Getting the UTMOST out of Open-Source Resources

By: Audrey Malagon, Lead Editor of DUE Point, Virginia Wesleyan University The quadratic formula in Braille. Credit: American Institute of Mathematics More than ever, students and faculty need access to quality, open-source educational materials, and software. The project team for UTMOST, "Undergraduate Teaching of Mathematics with Open Software and Textbooks," has been investigating, developing, and...

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The 1,001 Ways to Have a Successful Career in Mathematics

by Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin This tweet came up in my feed the other day. I sensed a topic for a “Devlin’s Angle” or maybe an NPR “Math Guy” slot, although the latter has pretty well retired itself now. (But I did recently do a live-streamed video conversation with my long-time NPR host Scott Simon that...

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How Low Can the Popular Vote Go?

By: Tim Chartier @timchartier, Patrick Danielson, Jonad Pulaj, and Ben Yokoyama Internet ads, emails, phone calls, yard signs and TV analysts remind us that we are in the height of a presidential election season. We have national polls, state polls, debate performance polls, and even polls that aggregate polls. Amidst the analysis there is one...

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Growing Inequalities in Access to Jobs

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences A recent report from Deutsche Bank Research, America’s Racial Gap & Big Tech’s Closing Window, warned that by 2045, 76% of Blacks will be prepared for only 12% of jobs. The...

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Student Passions Drive Statistics Education

By: Jana Talley, Co-Editor of DUE Point, Jackson State University Passion-Driven Statistics is a project-based model for statistics education that consists of online data science courses, instructional videos, student projects, and support resources for implementation. Traditional statistics education assigns rigidly defined scenarios to students in the absence of any real opportunities to make decisions or...

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Lift Thine Eyes from the Virtual World

By Tim Chartier, @timchartier Think about your life a year ago and how many aspects of your life were entirely different than now.  For that matter, it’s possible that a large portion of 2020 has been significantly different than any other portion of your life.  In particular, much of our world has become virtual.  I...

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Reconnecting to Mathematical Research with ADJOINT

Anisah N. Nu’Man, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Spelman College, @_nudoc_  July marked the 1-year anniversary of the NAM-MAA Math Values Blog. Over the past year, we hope that this blog has become a place where our readers come to learn about new teaching ideas, discuss current issues within mathematics, and develop a sense of community...

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Anti-science Policy and the Censure of Discourse on Race and Racism

A statement from the MAA Committee on Minority Participation in Mathematics We stand in the midst of a year of transitions. We have long been aware of broad shifts in the postsecondary education landscape, but 2020 has also been marked by the COVID-19 pandemic and emergency distance/online/hybrid teaching. Each of these new challenges for higher...

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The Strange Role of Calculus in the United States

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences This month’s column is a collection of the main points from a paper I recently published in ZDM Mathematics Education, “The strange role of calculus in the United States,” available here....

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Proving Unprovability

by Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin Euclid’s Elements (ca.350BCE) presented geometry and number theory based on axioms, using proofs to establish truth based on those axioms Proof is the gold standard for determining truth in mathematics. While it is possible to determine that some statements are true by everyday practical rational activities, these are generally the most...

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