November 2023 Carolyn Abbott (Brandeis University) I’d like to start a conversation about how we teach graduate classes.  In the last several decades, there has been a lot of discussion about active learning, in all its many forms, in mathematics classrooms from early elementary through college.  There is generally a consensusRead More →

September 2023 Yvonne Lai (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) Ji Y. Son (California State University, Los Angeles; CourseKata.org) Dramatis Personae A…………April the Applied T…………Thea the Theoretical Act I: Isn’t this what you believe? April the Applied is taking a nice walk in the neighborhood. Her neighbor Thea the Theoretical shoves open herRead More →

August 1, 2023 Tyler Kloefkorn I first learned about the National Science Foundation (NSF)—a federal agency that supports basic science research—through its Graduate Research Fellowship Program (GRFP). I was a first-year graduate student at the University of Oregon, and I met a graduate student who didn’t have any teaching obligations.Read More →

July 2023 Mark Saul Everyone needs mathematics. It is the heavy industry of scientific development, the unseen basis on which the more spectacular advances in science, in technology, and in medicine are often built. And mathematics is cheap. We rarely need fancy equipment to pursue our research. A pad andRead More →

April 2023 Yvonne Lai Rather than March, it was February that came in like a lion. On February 1, I received an invitation from the AMS Office of Government Relations to fly to Washington, D.C., to discuss mathematics education in a panel briefing of the U.S. House Committee on Science,Read More →

January 2023 Mark Saul I have lived my professional life—half a century by now—passing among three islands, three professional communities interested in mathematics.  There are bridges between them, but I am always made cognizant of crossing a bridge and being ‘somewhere else’. And there are walls, some artificial and othersRead More →