Becoming a Mathematician

Becoming a Mathematician
Author: Leigh N Wood
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 193
Release: 2012-02-13
Genre: Education
ISBN: 9400729847

This book considers the views of participants in the process of becoming a mathematician, that is, the students and the graduates. This book investigates the people who carry out mathematics rather than the topics of mathematics. Learning is about change in a person, the development of an identity and ways of interacting with the world. It investigates more generally the development of mathematical scientists for a variety of workplaces, and includes the experiences of those who were not successful in the transition to the workplace as mathematicians. The research presented is based on interviews, observations and surveys of students and graduates as they are finding their identity as a mathematician. The book contains material from the research carried out in South Africa, Northern Ireland, Canada and Brunei as well as Australia.

Mathematics Education for a New Era

Mathematics Education for a New Era
Author: Keith Devlin
Publisher: CRC Press
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2011-02-25
Genre: Computers
ISBN: 1439867712

Stanford mathematician and NPR Math Guy Keith Devlin explains why, fun aside, video games are the ideal medium to teach middle-school math. Aimed primarily at teachers and education researchers, but also of interest to game developers who want to produce videogames for mathematics education, Mathematics Education for a New Era: Video Games as a Med

Mathematics for Human Flourishing

Mathematics for Human Flourishing
Author: Francis Su
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 287
Release: 2020-01-07
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 0300248814

Winner of the Mathematics Association of America's 2021 Euler Book Prize, this is an inclusive vision of mathematics—its beauty, its humanity, and its power to build virtues that help us all flourish“This is perhaps the most important mathematics book of our time. Francis Su shows mathematics is an experience of the mind and, most important, of the heart.”—James Tanton, Global Math Project"A good book is an entertaining read. A great book holds up a mirror that allows us to more clearly see ourselves and the world we live in. Francis Su’s Mathematics for Human Flourishing is both a good book and a great book."—MAA Reviews For mathematician Francis Su, a society without mathematical affection is like a city without concerts, parks, or museums. To miss out on mathematics is to live without experiencing some of humanity’s most beautiful ideas.In this profound book, written for a wide audience but especially for those disenchanted by their past experiences, an award‑winning mathematician and educator weaves parables, puzzles, and personal reflections to show how mathematics meets basic human desires—such as for play, beauty, freedom, justice, and love—and cultivates virtues essential for human flourishing. These desires and virtues, and the stories told here, reveal how mathematics is intimately tied to being human. Some lessons emerge from those who have struggled, including philosopher Simone Weil, whose own mathematical contributions were overshadowed by her brother’s, and Christopher Jackson, who discovered mathematics as an inmate in a federal prison. Christopher’s letters to the author appear throughout the book and show how this intellectual pursuit can—and must—be open to all.

Mathematics Education Research: A Guide for the Research Mathematician

Mathematics Education Research: A Guide for the Research Mathematician
Author: Curtis C. McKnight
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
Total Pages: 120
Release: 2000
Genre: Education
ISBN: 0821820168

Mathematics education research in undergraduate mathematics has increased significantly in the last decade and shows no signs of abating in the near future. Thus far, this research has often been associated with innovations in curriculum such as calculus reform, statistics education, and the use of computational and graphing technology in instruction. Mathematics education research, carefully conducted, is something far more fundamental and widely useful than might be implied by its use by the advocates of innovation in undergraduate mathematics education. Most simply, mathematics education research is inquiry by carefully developed research methods aimed at providing evidence about the nature and relationships of many mathematics learning and teaching phenomena. It seeks to clarify the phenomena, illuminate them, explain how they are related to other phenomena, and explain how this may be related to undergraduate mathematics course organization and teaching. This book-the collaborative effort of a research mathematician, mathematics education researchers who work in a research mathematics department and a professional librarian-introduces research mathematicians to education research. The work presents a non-jargon introduction for educational research, surveys the more commonly used research methods, along with their rationales and assumptions, and provides background and careful discussions to help research mathematicians read or listen to education research more critically. This guide is of practical interest to university-based research mathematicians, as it introduces the methodology of quantitative and qualitative research in education; provides critical guidelines for assessing the reliability and validity of mathematics education research; and explains how to use online database resources to locate education research. The book will also be valuable to graduate students in mathematics who are planning academic careers, and to mathematics department chairs and their deans.

Inventing the Mathematician

Inventing the Mathematician
Author: Sara N. Hottinger
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2016-03-01
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1438460090

Considers how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field. Where and how do we, as a culture, get our ideas about mathematics and about who can engage with mathematical knowledge? Sara N. Hottinger uses a cultural studies approach to address how our ideas about mathematics shape our individual and cultural relationship to the field. She considers four locations in which representations of mathematics contribute to our cultural understanding of mathematics: mathematics textbooks, the history of mathematics, portraits of mathematicians, and the field of ethnomathematics. Hottinger examines how these discourses shape mathematical subjectivity by limiting the way some groups—including women and people of color—are able to see themselves as practitioners of math. Inventing the Mathematician provides a blueprint for how to engage in a deconstructive project, revealing the limited and problematic nature of the normative construction of mathematical subjectivity.

