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...

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Why do we become mathematicians?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social There are, of course, a wide range of circumstances, character traits, and opportunities that lead us to choose the career path we do. The question is particularly intriguing for mathematicians, since the subject requires considerable effort to master, much of it necessarily involving long periods of unaided, solo effort, struggling to proceed...

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Full ESTEEM Ahead: Forging a Path Toward Statistics and Data Science Literacy

By Jana Talley ESTEEM II (Enhancing Data Science and Statistics Teacher Education--Transforming and Building Community) is a three-campus collaboration project funded through both NSF’s Noyce and IUSE programs. In the initial ESTEEM I project, the team integrated statistics content and pedagogy into undergraduate mathematics teacher preparation. The current project, ESTEEM II, is positioned to cultivate...

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Calculus for Teachers: Creating Elliptic Functions

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. Genesis of the elliptic integral: David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences. Information about him and his publications can be found at davidbressoud.org Download a Word file containing the...

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There and Back Again: The Professor I Never Trained to Be

By Lew Ludwig “Alright, now that we understand how to write in the dominant impression, our next essay will use a structure known as “they say/I say” which is like engaging a conversation already in progress.” “Now that we have completed our empathy map and have a better understanding of our stakeholders, we will now start...

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Debunking a prominent feature of the “Mediterranean diet” health claim

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social Last month’s post discussed the subtle (and not so subtle) difficulties that can arise when using statistics to identify causes of phenomena. The example I used that time was the probability that use of the popular pain-reliever Tylenol by a pregnant woman led to an increased risk of her child being...

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The Mathematics of Time and Human Futures

By Kim Larkin As an artsy kid and a dreamer, I didn’t see the connection at the time, but even when I wasn’t looking for it, math was there in my life. It didn’t appear as equations, but rather as the unseen foundation underlying my fascination with finding patterns, asking why, imagining possibilities, and playing...

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Calculus for Teachers: Toward Elliptic Functions

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, new Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. In the September Launchings, I explained a remarkable result due to Cauchy that if C is a simply closed curve and f is any complex function that is analytic in a simply connected open region that includes C,...

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The Chain That Binds

By Lew Ludwig An Administrator’s Quip “If they want to ruin their education, that is up to them. We can’t stop them.” Someone recently shared this remark from an administrator who was responding to a question about whether they were concerned about what AI is doing to student learning. The exact circumstances and preceding exchange that...

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The Putnam Exam: Why do we compete?

By Doug Ensley The MAA’s annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition has been running since 1938, and in the past 50 years, only 10 different institutions have won first place, with Harvard and MIT achieving the feat in two-thirds of those years. The competition is considered to be the most prestigious undergraduate mathematics competition in...

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