You Can Be a STAR

  By Ed Aboufadel, @aboufade I have been interested in leadership and related ideas since I was a teenager, particularly leadership concepts built upon classifications. Perhaps it is due to my love of mathematics, which is full of classifications, like function types in precalculus. Over the past year, I have been learning about behavioral questions...

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DEI: The frame that dare not say its name

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. I began writing this column at the RUME Conference (Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education) in Omaha, Nebraska. I had recently returned from an MAA workshop planning a project with the vision that “Every student succeeds in introductory mathematics...

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Learning When to Say No

By Jennifer Guerrero Throughout graduate school, or perhaps life, people have attempted to give me a lot of advice on how to not take on too much. “Say no to the things that you don’t want to do,” “Say no to the non-important things,” etc. are a few of the phrases that I have been...

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Traversing the Python Landscape for Mathematical Applets

  By Lew Ludwig A Thought Experiment He said, “Imagine you have a container with a curvy top that is filled with Kool-Aid. Now imagine the Kool-Aid leveling out due to gravity. That level is the average value of the function.” I said, “That’s pretty good. Have you looked for a GIF so students can...

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Humanities for Mathematicians

By Pup Horst I secretly want to run away and become a humanities professor. I’m not sure which discipline specifically—general philosophy might be too general and religious studies might be too specific, and I worry I’d be no good with literature. But it’s a romantic idea, isn’t it? Sitting in a room with students brimming...

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How Will the New AI Impact Mathematics Research?

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org, @profkeithdevlin.bsky.social Will Large Language Models such as ChatGPT change how new mathematics is discovered? Yes. It’s happening already, just as occurred when earlier computing technologies came along: mechanical and then electronic calculators, general purpose digital computers, graphing calculators, etc. and more recently tools such as Mathematica, Maple, and (my favorite) Wolfram...

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The Perpetual Problem of Leap Day

Excerpted from Servois’ 1813 Perpetual Calendar, by Salvatore J. Petrilli, Jr. Editor’s Note: Happy Leap Day! In 1813, French mathematician and priest François-Joseph Servois proposed a “calendrier perpétuel,” or perpetual calendar. What follows is a lightly edited excerpt from a June 2012 article in the MAA journal Convergence on the way Servois’ calendar handled leap...

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Class Dismissed: Learning Outside the Classroom

  By Tim Chartier Let’s begin in the fall of 2013 when three students walked into my office. They asked if we could create an analytics group for the men’s basketball team at Davidson College. That’s a tall order. This is the program with notable successes including but not limited to being the team for...

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A Farewell to Living Proof

By Allison Henrich and Matthew Pons When we started the project Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey, the goal was to provide a resource for students who were struggling with belonging in the mathematical community. At the outset, we were focused on the sense of belonging that students feel (or don’t feel)...

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On Disrupting Hierarchies

By David Bressoud @dbressoud As of 2024, Launchings columns appear on the third Tuesday of the month. This is an overview of the recent MAA Notes volume by Daniel Reinholz: Equitable and Engaging Mathematics Teaching: A Guide to Disrupting Hierarchies in the Classroom. When I used Thomas Hawkins’ doctoral dissertation Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration: Its Origins...

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