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Winter 2012 Newsletter
From the ChairThe Joint Meetings in Boston were fantastic! Over 7,000 mathematicians from around the world came together to network and share their enjoyment for mathematics. It was full of excitement. If you did not get to go to the Joint Meetings, I hope our Kentucky Section meeting is on your calendar. It too promises to be an amazing event. Our Chair-Elect, Duk Lee, our colleagues at Bellarmine University, especially Daylene Zielinski, and the executive committee, have been working hard to organize an excellent meeting. The program has an array of impressive speakers. What an opportunity! Begin talking to your fellow faculty members and your students and get them excited about participating. Make it a point to encourage folks that have never attended a KYMAA meeting to join us this year. Send your abstract well before the deadline; register early and get your first choice of hotel room. Bellarmine University is the place to kick off your Math Awareness Month activities in 2012! I look forward to seeing you March 30-31 at Bellarmine.> Dora Ahmadi at d.ahmadi@moreheadstate.edu The Governor's CornerAn unexpected surgery kept me from participating in the meeting of the MAA Board of Governors at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Boston. The MAA requires that substitutes must be former governors. Dan Curtin, who is a former KYMAA governor, agreed to substitute for me at the meeting. Thanks, Dan. Here is Dan's report on the Board of Governors meeting: The weather was remarkably mild, and the turn out for the meetings was around 7,200, by far the largest Joint Meetings ever. Attendance since 2001 has been between about 5000-6000. It was good to see many KYMAA folks there. The MAA is in relatively good shape financially, with around $12M in net assets. Our investments have not done as well as hoped, as is true for most investors right now. One area of concern is that our reserve funds have declined to around $0.5M. For the health of the organization they should be more like $5M. The MAA is being very careful with its spending in order to build back our safety net. Membership is around 12,000 with 27% choosing journals in electronic form. Increasing this percentage could lead to savings for the MAA. The MAA and the NCTM have issued a joint statement on Calculus that addresses the teaching of the Calculus in both high schools and universities. It can be viewed at NCSSM. The next Joint Meeting will be in San Diego, CA, January 9-12, 2013. The following JMMs are in Baltimore, MD; San Antonio, TX; Seattle, WA; and Atlanta, GA; resp. MathFest this summer will be in Madison, WI, August 2-4. I hope this is close enough that I will see many KYMAA members there. MathFest 2013 will be in Hartford, CT, 2014 in Portland, OR, and the 2015 meeting will be in Washington, DC. The MAA will be 100 years old in 2015 and so will be celbrating its centennial. Plans are underway for a big celebration in Washington, DC. Our own section is one of the oldest, two years younger than the MAA, so we are thinking of a celebration in 2017. Most sections are writing section histories, ours among them with myself in charge. They will form part of a history of the MAA. Be sure to check out MAA Online and also all the excellent publications from MAA. And also, be sure to look for opportunities to share your interests and ability, either by serving the KYMAA, or the national MAA. Dan Curtin, KYMAA Historian curtin@knu.edu. MAA Congressional Advocacy: The Science Policy Committee of the MAA is seeking one person in each section to be a congressional advocate - to advocate for the MAA with the US Congress. An Advocacy Tool-Kit (written last July by the MAA's consultants for government relations, Dave Zook and Beena Patel of B&D Consulting) is available, and additional training and opportunities to learn about the MAA's legislative positions is available at national meetings of the MAA. If you are interested in being an advocate for the MAA to Kentucky's legislative delegation, please contact me at the adress below. I would be glad to send you information about the position. A current issue is to advocate for congressional support of efforts by the National Science Foundation to improve STEM undergraduate education. Chris Christensen at christensen@nku.edu KYMAA GovernorThe Annual KYMAA MeetingOur 2012 KYMAA Annual Meeting is scheduled for March 30 - 31, 2012, at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky. This meeting should be outstanding and we strongly encourage you to participate. Perhaps you and/or your students can give a talk, or just come and listen to what your mathematical colleagues from across the state are up to these days. We are very excited to have the following three invited speakers: Erik Demaine (MIT), Bob Devaney (Boston Univ.), and Christie Perry (Morehead State Univ.). You do not want to miss these awesome speakers! Complete program details will appear in the next newsletter on March 12, 2012. There will also be links to the meeting program and presentation abstracts. Please note the following important dates for the 2012 KYMAA Annual Meeting:
For speakers, the rooms will have available PCs, laptop docks, ELMO document cameras and whiteboard or chalkboard. If you need something other than any of these, indicates so under "Equipment Needs" on the abstract form. In general, the time for individual presentations will be 15 minutes, including time for questions. Special presentations can be allocated more time if necessary. Finally, our schedule of hosts for future section meetings is:
Please contact any officer of KYMAA if you would interested in hosting a future meeting; we're always on the lookout for a good meeting site! Links to abstracts, programs, and a map can be found at KYMAA meetings Complete program details will appear in the next newsletter on March 12, 2012. There will also be links there to the meeting program and presentation abstracts.
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