Blogging About Math In Real Life (and loving it!) with Kate Ertmann

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College Kate Ertmann Kate Ertmann, simply put, loves math. Although she’s not a mathematician, she writes a blog about math, spreading her joy of the subject broadly. In this interview, we see how a childhood in front of the camera as an actor springboarded her into creative career options and also...

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Separating My Performance from My Value

By Matthew Pons Matthew Pons I was chatting with a group of students recently. We were talking about not letting our performance on coursework cause us to doubt ourselves and our value as human beings. I didn’t think that much of it at the time, but a few days later I received a thank you...

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Scholarships Ensure Quality STEM Educators in Western Pennsylvania

By Erin Moss, Co-Editor, DUE Point, Millersville University The Edinboro Noyce Teacher Scholar (ENTS) program began in Fall 2019 with the goal to increase the number of STEM teachers in western Pennsylvania.  Undergraduate STEM majors and recent postgraduates seeking teacher certification engage in seminars and workshops to prepare them to work in high-need school districts. ...

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Testimonios: Dr. Omayra Ortega

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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Reflections on Applying to Graduate School

By Inés Chung-Halpern My name is Inés Chung-Halpern, a 4th year undergraduate at Yale University. I have been applying to Math PhD programs, in a process probably common to almost every reader of this blog. However, I write this with the naivety of one only partially through the ordeal. With the entry into my final...

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Helping Students Fail Productively

By Nathan Warnberg, Associate Professor, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Credit: Geoffrey Roberts When I first started teaching I unwittingly used the power that I had over the classroom to reinforce perfectionism.  This was most obvious when I would make mistakes in front of the classroom. I would get defensive. I would feel my face flushing....

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Understanding Mathematical Creativity

By Keith Devlin @KeithDevlin@fediscience.org CONTENT WARNING: High concentration of speculation and New Year hope in this month’s post. A common artist’s illustration of the human brain as a network of firing neurons. Image source. What is going on in our brain when we finally come up with the key idea to solve a mathematical problem...

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My Mathematical Journey: Explorations

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 1989 I decided that, for the sake of my own well-being, I would stop worrying about getting my next grant and look around for other ways to use my...

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How-to on Literature Reviews with Cara Evanson

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College Tim Chartier Literature reviews are an essential part of research papers. They lay the foundation of the work to follow and place the new ideas into context within the field. As such, researchers, students and faculty alike, must complete such reviews. How do we conduct such work? Where do we...

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Mega-minute of Data

Written by Tim Chartier, Davidson College Illustrated by Ansley Earle Tim Chartier Data analytics is a hot topic in our world and rightly so. With so much data, we need mathematics to analyze and make meaning from the mass of data. As such, we must rely on algorithms to search the web or recommend products...

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