Alison M. Marr (born 1980) is an American mathematician and mathematics educator. Her research concerns graph theory and graph labeling, and she is also an advocate of inquiry-based learning in mathematics. She works as a professor of mathematics and computer science at Southwestern University in Texas.

Education and career

Marr graduated from

Murray State University Murray State University (MSU) is a public university in Murray, Kentucky. In addition to the main campus in Calloway County in southwestern Kentucky, Murray State operates extended campuses offering upper level and graduate courses in Paducah, H ...

in 2002, and earned a master's degree in mathematics at Texas A&M University in 2004. She completed her Ph.D. in 2007 at Southern Illinois University; her dissertation, ''Labelings of Directed Graphs'', was supervised by Walter D. Wallis. She has been a member of the mathematics faculty at Southwestern University since 2007. She was department chair for 2015–2018. Beyond mathematics, her teaching at Southwestern has included a freshman seminar on

television game shows Television, sometimes shortened to TV, is a telecommunication medium for transmitting moving images and sound. The term can refer to a television set, or the medium of television transmission. Television is a mass medium for advertising, e ...

Contributions

Inquiry-based learning

Marr is an advocate of inquiry-based learning in mathematics, a style of teaching through student research rather than through presentation of packaged solutions that is closely related to the

Moore method The Moore method is a deductive manner of instruction used in advanced mathematics courses. It is named after Robert Lee Moore, a famous topologist who first used a stronger version of the method at the University of Pennsylvania The Un ...

. She was one of the founding officers of the inquiry-based learning special interest group of the

Mathematical Association of America The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on mathematics accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure a ...

, which was established in 2016. She is an editor of the ''Journal of Inquiry-Based Learning in Mathematics'', and serves on the board of directors of the Initiative for Mathematics Learning By Inquiry.

Graph theory

With Walter Wallis, Marr is the author of a book on

magic graph A magic graph is a graph whose edges are labelled by the first ''q'' positive integers, where ''q'' is the number of edges, so that the sum over the edges incident with any vertex is the same, independent of the choice of vertex; or it is a graph t ...

s and graph labeling, ''Magic Graphs'' (2nd ed., Springer, 2013). She spoke about magic graph labelings as an invited speaker at the Midwest Conference on Combinatorics, Cryptography, and Computing in 2011.

References

External links

Home page
{{DEFAULTSORT:Marr, Alison M. Living people 1980 births 21st-century American mathematicians Graph theorists American mathematics educators Murray State University alumni Texas A&M University alumni Southern Illinois University alumni Southwestern University faculty 21st-century American women mathematicians