On Microaggressions, Kind Humor, and People Who Lift Your Spirits

By Rachel Levy, Deputy Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America Rachel Levy, MAA Deputy Executive Director and Francis Su, past MAA President I have been thinking lately about reports of microaggressions at math conferences and in the classroom.  These can take the form of thoughtless comments that might make someone feel unwelcome.  Thoughtless...

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Data 4 Black Lives

By Carrie Diaz Eaton, Associate Professor of Digital and Computational Studies, Bates College Last year, I was checking what’s trending on Twitter (@mathprofcarrie) and started seeing a lot of really cool posts from individuals I respect, such as Dr. Piper Harron (@pwr2dppl) and Dr. Cathy O’Neil (@mathbabedotorg), being retweeted by my community.  They all had...

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Data Science at the 2019 AAAS Annual Meeting: Illustrating Opportunities for Undergraduate Mathematics Education

By Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America AAAS gets my vote for the best ribbons to attach to attendee badges! This year’s annual meeting of the AAAS was held in Washington, DC, in mid February. Since it was only a few blocks from MAA’s offices, I decided it was a great...

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The Issue of Online Homework

By David Bressoud @dbressoud Online homework systems have become ubiquitous in introductory mathematics courses. The 2009 AMS survey found that 65% of PhD-granting departments of mathematics, 70% of Master’s degree-granting departments, and 43% of Bachelor’s degree-granting departments were using online homework (Kehoe, 2010). For Calculus I, the 2010 MAA survey undertaken as part of Characteristics...

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What is mathematical creativity, how do we develop it, and should we try to measure it? PART 2

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin “What is creative mathematical thinking?” That’s the question I set out to answer last month. The discussion got this far: Creative mathematical thinking is non-algorithmic mathematical thinking. The question arose when a long-time friend (and former teacher) from the ed tech world and I had an email exchange, prompted in part by...

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Broadening Participation in the MAA Competitions Programs

By Rachel Levy, Deputy Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America Teachers at the NCSSM 2019 Teaching Contemporary Mathematics Conference discuss broadening participation in the MAA AMC and field test materials from MAA Mathematician-at-large James Tanton When I began my work as MAA Deputy Executive Director in Denver at MAA MathFest 2018, I knew...

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SUMMIT-P: Revising Early-stage College Math

By Katie Haymaker, Co-editor of DUE Point Two fundamental challenges of teaching required math courses to students in the first two years of college are (i) engaging students, and (ii) making the mathematics relevant to their future study. Tying the curriculum to the needs of other disciplines can encourage student engagement and also has the...

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NAM’s Golden Anniversary

By Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America NAM-MAA Blackwell Lecture, Raegan Higgins, MAA MathFest, Denver 2018 The National Association of Mathematicians (NAM) was founded in 1969. With membership open to all, NAM promotes excellence in the mathematical sciences while serving as a voice for underrepresented Americans in the mathematical sciences community....

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Functional Thinking in the Mathematics Curriculum

By David Bressoud @dbressoud The International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) meets every four years and produces a series of monographs based on the contributed papers. One important monograph from ICME-13, held in 2016 in Hamburg, Germany, has just been released: The Legacy of Felix Klein, published Open Access by Springer. Part II of this...

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What is mathematical creativity, how do we develop it, and should we try to measure it? PART 1

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin In its January 1 Learning Blog, the business networking service LinkedIn published a list of the skills today’s large companies value most in their employees, as obtained from survey data. The report notes that 57% of senior leaders in business value soft (human-centered) skills over hard skills, pointing out that “the rise...

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