Invitation to a Mathematical Festival


Book Description

Held annually in Moscow since 1990, the Mathematical Festival is a brilliant and fascinating math competition attended by hundreds of middle school students. This contains problems presented at the Festival during the years 1990-2011, along with hints and solutions for many of them. Most of the problems are accessible to students with no additional training in mathematics and may be used as supplementary material at school or at home.




A Festival of Mathematics


Book Description

This book, inspired by the Julia Robinson Mathematics Festival, aims to engage students in mathematical discovery through fun and approachable problems that reveal deeper mathematical ideas. Each chapter starts with a gentle on-ramp, such as a game or puzzle requiring no more than simple arithmetic or intuitive concepts of symmetry. Follow-up problems and activities require intuitive logic and reveal more sophisticated notions of strategy and algorithms. Projects are designed so that progress is more important than any end goal, ensuring that students will learn something significant no matter how far they get. The process of understanding the questions and how they build on one another becomes an exhilarating ride, revealing serious mathematics before the reader is aware of the transition. This book can be used in classrooms, math clubs, after school activities, homeschooling, and parent/student gatherings and is appropriate for students of age 8 to 18, as well as for teachers wanting to hone their skills. In the interest of fostering a greater awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and everyday life, MSRI and the AMS are publishing books in the Mathematical Circles Library series as a service to young people, their parents and teachers, and the mathematics profession.




A Celebration of the EDGE Program’s Impact on the Mathematics Community and Beyond


Book Description

The Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Program began twenty years ago to provide support for women entering doctoral programs in the mathematical sciences. With a steadfast commitment to diversity among participants, faculty, and staff, EDGE initially alternated between Bryn Mawr and Spelman Colleges. In later years, EDGE has been hosted on campuses around the nation and expanded to offer support for women throughout their graduate school and professional careers. The refereed papers in A Celebration of the EDGE Program’s Impact on the Mathematics Community and Beyond range from short memoirs, to pedagogical studies, to current mathematics research. All papers are written by former EDGE participants, mentors, instructors, directors, and others connected to EDGE. Together, these papers offer compelling testimony that EDGE has produced a diverse new generation of leaders in the mathematics community. This volume contains technical and non-technical works, and it is intended for a far-reaching audience, including mathematicians, mathematics teachers, diversity officers, university administrators, government employees writing educational or science policy, and mathematics students at the high school, college, and graduate levels. By highlighting the scope of the work done by those supported by EDGE, the volume offers strong evidence of the American Mathematical Society’s recognition that EDGE is "a program that makes a difference.” This volume offers unique testimony that a 20-year old summer program has expanded its reach beyond the summer experience to produce a diverse new generation of women leaders, nearly half of whom are underrepresented women. While some books with a women-in-math theme focus only on one topic such as research or work-life balance, this book's broad scope includes papers on mathematics research, teaching, outreach, and career paths.




Brain Teasers Mathematics: 100 Puzzles With Solutions


Book Description

The varied puzzles stimulate the readers brain and anyone with a slightly mathematical bent of mind will find the book fascinating. Even those who avoid mathematics may be attracted to the story format of these puzzles as they combine deductive ability with interest and enjoyment. The book is unique and will be of interest to candidates for competitive examinations. The puzzles are sure to appeal to readers of different levels of ability. This book is bound to find a wide readership amongst people of the English-speaking world.







Challenging Mathematics In and Beyond the Classroom


Book Description

In the mid 1980s, the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) inaugurated a series of studies in mathematics education by comm- sioning one on the influence of technology and informatics on mathematics and its teaching. These studies are designed to thoroughly explore topics of c- temporary interest, by gathering together a group of experts who prepare a Study Volume that provides a considered assessment of the current state and a guide to further developments. Studies have embraced a range of issues, some central, such as the teaching of algebra, some closely related, such as the impact of history and psychology, and some looking at mathematics education from a particular perspective, such as cultural differences between East and West. These studies have been commissioned at the rate of about one per year. Once the ICMI Executive decides on the topic, one or two chairs are selected and then, in consultation with them, an International Program Committee (IPC) of about 12 experts is formed. The IPC then meets and prepares a Discussion Document that sets forth the issues and invites interested parties to submit papers. These papers are the basis for invitations to a Study Conference, at which the various dimensions of the topic are explored and a book, the Study Volume, is sketched out. The book is then put together in collaboration, mainly using electronic communication. The entire process typically takes about six years.




