• ISMAA 2011 Annual Meeting
• From the Section Governor
• From the Section Chair
• Become an Institutional Sponsor
• ISMAA Project NExT Program

The 2011 Annual Meeting of the Illinois Section of the MAA

Don’t miss the ISMAA annual meeting April 7-9 at North Central College in Naperville, IL.  This year's plenary speakers include: Paul Sally (University of Chicago), Louis Kaufman (University of Illinois at Chicago), Susanna Epp (DePaul University), and Robin Blankenship (Morehead State University).

For more details and registration information see: http://ismaa.knox.edu/2011SpringMeetingB.htm 

Peter Andrews

ISMAA Governor

Eastern Illinois University

Charleston, IL 61920

pandrews@eiu.edu

First, let me express my appreciation of the support shown by the members of the Illinois Section when I was elected the Illinois Governor of the MAA last summer. Since then, I have attended two meetings of the full Board of Governors - at MathFest in Pittsburgh last summer and at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans in January.

Before the board meeting at MathFest, I attended an afternoon-long orientation for new governors. In spite of having been an MAA member for many years, I had very little detailed understanding of how the organization worked. Along with a lot of details on the MAA staff and procedures, we got a comprehensive overview of the finances and the strategic planning efforts the board has been undertaking for several years. This planning process is the mechanism by which the organization looks at itself, the services it provides, and potential new directions it should explore. When a particular area (such as meetings or publications) is selected, a committee is formed and handed a three cycle charge. You can get an idea of what topics have been addressed and the status of each review by going to the MAA homepage and selecting the About Us tab. The Governance Documents pop-up menu includes a Strategic Planning Reports option.

One of the duties of a section governor is to keep the members of the section informed of what the national organization is doing. Before giving you a summary of the Board meetings at MathFest and the JMM, I should let you know there are some significant changes coming to the staff of the MAA. Both Executive Director Tina Straley and Treasurer John Kenelly are retiring. Searches have begun for these important positions with details available on the homepage. Please take a look at them if you think you might be interested in re-locating to DC!

MathFest 2010 - Pittsburgh

Finances

•  We have total assets of around $13M (although this includes the depreciated value of the Carriage House rather than its actual value).
•  We held substantial cash reserves during the brunt of the recession so we lost less than most!
•  We are in the process of slowly re-investing some of these reserves.
• I was quite impressed by how well (and transparently) managed our financial position is.

ByLaws

•  A complete new set of Bylaws were passed at the General Meeting. These were mostly organizational changes. A good part of our time at the Board Meeting dealt with setting up the mechanisms for implementing some of these changes
• The new Bylaws include significant changes in how the MAA provides speakers for sectional meetings:
• Journal editors no longer among the executive available for a \free" speaker invitation at sectional meetings.
• Journal editors in a new pool of speakers for which we are eligible 2 years after getting a Polya Lecturer.

Membership

• Renewals continue to be a relatively expensive proposition. All ideas for making this process more efficient and effective are welcomed!
• Various forms of electronic membership (electronic access to journals) are more and more popular. More options are being investigated.
• The staff is trying to pare dead (literally) members from the lifetime retired category. These members currently get automatic renewal.

Publications

• Electronic access now moved to JSTOR for Monthly, Math Magazine, CMJ, Horizons.
• Lots of options under consideration for electronic access to books.
• Don't forget the MAA publishes textbooks { and they are relatively inexpensive!

Information Technology

• New web page is in the works - consultant hired to analyze needs and deliver a design.
• Electronic registration has been established for American Mathematics Competition.
• Upgrades to management software are underway.
• The MAA can host sectional web pages. About 40% of section sites are now hosted by MAA.

Grants

• The MAA has a lot of experience both writing and administering grants. The staff is very willing to work with individuals and institutions to partner on grant applications. If you are considering applying for a government or private grant, you might consider doing this in conjunction with the MAA - contact Michael Pearson at the DC office.
• There is still undergraduate conference grant money available from the NSF grant to the MAA to support these efforts.

Awards

• In spite of the number of outstanding teachers who are members of the ISMAA, there continues to be a relatively small number of Haimo Award nominees!! I hope we will continue to have strong nominations for our own teaching award. Those winners get passed on to the national Haimo Award for consideration.

