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