Announcements

The Fall 2008 MAA-NCS Section Meeting was held October 17-18, 2008 at Concordia College in Moorhead, Minnesota.  Executive Committee minutes and Business Meeting minutes are now available. The fall meeting program and fall newsletter are still available.

The Fall 2008 NCS Team Competition will be held for Saturday, November 15, 2008. For  information on deadlines for registration or a listing of last year's top third teams and copies of the problems and solutions, visit the NCS Team Competition page.

It's never too late to nominate!  A call for nominations for the MAA-NCS Meritorious Service Award (deadlines and guidelines) and MAA Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics (deadlines and guidelines) are here!

Information about the 2009 MAA-NCS Summer Seminar is available!  The seminar is entitled: 

ACTUALLY DOING IT!

A Hands-On Approach to Computational Combinatorial Geometry

with the principal lecturer Professor Jesús De Loera, University of California, Davis and will be held at St. John’s University, Collegeville, MN, July 19-24, 2009.  For more information, see the Summer Seminar page.

Fall 2008 Invited Speakers

Women and Mathematics at the Time of Euler

Betty Mayfield (bio)

Hood College

In 2007 mathematicians around the world focused on All Things Euler: his life, his work, his legacy. We were treated to special conferences, books, papers, posters, a study tour, and sessions at national meetings. We will examine a slightly different topic: female contemporaries of Leonhard Euler (1707 - 1783), some famous, some not so famous. We will look at their lives and their work, at mathematics that was written by and – surprisingly – for women in the time of Euler.

This talk grew out of an experimental summer research project with a group of undergraduate students in the history of mathematics.

Mathematics and Politics

Karen Saxe (bio)

Macalester College

"...democracy is the worst form of government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." -- Winston Churchill  

The cornerstone for a democracy is, arguably, the electoral system chosen. How do we elect our president? Are there better alternatives? We will consider mathematical approaches to these questions, and discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the many different electoral systems that are used by democratic countries around the world.