Joint Mathematics Meetings 2011 - New Orleans

In early December I got an e-mail reminder of the schedule for the Board Meeting at the JMM, complete with continental breakfast and a working lunch. It really is a full day. Less than two weeks later I got a follow-up letting me know there would be no breakfast provided and we were on our own for lunch as well. This was a harbinger of one of the main themes of the Board Meeting - we were running a substantial deficit for 2010 and, if we didn't make some changes, would do the same in 2011. The budgets for 2010 and 2011 had been built using revenue assumptions that were just not being realized. Thus, the staff and the Executive Committee revised their revenue estimates (final revenue figures for 2010 won't be available until late January or early February) and made significant cuts in expenditures to match. The result was estimated deficits of approximately $300-400K in 2010 and less than $200K for 2011. Some of the things cut were, across the board salary increases for the staff, staff benefits, replacement of some retiring staff, and the web-page re-design. There will be more electronic meetings of committees and boards and, of course, no breakfast or lunch for the Board Meeting!!

We do have substantial cash reserves and can cover these deficits in the short term. The staff and the Board are committed to returning to a balanced operating budget.

Finances

• In spite of the deficit in the operating budget, the long term financial state of the MAA is still very sound. The investment portfolios - many of which are dedicated to supporting awards and programs - have made up all their 2008-2009 losses.
• I encourage members to look at the financial reports on the MAA website. This is your organization and hence, you have a vested interest in how its finances are managed. You can see these reports from the About Us tab under the Governance Documents pop-up menu.

Membership

• One of the main reasons for the decline in revenue is a drop in dues receipts. While membership is going down, this is a slow process - from around 21,000 six years ago to approximately 20,000 now. However, many of our continuing members are retiring and moving from our highest dues category to our lowest!!
• We really need to expand membership, especially among young mathematicians. I encourage everyone to browse the Membership tab on the web page to see make sure you are getting all you can from the MAA and to provide you with information you can pass on to colleagues who are not members.
• Among those benefits is an affiliation we have made with NASA - details under the aforementioned Membership section! This provides access to the NASA credit union for all MAA members and some preferential access for student and faculty NASA internships!
• E-memberships are very popular, are working well, and seem to be having a faster renewal process.
• The Board approved a new class of membership. It will be a discounted membership for secondary school teachers which will be coupled with a subscription to Math Horizons, rather than a choice of the three main MAA journals.
• We discussed at length the issue of de-coupling membership from all journal subscriptions. The issue was referred to the Membership Committee for further study.

Publications

• Don Albers is retiring at the end of February as the \New Title Acquisition" person in the publications area. One of the temporary cost-cutting measures is not replacing him with full-time person. Don will still be available for consultation. There is certainly no plan to stop working on new books.
• Work continues on expanding e-book versions of old publications as well as making electronic versions of new titles available.
• The Publications Committee feels electronic resources like LOCI (a part of MathDL - the Mathematics Digital Library) are not receiving the number of visits they deserve. If you haven't been to the LOCI homepage, try it out. Under the Publications tab and then the Electronic Resources pop-up menu. I will be the first to admit that the MAA pages are not the easiest or most intuitive to navigate. That's why there was a plan to completely re-design them! This project is on hold until we get our operating budget back in order. Nonetheless, if you have a little patience, there really is a wealth of material stored (and sometimes hidden) away there.

SIGMAAs

• We received a preliminary report from the Strategic Planning Working Group on SIGMAAs.
• They very from extremely active to almost comatose.
• There was a feeling they could be a vehicle for more engagement in the mathematical community and for building sub-communities.

Project NExT

• ExxonMobile has announced it will end funding of the program.
• As of the meeting, no substitute has been identified!

Finally, if you have questions about the MAA and its programs, please do not hesitate to let me know. I can be contacted at pgandrews@eiu.edu

Iraj Kalantari

ISMAA Chair

Western Illinois University

Macomb IL 61455

(309.298.1238)

i-kalantari@wiu.edu

Colleagues,

The Board of Directors held its spring meeting last January at the downtown campus of De Paul University and more information about that meeting will be coming to you in the form of the minutes of the meeting.

Permit me to list some important requests again:

• Encourage your new colleagues to become members of MAA, and thus of ISMAA. (introductory membership with electronic access to Mathematical Monthly, College Math Journal and Math Magazine is for $49; see:

(https://www.maa.org/EbusPPRO/Memberships/MAANewMembershipProducts/tabid/155/Default.aspx?Level1=DISC)

• Institutional Membership.  Many of our institutions, including mine, are facing financial issues that require them to be particularly frugal this year again.  Perhaps that has affected their consideration for institutionally sponsoring ISMAA.  On behalf of the Board, I have been charged to write to the department chairs and request, particularly in these stringent financial times, to help ISMAA maintain its ability to meet its mission.  I ask you to help in registering the importance of continuing institutional support by appealing to your department to consider sponsoring ISMAA at one of the levels of

• Ordinary ($50; benefits: unlimited free student registration at the annual meeting),
• Sustaining ($90; benefits: unlimited free student registration at the annual meeting plus two – again, this year three -- free faculty registrations), or
• Speaker Sponsorship ($150; benefits: unlimited free student registration at the annual meeting, two -- this year three -- free faculty registrations, plus being listed as an underwriter of a speaker). 

