wikipedia, this means "instead of making a single forecast of the most likely weather, a set (or ensemble) of forecasts is produced. The multiple simulations are conducted to account for the two usual sources of uncertainty in forecast models: ...

Putting Two and Two Together

Like the authors’ previous book (A Dingo Ate My Math Book), this volume is a collection of columns that appeared between 2007 and 2014 in Melbourne’s Age newspaper. Those columns were intended for a general reader, and no mathematical background is needed to enjoy the 64 short chapters (~4 pages each). Perhaps some background on...

AwesomeMath Admission Tests

Note: this is a review of two volumes in this series covering 2006-2014 and 2015-2021. These books present problems that have constituted part of the admissions requirements for the Awesome Math Summer Program (AMSP) for middle school and high school students, cofounded and directed by Titu Andreescu, who has created the ”vast majority” of the problems....

Against All Odds Women’s Ways to Mathematical Research Since 1800

Against all Odds: Women’s Ways to Mathematical Research Since 1800 (Springer, 2020, Cham, editors Eva Kaufholz-Soldat and Nicola M. R. Oswald) grew out of a “small conference on women in mathematics in Würzburg in 2015” followed by a workshop “Women in Mathematics: Historical and Modern Perspectives” at Oberwolfach Research Institute for Mathematics in 2017. Evidence...

Pop-Up Geometry

We have all received birthday, holiday, or congratulatory pop-up greeting cards. The motions and actions of these pop-up cards provided us with an additional amusement. And, many of us have watched children learn with delight when they page through a Pop-Up book. How many of us have ever wondered about or considered the complexity of...

Formulations: Architecture, Mathematics, Culture

In this book Witt describes how in the first half of the 20th century the design component of architecture was influenced by the evolution of mathematics, science, and technology, until the computer took over around 1960-1970. There was a tendency to collect, classify, and eventually unify, knowledge, which resulted in larger research projects that should...

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