January 30-31, 2004
Xavier University
Members in attendance:
Chris Christensen, Northern Kentucky University
Daniel Curtin, Northern Kentucky University
Charles Holmes, Miami University
Kevin Kirby, Northern Kentucky University
David Kullman, Miami Univeristy
Daniel Otero, Xavier University
Richard Pulskamp, Xavier University
We gathered for Friday night dinner at 6pm at the Bonefish Grill in Oakley. (It so happened that another NKU contingent was also at the restaurant with a math ed candidate for an open position in their department!)
We reconvened at XU in new and impressive digs on the seventh floor of the Schott Building, thanks to our host, member Dick Pulskamp. After a brief review of the career of Polya taken from an article in Notable Mathematicians, we viewed the nearly-hour-long video that Polya made for the MAA in 1966 with a class of undergraduates, called Let Us Teach Guessing. In the video, he works with the students to formulate a conjecture about the number of cells into which n planes in general position dissect 3-space, and it provided a glimpse of the perspective Polya took in teaching mathematics. The rest of the evening's discussion was devoted to a walkthrough of the text we had selected from his 1954 Mathematics and Plausible Reasoning. This book was written as a follow-up to his immensely popular 1945 work, How To Solve It.
On Saturday morning, after bagels and cream cheese from Panera, and orange juice and coffee, we returned to a discussion of the texts. While we had intended to address ourselves to a sizeable excerpt from Polya's 1962 Mathematical Discovery, we made slower-than-expected progress through MPR, so we never got to it. But no matter; we enjoyed the discussions we had nonetheless, and it provided an opportunity for us to reflect seriously on some of the ideas of one of the great mathematics educators of our times.
In discussing the upcoming fall meeting, tentatively scheduled for September 17-18, 2004, at Northern Kentucky University, we were not able to settle on a text. Too many options presented themselves. So we doled out assignments that asked the members to investigate the various choices. We may very well devote a number of future meetings to these topics. The assignments were:
G. H. Hardy (Chris Christensen)
Percy MacMahon (Dan Curtin)
Hermann Weyl (David Kullman)
Abu Rayhan al-Biruni & Louis Mordell (Danny Otero)
John von Neumann (Dick Pulskamp)
Other mathematicians mentioned but not selected for follow-up included Henri Lebesgue and Bernhard Riemann. We hope to get reports by early summer so that we can make final plans for the September date.
Respectfully submitted,
Danny Otero