A Personal Prescription for Choosing Mathematics

By Edward Scheinerman Edward Scheinerman Many years ago, as a freshman in college, I had a great deal of interest in mathematics, but was uncertain about pursuing that as a career. At the same time, the field of medicine was attractive and familiar to me and seemed like a safer bet. I was pleased to...

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Effective Professional Development: What we can learn from PRODUCT

By Audrey Malagon A few months back, Stan Yoshinobu told us about the PRODUCT (PROfessional Development and Update through Collaborative Teams) program’s efforts to get IBL into classrooms across the country through a robust professional development program for faculty. A key part of their project was evaluating the effectiveness of their approaches to professional development....

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Testimonios: Dr. Ryan R. Moruzzi, Jr.

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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Reforming Introductory Math Courses – While Attending to Everyone’s Emotional Needs

By Dave Kung, Director of Policy; Joan Zoellner, Professional Learning Specialist @utdanacenter “Our developmental mathematics system is a shell game, disproportionately scamming Black, Latino and poor students.” You could feel the air go out of the room at Gregory Larnell’s plenary session, opening the 2020 Research on Undergraduate Mathematics Education conference. Nearly every audience member...

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Coming to grips with Mastodon

By Keith Devlin https://fediscience.org/@KeithDevlin I spent last weekend (November 5-6) in Mastodon. One of the first lessons I learned was, I was spelling it wrong; it’s not Mastadon as I instinctively wrote. It turned out I was not alone. In fact, several people I interacted with made the same mistake. But I digress. Why was...

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Service Work in Graduate School: Taking on too Much

By Kayla Gibson Kayla Gibson When applying to graduate schools, what I wanted most out of a future department was community and collaboration. After applying, when it came to choosing a program, it was necessary for me to visit these departments to get a first-hand feel of their community. I was able to visit one...

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Playful Math – Is there a “there” there?

By Keith Devlin [Twitter @profkeithdevlin; Mastadon https://fediscience.org/@KeithDevlin] Fred McFeely Rogers (1928 – 2003), known to millions as “Mister Rogers”, was the creator, show-runner, and host of the preschool television series Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, which ran from 1968 to 2001. Google “playful math” and the world’s most famous mathematical algorithm will return over 30,000 hits. Many...

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My Mathematical Journey: France

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 the summer of 1985 Jan and I were married. We then headed off for a year’s sabbatical in France, at the Université Louis Pasteur in Strasbourg, France (today part...

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A Teacher Affects Eternity—And So Do His Kids

By Laurie Maloff Kramer Create a sense of wonder about mathematics. Challenge high school students with logic and math problems that stray far from the standard curriculum and make them think outside their comfort zone. Ira Ewen, just a few years out of Harvard College, followed that teaching philosophy 60 years ago at a New...

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Great Resignation in Math Departments

By Rebecca Swanson with Melissa Erdmann This is Melissa Erdmann on the left and Rebecca Swanson on the right. Over the past couple of years, we have heard much about the “Great Resignation.” It refers to the increased rate at which workers are leaving their jobs, and academia is not immune. The Chronicle of Higher...

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