HPM-Americas

The Americas Section of HPM spans an area that is immense both in its physical and cultural dimensions. Our members have a correspondingly wide scope of interests, ranging from scholarly pursuit of knowledge to practical classroom issues. We aim to foster communication and cooperation among our members by means of this website and, where possible, through face-to-face meetings at local, regional or international conferences.

Please view the “What is HPM” page to learn more.

This is the new version of the HPM-Americas website (implemented May 2nd, 2009). You may visit the old website here.

HPM Americas will meet March 13-14 in Washington, DC at the MAA Carriage House, 1781 Church Street NW, Washington, DC.

HPM welcomes talks on the history of mathematics, the teaching of mathematics, and the history of the teaching of mathematics from all time periods and cultures. Prospective speakers should send a title and abstract, as well as their own contact information to Dave Roberts at
robertsdl@aol.com by February 5, 2010. Talks will be 30-40 minutes long.

Registration prior to March 1 will be $70 ($35 for full-time graduate students) and include Saturday lunch. Registration after March 1 will be $5 higher. Registration checks should be made out to Amy Ackerberg-Hastings, Treasurer, HPM and mailed to:

Amy Ackerberg-Hastings
5908 Halsey Road
Rockville, MD 20851

Lodging
While HPM-Americas does not have any official relationships with hotels for this conference, the nearest conference-grade hotel is the Washington Hilton, 1919 Connecticut Ave., NW, Washington, District of Columbia, United States 20009; Tel: 1-202-483-3000; Fax: 1-202-232-0438. As of February 5, this hotel is offering rates of $143 for advance purchase for the conference weekend. It is approximately a 10-minute walk downhill to the restaurants in Dupont Circle and the MAA Carriage House.

The Hotel Tabard Inn, 1739 N Street NW, Washington D.C. 20036; Tel: 202-785-1277; Fax: 202-785-6173; is approximately a 3-block walk from the meeting site. It consists of 40 sleeping rooms, some with shared baths, in 3 townhouses built between 1880 and 1890. Continental breakfast is included, and WiFi is free. Rooms are in fixed price categories, which range from $113 to $218.

According to Hotels.com, there are rooms available for as little as $53 in economy chain hotels in locations such as Silver Spring and New Carrollton, MD, and Alexandria, VA. Many of these are proximate to Metro; feel free to contact the officers with questions about locations. There are also numerous hostels in DC; see http://www.hostels.com/us.dc.html. Dupont Circle has several boutique hotels, such as the Churchill Hotel, which are currently advertising rates between $100 and $150. The MAA Carriage House is located at 1781 Church Street NW, Washington DC; see http://www.maa.org/meetings/MAA_conference_center.html. For finding restaurants, http://www.washingtonpost.com/gog/dc-restaurants.html?nid=roll_findrest is useful.

Special Library Visit
In conjunction with the HPM meeting March 13-14, the Dibner Library, within the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History, will host the HPM for a temporary book exhibit set up just for us on Friday, March 12, from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. The museum is located on the Mall, between the Smithsonian and Federal Triangle Metro stops on the Blue and Orange Lines. You will find the library on the first floor; please ring the bell for entry. Information about its collections may be found at: http://www.sil.si.edu/libraries/Dibner/index.cfm. For station maps, a trip planner, and other assistance with navigating the Washington, DC, area via public transportation, see http://www.wmata.com.

Please download this file for information on the 6th European Summer University on the History and Epistemology in Mathematics Education. It will be held on July 19 – 23, 2010 at Vienna University of Technology.

An excerpt:

“The initiative of organizing a Summer University (SU) on the History and Epistemology in
Mathematics Education belongs to the French Mathematics Education community, in the early 1980’s.
From those meetings emerged the organization of a SU on a European scale, as the European Summer
University (ESU) on the History and Epistemology in Mathematics Education, starting in 1993. Since
then, ESU was successfully organized in 1996, 1999, 2004 and 2007 at different places in Europe1 and
has been established into one of the main international activities of the HPM Group. From 2010 onwards
it will be organized every four years, so that every two years there will take place at least one major
international meeting of the Group; namely, ESU and the HPM Satellite Meeting of ICME.”

Website: http://www.algebra.tuwien.ac.at/esu6

We will offer a MAA minicourse on teaching discrete mathematics and broadly related courses using student projects based on primary historical sources, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco, Jan. 13-16, 2010, http://www.ams.org/amsmtgs/2124_intro.html.

Our historical projects guide students in learning mathematics directly from primary historical sources by the likes of Archimedes, Cantor, Euler, Hamilton, Leibniz, Pascal, Shannon, Turing, Veblen, von Neumann, Fermat, Bernoulli, Boole, Frege, Peirce, Venn, Euclid, Huffman, Cayley, Henkin, Goedel, Peano, Dedekind, Wittgenstein, Russell, Whitehead, Post.

Minicourse #12: Learning discrete mathematics via historical projects, organized by Jerry Lodder, Guram Bezhanishvili, and David J. Pengelley, New Mexico State University.

Part 1: Wednesday, 2:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.
Part 2:Friday, 2:15 p.m. – 4:15 p.m.

This minicourse will introduce curricular modules, based entirely on primary historical source material, for courses in discrete mathematics, combinatorics, logic, abstract algebra, and computer science. The modules have been authored by an interdisciplinary team of mathematics and computer science faculty at New Mexico State University and Colorado State University at Pueblo, with support from the US National Science Foundation. In the first session we will discuss the pedagogy behind our approach, give a brief outline of the compendium of projects, and provide initial hands-on participant work using four chosen projects. In the second session we will discuss the four projects in detail, lead group discussions, and offer more interactive activities. The projects
we have developed so far, as well as our philosophy in teaching with historical sources, can be found on our homepage at http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/historical-projects/.

We will also have several faculty who have tested our projects with students at various other institutions describe their experiences.

I would be delighted to see you at the minicourse,
David Pengelley

The Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications (UK) is organising its
first one-day conference on the History of Mathematics in London on 6th
November, at the Royal Statistical Society. You can see the details of the
conference at: http://www.ima.org.uk/Conferences/history_of_mathematics.html

You can book on-line at: http://online.ima.org.uk/events.aspx

The program, photos, and minutes from the HPM 2009 meeting are now available.