Promoting Success in Undergraduate Mathematics through Graduate Teaching Assistant Training

By Audrey Malagon, Virginia Wesleyan University, Lead Editor Mike Jacobson, Leigh Harrell-Williams, and their team of investigators recognize the importance of preparing graduate teaching assistants (GTAs). GTAs’ teaching experiences begin in graduate school and often continue into academic careers. While in the first stages of teaching, GTAs often interact with undergraduates early in their own...

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Goodbye, Grad School!

By Jack Sturm Jack Sturm Throughout my entire life, I always wanted to be a teacher. Only knowing what I had been exposed to, I transitioned from wanting to be an elementary school teacher to a junior high teacher and then, finally, to a high school teacher. When I started at North Central College, I...

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Testimonios: Dr. Jessica M. Deshler

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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The Twin Problems of Curriculum Modernization and Equity

By Dave Kung, Director of Policy, Charles A. Dana Center Dave Kung Math community, we have a problem. Actually, we have two. Our curriculum is woefully in need of updating. The college math curriculum in the US was largely designed to produce a small number of STEM professionals who could beat the Soviet Union to...

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What Does it Mean?

By Charles Kulick Charles Kulick Studying for qualifying exams is grueling. It’s much like the gravitational constant or the Feigenbaum delta or the speed of light; qualifying exams demand effort. No matter how much I loved math, and I certainly loved math quite a bit, the exam preparation process was enough to leave me exhausted....

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Derivative Humor—A Stand-up Mathematician Spills the Beans

By Tim Chartier, Davidson College Simon Pampena So, a mathematician walks into a bar and asks “Is this the start of some sort of joke?” Now, that sounds neither like a joke nor a real-life story—unless you are Simon Pampena. Simon is a stand-up mathematician who has been a Numeracy Ambassador for the Australian Government...

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Mathematics and the real world

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin Fig 1. How mathematics connects to our physical or social world. (1) We begin with some real world situation we want to understand or act upon. (2) Using the appropriate domain language, we formulate a technical description or goal. (3) We identify key features in that technical description where we think...

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My Mathematical Journey: Becoming a Mathematician

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud Figure 1. The Rogers-Ramanujan Identities David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and former Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences The first four installments of My Mathematical Journey explored the origins of my early textbooks and favorite projects. This may seem strange since I initially...

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A Community Learning Project Centering Race, Gender, and Mathematics

By Jana Talley, Co-Editor of DUE Point, Jackson State University The NSF Anti-Deficit Learning and Teaching: A Community Learning Project Centering Race, Gender, and Mathematics uses critical conversations in the classroom to facilitate shared understandings between instructors and students about how issues of race and gender impact their lives and the learning environment. Adi Adiredja...

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How (Not) to Communicate Mathematics

By Allison Henrich Allison Henrich In grad school, one of the things I had to learn was which researchers’ work was readable and which I should avoid. There are some (wonderful!) researchers in my field who rewrote important, yet incomprehensible papers in a more understandable way–a way that motivated the problem being solved, reviewed background...

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