Women in Math & IC ME 14
Women in Math: By now [possibly via last week’s GMD newsletter] you may be aware of the responses to an AMS Notices “opinion piece” that was written by one of the AMS [American Mathematical Society] Vice Presidents. One of the more recent
responses came from the Association for Women in Mathematics [@
AWMmath] who
tweeted:
I recommend learning more about AWM, in general; for example, they have a Moving Towards Action Workshop coming up at JMM [Joint Mathematics Meeting] in January 2020, which is also described in an AMS blog post written by Rachel Crowell. See the first link here as tweeted by Vanessa Rivera Quiñones:
If you are interested in reading another individual take on the matter of Diversity Statements, then you might check out the personal blog entry that was tweeted out by Izabella Laba:
Rather separately,
Nicholas Jackson helped celebrated “Noethember” [portmanteau of Emmy Noether’s surname and November] by illustrating and describing women mathematicians at a rate of nearly one per day all month! He tweeted a full thread of them
here:
It will be great to diversify further the collection of non-male mathematicians – historical and contemporary – whose names and work are not known widely enough. To this end, there is also a nascent account called Great Women of Mathematics [@GWOMaths] that you might check out [if you haven’t already].
IC ME 14 I wanted to space out this conference’s name because I’d rather it not be a high-up google return [I don’t know whether this will work]. The acronym refers to a quadrennial mathematics education gathering for which the 2016 Conference was in Hamburg, Germany, and the 2024 Conference will be in Sydney, Australia. This coming summer, the 2020 Conference is scheduled to happen in a country that I have visited several times [originally on a Fulbright Fellowship to learn about their mathematics education system while living there from 2008-09; and, most recently, to learn about Chinese linguistics in the summer of 2017]. International media outlets have reported on controversial domestic matters, which I think have received proportionally little attention; to this end, I strongly recommend reading the New York Times coverage
here. You can link-chase from there back to a
piece from August of 2018 that begins:
Please note the strong language used in the image above. To this end, I am quite interested in what others are thinking as pertains to attending this conference. As a full disclosure, I sent in a session proposal that I think is worthwhile reading irrespective of attendance [the linked topic is techniques to incorporate problem posing into teaching and assessments, and the paper stands at a mere 4 pages – including references – in length]. I have yet to hear back about the proposal’s status, and even then one needs to procure a visa [a process that I am admittedly concerned could be impacted negatively by this newsletter post as well as some of my tweets]. Still, I cannot imagine the mathematics education community organizing such an event and totally overlooking the numbers reported in the NYT above. [Also – and without engaging too deeply in whataboutism – I wish to note that I can see clear reasons why others would decide not to attend conferences in the United States based on government decisions by, in particular, the current administration].
Anyway: Below is my first
tweet of what may be a growing thread. At the time of writing, there are two follow-up responses from superset organizing bodies. I may have committed grammatical errors in the Chinese that I typed [my Mandarin speaking is much better than my writing!] but, I clicked on ‘translate tweet’ just now and am sufficiently satisfied with google’s result:
Even if you choose not to speak out publicly about this particular matter, it will be optimal to educate yourselves and others around the alleged happenings.
Lastly, in an abrupt change of tone and to close on a lighter note: Check out the newest
task from
PlayWithYourMath:
As always: I will be most delighted to hear from anyone in/around the worlds of [mathematics] education about work that should be amplified or highlighted. Email, DM, @, snail mail, etc!
