This is the web edition of the Iowa Section Newsletter. To receive a printed copy of the newsletter or to make suggestions/comments, please contact the editor, Mark Mills, millsm@central.edu.

Contents

• 2004 Iowa Mathematics Meeting at Central College
• Governor's Report
• Treasurer's Report
• Iowa Collegiate Mathematics Competition Matched Donations Campaign
• Nominating Committee Report
• Announcements and Dates of Importance
• Officers of the Iowa Section

Governor's Report

This is my last report as you section governor. It is my pleasure to announce that Jim Freeman has been elected as my successor, and he will be taking over on July 1. Attending the national board meetings for the past three years was very interesting. I learned a lot about the way the MAA operates and all the different projects that the MAA is involved in. There are many different MAA committees that need members to serve on them, and you can see www.maa.org for a listing. If you think you are able to contribute to one of them, please let your governor know.

The January 2004 joint meetings were held in sunny Phoenix, Arizona. The Iowa section was very well represented; we could have had a section meeting right there! The MAA Board of Governors met on January 6 in Phoenix. We heard many reports from MAA officers, staff, editors and committees. Even during the lunch break we had a topic to discuss: “Is Calculus a college level course that should not be taught in high schools?” I don’t have an answer for you on that (opinions vary, depending on how Calculus is taught…..), but here a report on some of the rest of the meeting:

• The MAA is financially sound, but to keep it in this condition, a slight increase in annual rates was approved. You can now renew your MAA membership on-line. By the way, the MAA now has a searchable database (restricted access), so make sure that your listing includes your institution’s name. The annual student-member dues which include a subscription to “Math Horizons” were raised from $20 to $25 and may be raised again in the near future. The MAA has about 1500 student members.
• During clean-up for renovation at the Washington, DC, office a box of almost 100 year old documents was found which includes some of the original founding documents of the MAA. They have been sent to the MAA archives in Texas.
• Project NExT is in the final years of their ExxonMobil grant and will need to find new donors.  ExxonMobil is supporting the new MAA/AMATYC program  ACCCESS, which supports the professional development of new two-year college faculty members: “Advancing Community College Careers: Education, Scholarship and Service”.
• There are many new MAA books on the market, take a look at “publications” at www.maa.org and support your section by purchasing some at the section meeting. The MAA brochure “We do Math! Careers in the Mathematical Sciences” can be ordered in bulk by your department, see details in the February issue of Focus.

• There now is a new SIGMAA on “Quantitative Literacy”. For a complete list of all SIGMAAs see www.maa.org/SIGMAA/SIGMAA.html.
• MAA’s Professional Enhancement Programs (PREP) continue to offer lots of workshops. Information on PREP as well as Preparing Mathematicians to Educate Teachers (PMET) can be found at www.maa.org/prep and  www.maa.org/pmet, respectively.
• The sections are encouraged to check out the AMC web site www.AMC8.org and recognize winners in their state.
• April is Mathematics Awareness month, see mathforum.org/mam/04/.

 The next board of Governors meeting will be in August 2004 in Providence, Rhode Island. 

For a complete list of upcoming national meetings see www.maa.org/meetings/national_meetings.html

Respectfully submitted,

Ruth I. Berger
Luther College

Treasurer's Report

Respectfully submitted,

Wendy A. Weber
Central College

Iowa Collegiate Mathematics Competition Matched Donations Campaign

At last year's Iowa Section business meeting, it was noted that the fund that currently supports the annual Iowa Collegiate Mathematics Competition would not be sufficient to fund the contest after 2004.  During the ensuing discussion about how to replenish the fund, Dr. Stephen J. Willson generously offered to match up to $5,000 in donations.  This has lead to a campaign to raise at least $5,000 from the section to receive Dr. Willson's matching funds.

A letter describing the details of Dr. Willson's match and a donation form are available on the Section web page under College Math Contest.

Nominating Committee Report

The 2004 MAA-Iowa Nominating Committee (David Manderscheid, Murphy Waggoner, and Justin Peters) has submitted the following nominations.  Elections will be held at the business meeting at Central College on Saturday, April 17, 2004.

Chair Elect:  

Mariah Birgen, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Scholars Program Director, has been at Wartburg College since 1997. She studied engineering physics as an undergraduate at the University of California at Berkeley and completed her Ph.D. in global and microlocal analysis at the University of Michigan. Since arriving at Wartburg, she has been involved in combining the homework group concepts she learned at Michigan with a heavy emphasis on Maple that she discovered at Wartburg into what the students refer to as “Insanely Hard Maple Homework”. Additionally, she has been instrumental in bringing Wartburg faculty into the twenty-first century technology of classroom management systems and has been co-administering a free ware version from a server in her temporary office. She has also worked to design new computer labs/classrooms in the new Science Center at Wartburg. Her latest hobbies are child-juggling with her husband Dr. Brian Birgen and starting a Socrates Café with her Scholars Program.

Tom Moore:  I am a professor of mathematics at Grinnell College, where I have taught since 1980. I have been an MAA member for over 25 years. I earned my Ph.D. in probability at Dartmouth and a few years later earned an M.S. in statistics from the U. of Iowa. My main interests today are statistics and statistics education. I have served on several MAA committees and am currently chair-elect of the SIGMAA on Statistics Education. I have organized several events over the years, including an MAA CRAFTY workshop in statistics held at Grinnell in October of 2000. The relevance of this information is that organizing the 2005 Section meeting would be the first important task of the chair-elect, a task I would enjoy doing. I thank the Nominating Committee for asking me to stand for election.

Announcements and Dates of Importance

• To subscribe to a monthly e-mail newsletter covering the advancements in recreational mathematics, contact Charles Ashbacher at cashbacher@yahoo.com. Charles is the editor of Journal of Recreational Mathematics and the newsletter features descriptions of the content of JRM, web site reviews, book reviews and correspondence about the latest results in the field.
  
• The MAA's Professional Enhancement Program (PREP) will offer a wide variety of workshops during summer 2004. PREP workshops offer you the chance to spend a few days exploring topics of mutual interest with colleagues from other institutions, with experienced leaders to guide the group towards a deeper understanding and broader perspective. Most of the cost of attending a PREP workshop is covered by the program, so what are you waiting for? Visit the PREP web site, www.maa.org/prep to see this year's schedule and to obtain registration materials.
• Scott Herriott (Maharishi University of Management) recently had his book College Algebra Through Functions and Models published by Brooks-Cole.  It was classroom tested at the University of Northern Iowa.  If you would like to receive a review copy, please contact Scott (herriott@mum.edu).

Dates of Importance

August 12-14, 2004 - MathFest in Providence, Rhode Island

January 5-8, 2004 - MAA-AMS Joint Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia