Launchings – Page 5 – Mathematical Association of America

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Calculus for Teachers: Elliptic Curves and Modular Functions

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. The elliptic curve has the amazing property that if you treat the point at infinity as a point on the curve, then any line through two points on the curve or that is tangent to the curve will...

There and Back Again: When Knowing Gets in the Way of Learning

By Lew Ludwig I’ve been invited to the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences (CBMS) annual meeting to discuss AI in the classroom. I know what questions will come up—they’re the ones people ask me at every webinar and workshop: How do we secure assessment in an AI-driven world? How do I use AI in the...

The decline in high school calculus

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences In May of this year, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released the results of their transcript study for the high school graduating class of...

My Mathematical Journey: The q-Dyson theorem

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences I spent the fall of 1983 at the University of Minnesota supported by a Sloan Fellowship. Two important things happened that fall. The first was that I met Jan Alford,...

My Mathematical Journey: The Alternating Sign Matrix Theorem

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences Problem: Prove the Vandermonde Determinant Formula which says that the determinant of the matrix for which the entry in row i, column j is (x_j)^{n–i) is the product of x_i...

My Mathematical Journey: Issai Schur, Henry Alder, and Partitions

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences MAA has just published Addressing Challenges to the Precalculus through Calculus II Sequence through Case Studies, the Notes volume summarizing the results of the NSF-sponsored project, Progress through Calculus, case...

My Mathematical Journey: Becoming a Mathematician

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud Figure 1. The Rogers-Ramanujan Identities David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences The first four installments of My Mathematical Journey explored the origins of my early textbooks and favorite projects. This may seem strange since I initially...

My Mathematical Journey: From F = ma to E = mc^2

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences This month I have chosen to write about the genesis of a very important book in my development as a writer, Second Year Calculus: From Celestial Mechanics to Special Relativity....

Calculus, College Admissions, and the High School Curriculum

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences The third installment of My Mathematical Journey: Pólya’s “Let Us Teach Guessing”, was released on February 15 to free up the March Launchings for this column. I have often written...

My Mathematical Journey: Pólya’s “Let Us Teach Guessing”

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences I do not remember when or how I first discovered the MAA’s film of George Pólya in “Let Use Teach Guessing.” It was on a VHS tape owned by Macalester....

My Mathematical Journey: The Stamp Problem

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences For the second in this series of reminiscences about my mathematical journey, I have chosen to write about a rich problem that I have used for years in Macalester’s...

My Mathematical Journey: Factorization and Primality Testing

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences Just Equations has recently published an important new study: Charting a New Course: Investigating Barriers on the Calculus Pathway to STEM As I start the Launchings columns for this new...

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