COVID-19 and Learning Loss

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin How do people learn? After being in the learning and education world, one way or another, all my career, I don’t have a good answer to that question. Even when I apply it to myself as a learner. This is, in part, why I used the more cumbersome phrase “learning and education...

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Does Class Size Matter?

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences I am often asked by math department chairs what evidence they can take to their deans to argue against increasing the size of their classes. This is particularly pertinent now when...

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¡Let’s Rumba!

By Andrea Arauza Rivera Exploration - meeting our wonders with action and forging a path forward. The Research for Undergraduates on the Mathematics of the Bay Area (RUMBA) program, supported by an MAA Tensor-SUMMA grant, gives students at Cal State East Bay the opportunity to explore their communities via mathematical projects. Nine undergraduates, a graduate...

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Community During COVID

By John Nardini How do we maintain community in a virtual classroom? In the midst of teaching virtually during COVID-19, this question repeatedly lingers in my mind. Before 2020, we probably took many things for granted: the ability to work together on a (physical) whiteboard, making small talk before class, and communicating nonverbally. I switched...

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EPIC: Increased Success of Commuter Students through STEM Research Experiences and Campus Engagement

By Jana Talley, co-editor of DUE Point, Jackson State University Student Poster Session The Establishing Practices for Integrating Commuters (EPIC) project is designed to address the unique challenges that commuter students face. Many of them have off-campus jobs that prevent engagement in academic programs that support scholarly growth. Living away from campus also hinders the...

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The Mathematics of Character: When the Job Hunt and Pandemic Coincide

By Catherine Lori Catherine Lori is a senior at Davidson College. She hails from Long Island, NY. Cat is passionate about the intersection of technology and social good. Next year she will be joining Google as a Cloud Technical Resident in Atlanta, GA. The leap from undergrad to a first full-time position is a unique...

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Building Community in an Online World

By Cindy Lawrence, National Museum of Mathematics executive director and CEO Photo Credit: National Museum of Mathematics The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) celebrates the wonders of mathematics. As Manhattan’s only hands-on science center and the nation’s only museum centered on mathematics, MoMath demonstrates the power of bringing hands-on math to the public. Located in...

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A quarter century and counting

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin The MAA website, and with it Devlin’s Angle, is 25-years-old this month, appearing for the first time on January 1, 1996. (The Web itself began just five years earlier, when Tim Berners-Lee put up the world’s first website on August 6, 1991.) I had started writing monthly articles for the MAA back...

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On Equity and the Futures of STEM Education and Graduate Student Programs

By: David Bressoud @dbressoud David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor Emeritus at Macalester College and Director of the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences On December 4, 2020, the Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences held its 124th semi-annual meeting. In addition to updates on CBMS activities and plans for the National Math Festival, there...

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Give Me a Break!

By Tim Chartier @timchartier Photo by David Mao on Unsplash “How are you?” It’s a common question asked so many times over my career – in meetings, at conferences, in emails. And yet, during the pandemic, it’s a difficult question to answer. Am I fine? Are things OK? Am I doing well relative to someone else? When am I sharing and...

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