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MAA Math Alert - March 2008

News and Views

Project NExT Helps Sloan Fellow Get Started
Davidson College Professor Tim Chartier wasn’t sure he had read the e-mail correctly. Read More

MathFest 2008 Call for Papers
The Mathematical Association of America will hold its eighty-sixth summer meeting, Thursday, July 31 through Sunday, August 3 in Madison, Wisconsin, and the deadline for submitting abstracts is May 16. Submit Now!

New Mathematics Textbook is Drawing Ire
A mathematics textbook series has angered parents and elementary school teachers who say its methods fail to help children master basic math skills. Read More

Four-Decade-Old "Road Coloring Conjecture" Apparently Solved
Avraham Trakhtman (Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel) has apparently solved the "Road Coloring Conjecture," which was raised by, among others, Israeli mathematician Binyamin Weiss in 1970. The solution is slated to appear in the Israel Journal of Mathematics within the next few months. Read More

Attention Student Chapter Advisors
The newest issue of the CUSAC Newsletter is now available on MAA Online. Included in this issue are articles and pictures from the Joint Mathematics Meeting, newsabout MathFest 2008, and more. Access the Student Chapter Newsletter here.

MathFest Travel Grants
There are a limited number of travel grants available to students who register to give a talk at MathFest. For more information click here.


Featured Articles

The Mathematical Tourist by Ivars Peterson: Newton’s Algebra Book
PROBLEM V. If two Post-Boys A and B, at 59 Miles Distance from one another, set out in the Morning to meet. And A rides 7 Miles in two Hours, and B 8 Miles in three Hours, and B begins his Journey an Hour later than A; to find what Number of Miles A will ride before he meets B. Read More

Devlin's Angle by Keith Devlin: Lockhart’s Lament
This month's column is devoted to an article called “A Mathematician's Lament,” written by Paul Lockhart in 2002. Paul is a mathematics teacher at Saint Ann's School in Brooklyn, New York. His article has been circulating through parts of the mathematics and math ed communities ever since, but he never published it. Read More


New From the MAA

The College Geometry Project
From 1965 - 1971 the National Science Foundation funded a star-studded group of geometers to produce a series of geometry films at the University of Minnesota. The geometers, under the overall direction of Schuster, developed twelve beautiful films over a period of six years. Read More

A Garden of Integrals
The derivative and the integral are the fundamental notions of calculus. Though there is essentially only one derivative, there is a variety of integrals, developed over the years for a variety of purposes, and this book describes them. Read More

Hesiod’s Anvil
This book is about how poets, philosophers, storytellers, and scientists have described motion, beginning with Hesiod, a contemporary of Homer, who imagined that the expanse of heaven and the depth of hell was the distance that an anvil falls in nine days. Read More

Publishing Date: 
March, 2008