Maura B. Mast

Janet L. Beery

Sarah J. Greenwald

Jacqueline A. Jensen-Vallin

This collection of refereed papers celebrates the contributions, achievements, and progress of female mathematicians, mostly in the 20th and 21st centuries. Emerging from the themed paper session “The Contributions of Women to Mathematics: 100 Years and Counting” at MAA's 2015 MathFest, this volume contains a diverse mix of current scholarship and exposition on women and mathematics, including biographies, histories, and cultural discussions. The multiplicity of authors also ensures a wide variety of perspectives. In inspiring and informative chapters, the authors featured in this volume reflect on the accomplishments of women in mathematics, showcasing the changes in mathematical culture that resulted as more women obtained tenure-track and tenured academic positions, received prestigious awards and honors, served in leadership roles in professional societies, and became more visibly active in the mathematical community. Readers will find discussions of mathematical excellence at Girton College, Cambridge, in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; of perseverance by Polish women in mathematics during and after World War II and by Black women in mathematics in the United States from the 1880s onward; and of the impact of outreach programs ranging from EDGE's promotion of graduate education to the Daughters of Hypatia dance performances. The volume also provides informative biographies of a variety of women from mathematics and statistics, many of them well-known and others less well-known, including Charlotte Angas Scott, Emmy Noether, Mina Rees, Gertrude Cox, Euphemia Lofton Haynes, Norma Hernandez, Deborah Tepper Haimo, and Teri Perl. These essays provide compelling reading for a wide audience, including mathematicians, historians of science, teachers of mathematics, and students at the high school, college, and graduate levels. Anyone interested in attracting more girls and women as students, faculty, and/or employees will also find this volume engaging and enlightening.

Celebrating the Centennial of the Mathematical Association of America

Women in Mathematics

Ethan D. Bolker

Ten years from now, what do you want or expect your students to remember from your course? We realized that in ten years what matters will be how students approach a problem using the tools they carry with them—common sense and common knowledge—not the particular mathematics we chose for the curriculum. Using our text, students work regularly with real data in moderately complex everyday contexts, using mathematics as a tool and common sense as a guide. The focus is on problems suggested by the news of the day and topics that matter to students, like inflation, credit card debt, and loans. We use search engines, calculators, and spreadsheet programs as tools to reduce drudgery, explore patterns, and get information. Technology is an integral part of today's world—this text helps students use it thoughtfully and wisely. This second edition contains revised chapters and additional sections, updated examples and exercises, and complete rewrites of critical material based on feedback from students and teachers who have used this text. Our focus remains the same: to help students to think carefully—and critically—about numerical information in everyday contexts.

Common Sense Mathematics: Second Edition

Common Sense Mathematics is a text for a one semester college-level course in quantitative literacy. The text emphasizes common sense and common knowledge in approaching real problems through popular news items and finding useful mathematical tools and frames with which to address those questions. We asked ourselves what we hoped our students would remember about this course in ten year’s time. From that ten year perspective thoughts about syllabus–“what topics should we cover?"–seemed much too narrow. What matters more is our wish to change the way our students' minds work–the way they approach a problem, or, more generally, the way they approach the world. Most people “skip the numbers" in newspapers, magazines, on the web and (more importantly) even in financial information. We hope that in ten years our students will follow the news, confident in their ability to make sense of the numbers they find there and in their daily lives. Most quantitative reasoning texts are arranged by mathematical topics to be mastered. Since the mathematics is only a part of what we hope students learn, we've chosen another strategy. We look at real life stories that can be best understood with careful reading and a little mathematics.

Maura B. Mast

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