Teaching Mathematics Through Games

Teaching Mathematics Through Games
Author: Mindy Capaldi
Publisher: American Mathematical Soc.
Total Pages: 160
Release: 2021-05-18
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1470462842

Active engagement is the key to learning. You want your students doing something that stimulates them to ask questions and creates a need to know. Teaching Mathematics Through Games presents a variety of classroom-tested exercises and activities that provoke the active learning and curiosity that you hope to promote. These games run the gamut from well-known favorites like SET and Settlers of Catan to original games involving simulating structural inequality in New York or playing Battleship with functions. The book contains activities suitable for a wide variety of college mathematics courses, including general education courses, math for elementary education, probability, calculus, linear algebra, history of math, and proof-based mathematics. Some chapter activities are short term, such as a drop-in lesson for a day, and some are longer, including semester-long projects. All have been tested, refined, and include extensive implementation notes.

A Mathematician's Lament

A Mathematician's Lament
Author: Paul Lockhart
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Total Pages: 85
Release: 2009-04-01
Genre: Mathematics
ISBN: 1934137332

“One of the best critiques of current K-12 mathematics education I have ever seen, written by a first-class research mathematician who elected to devote his teaching career to K-12 education.” —Keith Devlin, NPR’s “Math Guy” A brilliant research mathematician reveals math to be a creative art form on par with painting, poetry, and sculpture, and rejects the standard anxiety-producing teaching methods used in most schools today. Witty and accessible, Paul Lockhart’s controversial approach will provoke spirited debate among educators and parents alike, altering the way we think about math forever. Paul Lockhart is the author of Arithmetic, Measurement, and A Mathematician’s Lament. He has taught mathematics at Brown University, University of California, Santa Cruz, and to K-12 level students at St. Ann’s School in Brooklyn, New York.

The 'Resource' Approach to Mathematics Education

The 'Resource' Approach to Mathematics Education
Author: Luc Trouche
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 564
Release: 2019-11-29
Genre: Education
ISBN: 303020393X

This edited volume will help educators better analyze methodological and practical tools designed to aid classroom instruction. It features papers that explore the need to create a system in order to fully meet the uncertainties and developments of modern educational phenomena. These have emerged due to the abundance of digital resources and new forms of collective work. The collected papers offer new perspectives to a rising field of research known as the Documentational Approach to Didactics. This framework was first created by the editors of this book. It seeks to develop a deeper understanding of mathematics teaching expertise. Readers will gain insight into how to meet the theoretical questions brought about by digitalization. These include: how to analyze teachers’ work when they prepare for their teaching, how to conceptualize the relationships between individual and collective work, and how to follow the related processes over the long term. The contributors also provide a comparative view in terms of contrasting selected phenomena across different educational cultures and education systems. For instance, they consider how differences in curriculum resources are available to teachers and how teachers make use of them to shape instruction. Coverage also considers the extent to which teachers make use of additional material, particularly those available through the global marketplace on the Internet. This book builds on works from the Re(s)sources 2018 Conference, Understanding teachers’ work through their interactions with resources for teaching, held in Lyon, France.

Critical Race Theory in Mathematics Education

Critical Race Theory in Mathematics Education
Author: Julius Davis
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 309
Release: 2019-04-30
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1351356151

Critical Race Theory in Mathematics Education brings together scholarship that uses critical race theory (CRT) to provide a comprehensive understanding of race, racism, social justice, and experiential knowledge of African Americans’ mathematics education. CRT has gained traction within the educational research sphere, and this book extends and applies this framework to chronicle the paths of mathematics educators who advance and use CRT. This edited collection brings together scholarship that addresses the racial challenges thrusted upon Black learners and the gatekeeping nature of the discipline of mathematics. Across the ten chapters, scholars expand the uses of CRT in mathematics education and share insights with stakeholders regarding the racialized experiences of mathematics students and educators. Collectively, the volume explains how researchers, practitioners, and policymakers can use CRT to examine issues of race, racism, and other forms of oppression in mathematics education for Black children and adults.

Teaching Math at a Distance, Grades K-12

Teaching Math at a Distance, Grades K-12
Author: Theresa Wills
Publisher: Corwin Press
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-10-12
Genre: Education
ISBN: 1071837125

Make Rich Math Instruction Come to Life Online In an age when distance learning has become part of the "new normal," educators know that rich remote math teaching involves more than direct instruction, online videos, and endless practice problems on virtual worksheets. Using both personal experience and those of teachers in real K-12 online classrooms, distance learning mathematics veteran Theresa Wills translates all we know about research-based, equitable, rigorous face-to-face mathematics instruction into an online venue. This powerful guide equips math teachers to: Build students’ agency, identity, and strong math communities Promote mathematical thinking, collaboration, and discourse Incorporate rich mathematics tasks and assign meaningful homework and practice Facilitate engaging online math instruction using virtual manipulatives and other concrete learning tools Recognize and address equity and inclusion challenges associated with distance learning Assess mathematics learning from a distance With examples across the grades, links to tutorials and templates, and space to reflect and plan, Teaching Math at a Distance offers the support, clarity, and inspiration needed to guide teachers through teaching math remotely without sacrificing deep learning and academic growth.