My letter to your department should arrive early in March; please consider adding your voice to this important cause.

• Plan to attend: The 91st annual ISMAA meeting at North Central College on April 8-9, 2011.  
• Promote attendance and participation of your undergraduate and graduate students at the annual meeting. 
• Put on your calendar: The 92nd annual meeting of the ISMAA in Spring of 2012 will be held at Illinois State University (Bloomington) on April 20 -21. Our gratitude goes to ISU.)

• Consider volunteering your institution to host a meeting of ISMAA sometime. (We need a host for 2013, April 5 – 6 or April 12 – 13; please let me know if you are interested.)
• Nominate a deserving colleague for an ISMAA Distinguished Award (teaching or service).    
• Consider becoming a member of the Board of Directors of ISMAA.
• See our web page starting at: http://sections.maa.org/

Become an Institutional Sponsor

ISMAA offers three levels of Institutional Sponsorship. Free student registration at the annual meeting comes with each level.

The base level, Ordinary Sponsorship ($50), allows unlimited student registration at the annual meeting.

The higher levels, Supporting Sponsorship ($90) and Speaker Sponsorship ($150), have all of the benefits of Ordinary Sponsorship *PLUS* two free faculty registrations.

Those who choose Speaker Sponsorship will be listed as an underwriter of a plenary speaker at the ISMAA meeting. Regular registration at the meeting is $20 (on-site would be $25), so those schools who would normally choose Ordinary Sponsorship may wish to consider the Supporting level. However, to make life easier on our secretary-treasurer (and faculty who wish to avail themselves of the "free" registration) please contact Jon Johnson <mailto:jonj@elmhurst.edu> by e-mail for the procedure prior to registering for the Annual Meeting. A copy of the form is available online <http://ismaa.knox.edu/out-of-focus/winter-2007/inst-member-2007.pdf>.

ISMAA Project NExT Program

The Tenth Annual ISMAA Project NExT Program will be held in conjunction with the ISMAA annual meeting at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, April 7, 2011 - April 9, 2011. Up to nine 2011 ISMAA Project NExT Fellows will be selected. Anyone within their first four years of teaching mathematics (after finishing a master's or doctoral degree) at any two or four-year college or university in Illinois is eligible, as well as any graduate students at universities in Illinois who are completing their PhD this year and have a position in Illinois for the 2011-2012 academic year. 2011 ISMAA Project NExT Fellows' meeting registration, pre-conference workshop registration, opening banquet fees, and Friday and Saturday lunches at the annual meeting will be paid for by the ISMAA Project NExT for the 2011 and 2012 ISMAA Annual Meetings. The 2011 Program will begin on the morning (8:45 – 11:45 AM) of Friday, April 8, 2011 with Dr. Robin Blankenship, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Morehead State University, who will be presenting An Inclination to Find the Height and Totally Tubular: Inquiry- and Discovery-based Collaborative Investigations of Geometry and Measurement.

The workshop is followed by an opening lunch during which new ISMAA NExT fellows will have an opportunity to get to know one another as well as other sectional Fellows and national NExT Fellows. The ISMAA Project NExT program will conclude on the afternoon of Saturday, April 9, 2011, following the closing address of the ISMAA meeting. After a brief box lunch, the group will reconvene for a session devoted to the role of technology in teaching mathematics. This year we will match new ISMAA NExT Fellows with a Mentor at the meeting. It is expected that each Mentor-Fellow pair will continue to communicate about professional development issues throughout the following academic year. 

Application materials for 2011 ISMAA Project NExT Fellows can be accessed via the links below. For further information, please contact the Director for the ISMAA Project NExT Program: 

2011 ISMAA Project NExT Application (MS Word)
2011 ISMAA Project NExT Application (pdf) 

Timothy McMurry
Department of Mathematical Sciences
DePaul University
2320 N. Kenmore Ave.
Chicago, IL 60614
PHONE: (773) 325-1340
FAX: (773) 325-7807

tmcmurry@depaul.edu 

The registration deadline for the 20ellows is March 14, 2011.