Mathematical Outreach: Explorations In Social Justice Around The Globe


Book Description

'The presentations gathered in this book offer plenty of ideas and advice for anyone seeking to start a program or affiliate with an existing one. In general, the authors do not compare their programs to those described in other chapters, but readers of the whole volume will identify significant commonalties across the various audiences, processes, obstacles, and outcomes described.Summing up: Recommended. All readers.'CHOICEThis groundbreaking anthology is a collection of accounts from leaders in mathematical outreach initiatives. The experiences range from prison education programs to alternative urban and Indian reservation classrooms across the United States, traversing the planet from the Americas to Africa, Asia, and the Indian subcontinent. Their common theme is the need to share meaningful and beautiful mathematics with disenfranchised communities across the globe.Through these stories, the authors share their educational philosophy, personal experiences, and student outcomes. They incorporate anecdotal vignettes since research articles in mathematics education often exclude them. The inclusion of these stories is an element that adds immeasurable value to the larger narratives they tell.




Proceedings Of The 14th International Congress On Mathematical Education (In 2 Volumes)


Book Description

The International Congress on Mathematical Education (ICME) is the largest international conference on mathematics education in the world. This quadrennial event is organized under the auspices of the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI). This book, the Proceedings of ICME-14, presents the latest trends in mathematics education research and mathematics teaching practices at all levels. Each chapter covers an extensive range of topics in mathematics education.Volume I consists of 4 Plenary Lectures, 3 Plenary Panels, 5 Lectures of Awardees, 4 Survey Teams, 62 Topic Study Groups, 13 Discussion Groups, 20 Workshops, a Thematic Afternoon, and an Early Career Researcher Day. Plenary Lectures recognize substantial and continuing contributions to the growth of the field of Mathematics Education. Plenary Panels address three major challenges currently facing mathematics educators across the globe. The Survey Teams have a particular emphasis on identifying and characterizing important new knowledge, recent developments, new perspectives, and emergent issues. The Topic Study Groups provides a coverage of important topics in mathematics education.Volume II consists of 50 invited lectures which present the work and reflections of both established and emerging researchers from around the world. These lectures cover a wide spectrum of topics, themes and issues that reflect the latest challenges and development in the field of mathematics education.




The Mathematical Imagination


Book Description

This book offers an archeology of the undeveloped potential of mathematics for critical theory. As Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno first conceived of the critical project in the 1930s, critical theory steadfastly opposed the mathematization of thought. Mathematics flattened thought into a dangerous positivism that led reason to the barbarism of World War II. The Mathematical Imagination challenges this narrative, showing how for other German-Jewish thinkers, such as Gershom Scholem, Franz Rosenzweig, and Siegfried Kracauer, mathematics offered metaphors to negotiate the crises of modernity during the Weimar Republic. Influential theories of poetry, messianism, and cultural critique, Handelman shows, borrowed from the philosophy of mathematics, infinitesimal calculus, and geometry in order to refashion cultural and aesthetic discourse. Drawn to the austerity and muteness of mathematics, these friends and forerunners of the Frankfurt School found in mathematical approaches to negativity strategies to capture the marginalized experiences and perspectives of Jews in Germany. Their vocabulary, in which theory could be both mathematical and critical, is missing from the intellectual history of critical theory, whether in the work of second generation critical theorists such as Jürgen Habermas or in contemporary critiques of technology. The Mathematical Imagination shows how Scholem, Rosenzweig, and Kracauer’s engagement with mathematics uncovers a more capacious vision of the critical project, one with tools that can help us intervene in our digital and increasingly mathematical present. The Mathematical Imagination is available from the publisher on an open-access basis.




International Handbook of Mathematics Education


Book Description

ALAN J. BISHOP Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia RATIONALE Mathematics Education is becoming a well-documented field with many books, journals and international conferences focusing on a variety of aspects relating to theory, research and practice. That documentation also reflects the fact that the field has expanded enormously in the last twenty years. At the 8th International Congress on Mathematics Education (ICME) in Seville, Spain, for example, there were 26 specialist Working Groups and 26 special ist Topic Groups, as well as a host of other group activities. In 1950 the 'Commission Internationale pour I 'Etude et l' Amelioration de l'Enseignement des Mathematiques' (CIEAEM) was formed and twenty years ago another active group, the 'International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education' (PME), began at the third ICME at Karlsruhe in 1976. Since then several other specialist groups have been formed, and are also active through regular conferences and publications, as documented in Edward Jacobsen's Chapter 34 in this volume.