Testimonios: Dr. Richard A. Tapia

Testimonios, a new publication from MAA/AMS, brings together first-person narratives from the vibrant, diverse, and complex Latinx and Hispanic mathematical community. Starting with childhood and family, the authors recount their own particular stories, highlighting their upbringing, education, and career paths. Testimonios seeks to inspire the next generation of Latinx and Hispanic mathematicians by featuring the...

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My Flourishing Journey

By Matthew Pons Matthew Pons Recently I’ve had the opportunity to read Mathematics for Human Flourishing with my math students and a group of colleagues from a variety of disciplines and these conversations have elevated the reading experience. My students were in a capstone seminar, and about forty percent of the course time was spent...

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Finding Patience and Perseverance at Academic Conferences

By Shilpi Mandal Shilpi Mandal Attending conferences can evoke a range of emotions. Some people love them, while others may only tolerate or even hate them. These feelings are not mutually exclusive and there is no requirement to feel a certain way. I began my Ph.D. during the pandemic (yep, that one), when in-person conferences...

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How High School Math Can Propel Students to Higher Ed Success

By Dave Kung, Director of Policy; Lindsay Perlmutter Fitzpatrick, Policy and Implementation Lead A high school junior asks you for some expert advice. They’re choosing classes for their last year of high school. When it comes to math, what should they do? Your first instinct might be to answer this question based on your own...

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Being Rock-star Good at Math: An interview with Vanessa Vakharia

By Tim Chartier with Vanessa Vakharia Vanessa Vakharia Expanding one’s knowledge often involves getting stuck.  Yet, many math students see their moments of uncertainty as indicating weakness in the field.  Classroom teaching, office hours, and tutoring are places where a positive math identity in students can be fostered.  For a discussion about working with students’...

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Theory and Practice: An Alternative View on the Politics of MathFest 2023 in Florida

By Chloë Boatright [Cover photo used with permission of Erin Reed, original source] Chloë Boatright On April 27, 2023, Michael Pearson published a blog post on Math Values titled “Dialogue is Necessary,” in which he makes the case for continuing to hold MAA MathFest 2023 in Florida in spite of the state’s increasingly hostile anti-LGBT...

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The Language of Mathematics

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. davidbressoud.org In my July 2022 column, My Mathematical Journey: The Alternating Sign Matrix Theorem, I briefly recounted the influence of Lakatos’s Proofs and Refutations on my own thinking about mathematics....

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When Patterns Mislead

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org Conrad Wolfram, strategic director and European cofounder/CEO of Wolfram Research. Image source https://www.conradwolfram.com One of the devices regular writers and bloggers turn to when an article is due and nothing quite right has cropped up, is to look for anniversaries that occur when the article is published. Which is what led...

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Inclusive Class and Seinfeld

By Lew Ludwig Not that there’s anything wrong with that… I taught my first college-level math class in the early 1990s – the era with only three major television networks and “Must See TV” (already, I may have lost some of you). To connect with my mostly white, suburban, Midwestern students, I would reference one...

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Being Human in Mathematics and Statistics

By Sarah L. Bunnell, Shu-Min Liao, Megan Lyster, and Sheila Jaswal The Being Human in STEM (HSTEM) Initiative arose out of a time of conflict at Amherst College. Students occupied the College library for four days, giving voice to their experiences of marginalization and exclusion on campus. Over the preceding 5 years, Amherst had dramatically...

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