The decline in high school calculus

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 May of this year, the U.S. Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) released the results of their transcript study for the high school graduating class of...

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Mathematical Magic with Robert Vallin

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College Robert Vallin Mathematical careers can have nonlinear trajectories. It can seem almost magical when one moves from one field to another. For Dr. Robert Vallin, of Lamar University, it quite literally was magic! Vallin earned his PhD from North Carolina State University, studying classical real analysis. He’s published in fields...

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What is Mathematics?

By Jenny Quinn (Jenny Quinn’s Blog) Jenny Quinn The title question has been on my mind for quite some time now. A thoughtful response could go a long way to communicate the beauty, power, and purpose of our discipline to anyone at any level. A careless response might increase misconceptions or anxiety related to mathematics....

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JPBM: Then and Now

By Paul Zorn Abbreviations and acronyms are found everywhere in mathematics: AC, DE, FOIL, NP, QED, ZFC, . . ., and all over our discipline's public side: AMS, ASA, MAA, SIAM. NSF alone is a famous producer and consumer: DMS, EHR, GRFP, IUSE, REU, . . . . It takes effort to find the bottom...

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Why Not Both?

By Jasmine Ng Jasmine Ng After graduate school in mathematics, most people continue in academia or find a job in industry. I never thought I would actually end up in both! Teaching has always been my true passion. However, after deciding to obtain my Ph.D. in pure mathematics, I thought that research would be my...

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Students Speak: The Value of Being an Undergraduate Teaching Assistant

By Gustavo Flores Gustavo Flores Over the course of my secondary school years, I watched as my peers gradually sorted themselves into two neatly divided categories: math people and not-math people, a dichotomy reinforced by our teachers. As the latter group continued to grow year after year, I questioned whether my classmates and I were...

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Testimonios: Dr. Stephan Ramon Garcia

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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Did you Tell Them?

By Deanna Haunsperger Deanna Haunsperger Carleton College has a new faculty workshop during winter break each year so that new faculty have an opportunity to intentionally reflect on the term that just finished, ask questions of established faculty, and re-energize to be ready to start the next term fresh. I greatly enjoyed this scheduled time...

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The First Year of Graduate School: Is It Really the Hardest?

By Verenalei Schoenfeld Verenalei Schoenfeld I am Lulu Schoenfeld, a rising 2nd year graduate student at the University of California, Irvine (UCI). I just finished my first year of graduate school and attempted the qualifying exams for the first time. A year ago, when I was accepted to UCI, all the current students and faculty...

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Students Speak: Pursuing a Math Degree as a Nontraditional Student during the Pandemic

By Alice Mehalek Alice Mehalek I took AP Calculus in my last year of high school and hated it. Even though I passed the class and the AP exam, I never felt like I understood the subject. Calculus was so incomprehensible to me that when I went to college the next year, I swore I’d...

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