EPaDel-NJ Fall 2016 Section Meeting

The fall meeting, jointly-organized with the New Jersey section, was held November 12, 2016 at Villanova University.

Invited Speakers

• Betty Mayfield (Hood College)
  Gerbert d'Aurillac and the March of Spain: A Guy in the Right Place at the Right Time
  • Gerbert was a tenth century scholar and churchman who eventually was named Pope Sylvester II. In the Year 1000, he probably knew more mathematics than anyone else in Europe. We¹ll explore how that came to be.
• Martha Siegel (Towson University)
  CUPM Recommendations for Programs in the Mathematical Sciences
  • The chair of CUPM will present the new recommendations for undergraduate mathematical science programs.  There are cognitive and content goals common to all programs and specific details pertaining to the many possible tracks, minors, and interdisciplinary majors that will be important to mathematics students in the 21st century.
• Charles R. Hadlock (Bentley University)
  A Mathematical Tour through a Collapsing World
  • If you search the word “collapse” on Google News on any given day, you are sure to get thousands of hits, as well as a healthy reminder that we do live in a world where a very wide variety of things are collapsing every day. When assessing the risk of collapse, one’s initial mindset about its source can lead to insufficient attention being paid to alternative sources. That’s why financial auditors, accident investigators, and similar professionals follow systematic protocols that attempt to assure that a wide field of issues are addressed, even in the presence of strong evidence pointing in a particular direction. This same mentality is important in more general and less structured treatments of risk and possible collapse, whether to companies, currencies, species, governments, facilities, diseases, societies, or almost anything else. Mathematics provides an ideal framework for capturing the essence of a wide range of common collapse dynamics that permeate many areas of application. After all, we customarily discuss subjects like probabilities, extrema, stability, nonlinearity, games, networks, and others, all of which are closely related to possible collapses. But beyond capturing the concepts, which itself should not be underestimated as an important contribution to workers from diverse disciplines, we also offer powerful tools for going deeper to mine important insights, resolve specific uncertainties, and guide future actions. I will expand upon these ideas with examples from the real world and with some mathematical gems that many of us might not ordinarily encounter in our mathematical training or reading.
• Workshop, led by Betty Mayfield of Hood College
  Teaching Calculus Using a Tablet
  • What can you - and your students - do on an iPad/tablet in an introductory calculus class? As it turns out, a lot! We will explore how to run a paperless classroom using tablets for reading and interacting with the text, giving lectures and taking notes, distributing and filling in discovery-oriented worksheets, graphing functions, and submitting homework. Participants are encouraged to bring a tablet if they have one. I will demonstrate the use of the apps Notability (any app that can read and annotate pdf files is fine), Desmos (free), and Dropbox (also free), but none of these are required for participation in the workshop. I hope that others will bring their own experiences and ideas to share.

Faculty Contributed Paper Session

Faculty talk schedule (PDF)

Faculty talk abstracts (PDF)

Student Contributed Paper Session

Student talk schedule (PDF)

Student talk abstracts (PDF)

Student Activity

Here are the solutions to the student activity.

Lunch Table Discussions

This year's lunch table discussion topics will be:

• Faculty Presence and Availability on Campus – is there a problem here?
• Stimulating Student's Interest in Science and Math
• AWM/MAA Discussion; Creating Community Among Women in the Profession
• The MAA Leadership Restructuring
• Valuable Lessons from the S-STEM Program

This PDF lists further information on each discussion topic.

Schedule