Living Proof: Exploring Privilege and Prejudice in Mathematics

By Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America I am reading a book, Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility,” that carefully discusses the complex and nuanced relationships between white privilege, prejudice, and racism. DiAngelo also notes the role of ideology in preserving existing social ideals and structures, such as individualism and consumerism, and how...

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The Mathematics of Gerrymandering and the Supreme Court

By Dr. Rachel Levy, Deputy Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America with an excerpt from Dr. Jeanne Clelland, University of Colorado, Boulder One of the interesting things about working at the MAA in Washington, DC is that people talk politics and policy. Honestly, I find it hard to keep up or even to...

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Does Society Need IMO Medalists? A Student’s View

By Meera Desai, awesomemathgirls.org A paper written by Dr. Man Keung Siu, a professor of math at the University of Hong Kong, titled “Does Society need IMO medalists?” poses an important question: how do math competitions fit in with the field of math at large? He starts by describing the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), including...

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Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas

Figure 1. Cover to Calculus Reordered. Available at Princeton University Press. By David Bressoud @dbressoud This month, Princeton University Press will publish my new book, Calculus Reordered: A History of the Big Ideas (Figure 1). At one level, this is a history of calculus, a successor to such works as Boyer’s The History of Calculus...

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Mathematics is a way of thinking – how can we best teach it?

By Keith Devlin @profkeithdevlin Last month I described my own, half-century career in mathematics, the first twenty-five years as a pure mathematician, then, in the second half, working on problems for industry and various branches of the US Department of Defense. I observed that at no stage did I make significant use of any of...

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MAA Meetings: Building Community in Turbulent Times

By: Michael Pearson, MAA Executive Director, Hortensia Soto, MAA Associate Secretary, Anne Agniel, MAA Director of Meetings & Events MAA MathFest will be held in Cincinnati in just a few weeks, and we’re looking forward to seeing colleagues and friends, and together enjoying the wonderful program that has been developed. For us, this has become...

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Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program at Xavier University

By Erin Moss, Co-editor of DUE Point The NSF Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program provides funding for universities that develop innovative methods of training highly-effective science and mathematics teachers to work with K-12 students in high-need areas.  Project Director, Dr. Carla Gerberry, and co-PI, Dr. Mary Stroud, describe some of the unique features of the...

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Evaluating the Educational Experience in Post-secondary Mathematics: A New Survey Suite

By Naneh Apkarian, guest blogger for Launchings This is the first in what I anticipate will be an occasional series of guest blog posts on Launchings. Others who wish to submit a guest blog post for consideration should contact me at bressoud@macalester.edu. As the nation moves to improve student experiences and outcomes in postsecondary mathematics,...

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What is a Meritocracy?

By Michael Pearson, Executive Director of the Mathematical Association of America I am confident in asserting that all of you reading this post have taken a variety of standardized tests over the course of your lives. I would venture to add that, like me, your performance on those tests has influenced the options available to...

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Persistence of Black and Latina/o Students in STEM

By David Bressoud @dbressoud The MAA’s calculus studies have highlighted problems with the retention of women in STEM disciplines, especially in the calculus sequence (see the October 2016 Launchings). Because the numbers are so small, we were not able to say anything about the persistence of Black and Latina/o students. But there are recently published...

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