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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Learnings from Transforming Elementary Statistics Courses into Online and Hybrid Offerings

By Brandi Falley and Ryan Sides Brandi Falley While the topics and depth covered in Elementary Statistics varies by school, it is still often a difficult course for the majority of students. Statistics is not a traditional math course where pattern recognition can aid in solving problems, and students are often forced to use logic...

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How Can We Picture Information? How Can We Model It Mathematically? Part II

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin This month’s essay completes a thread commenced with the May, June and July posts. Last month, I described the sequence of events that led me to join an interdisciplinary team of researchers at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information (CSLI) in 1987 to try and develop a...

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My Mathematical Journey: The q-Dyson theorem

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 I spent the fall of 1983 at the University of Minnesota supported by a Sloan Fellowship. Two important things happened that fall. The first was that I met Jan Alford,...

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University Teaching Faculty: A New Job Opportunity

By Rebecca Swanson Rebecca Swanson To paraphrase one of my mentors, Erica Flapan, there are many different ways to be a mathematician. Many of us are familiar with the standard tenure-track path that emphasizes both teaching and research (to varying degrees) along with service. However, some of us discover our primary passion in teaching students...

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Mathematics for Human Flourishing at Ursinus College

By Nicholas Scoville Nicholas Scoville Ursinus College revamped its core curriculum a few years ago. Motivated almost exclusively by the desire to avoid “checkbox mentality,” the college envisioned a fluid yet coherent core, one that allows for a variety of options but does not feel like a collection of completely disjointed courses. One of the...

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Mathematics as a Safe Space

By Matthew Pons For a good part of my life, mathematics has been a public safe space. Why did I need a safe space? In high school, I was bullied and made to feel unwelcome by most of my peers. I had transferred into the public school system in my county at the beginning of...

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Testimonios: Dr. Alexander Díaz-López

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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Mathematicians’ Case for Preserving the Right to Abortion

By Karen Saxe, former MAA Vice President; Associate Executive Director, and Director of Government Relations, American Mathematical Society Karen Saxe When I heard about the leak of the Supreme Court’s decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, I was not surprised. That Roe v Wade would be overturned felt like a done deal when...

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