The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) is a professional society that focuses on
mathematics
Mathematics is an area of knowledge that includes the topics of numbers, formulas and related structures, shapes and the spaces in which they are contained, and quantities and their changes. These topics are represented in modern mathematics ...
accessible at the undergraduate level. Members include university, college, and high school teachers; graduate and undergraduate students; pure and applied mathematicians;
computer scientist
A computer scientist is a person who is trained in the academic study of computer science.
Computer scientists typically work on the theoretical side of computation, as opposed to the hardware side on which computer engineers mainly focus (al ...
s;
statistician
A statistician is a person who works with theoretical or applied statistics. The profession exists in both the private and public sectors.
It is common to combine statistical knowledge with expertise in other subjects, and statisticians may wor ...
s; and many others in academia, government, business, and industry.
The MAA was founded in 1915 and is headquartered at 1529
18th Street 18th Street may refer to:
Los Angeles
* 18th Street gang, an Hispanic street gang
Manhattan, New York City
* 18th Street (IRT Broadway – Seventh Avenue Line); a subway station serving the trains
* 18th Street (IRT Lexington Avenue Line), a ...
,
Northwest
The points of the compass are a set of horizontal, radially arrayed compass directions (or azimuths) used in navigation and cartography. A compass rose is primarily composed of four cardinal directions—north, east, south, and west—each sep ...
in the Dupont Circle neighborhood of Washington, D.C. The organization publishes mathematics journals and books, including the ''
American Mathematical Monthly
''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a mathematical journal founded by Benjamin Finkel in 1894. It is published ten times each year by Taylor & Francis for the Mathematical Association of America.
The ''American Mathematical Monthly'' is an e ...
'' (established in 1894 by Benjamin Finkel), the most widely read mathematics journal in the world according to records on
JSTOR
JSTOR (; short for ''Journal Storage'') is a digital library founded in 1995 in New York City. Originally containing digitized back issues of academic journals, it now encompasses books and other primary sources as well as current issues of j ...
.
Mission and Vision
The mission of the MAA is to advance the understanding of mathematics and its impact on our world.
We envision a society that values the power and beauty of mathematics and fully realizes its potential to promote human flourishing.
Joint Mathematics Meeting The Joint Mathematics Meetings (JMM) is a mathematics conference hosted annually in early January by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). Frequently, several other national mathematics organizations also participate. The meeting is the largest ...
, held in early January of each year. On occasion the
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific socie ...
joins in these meetings. Twenty-nine regional sections also hold regular meetings.
Publications
The association publishes multiple journals in partnership with Taylor & Francis:
* ''
The American Mathematical Monthly
''The American Mathematical Monthly'' is a mathematical journal founded by Benjamin Finkel in 1894. It is published ten times each year by Taylor & Francis for the Mathematical Association of America.
The ''American Mathematical Monthly'' is an e ...
'' is expository, aimed at a broad audience from undergraduate students to research mathematicians.
* '' Mathematics Magazine'' is expository, aimed at teachers of undergraduate mathematics, especially at the junior-senior level.
* '' The College Mathematics Journal'' is expository, aimed at teachers of undergraduate mathematics, especially at the freshman-sophomore level.
* '' Math Horizons'' is expository, aimed at undergraduate students.
'' MAA FOCUS'' is the association member newsletter. The Association publishes an online resource, Mathematical Sciences Digital Library (Math DL). The service launched in 2001 with the online-only ''Journal of Online Mathematics and its Applications'' (JOMA) and a set of classroom tools, ''Digital Classroom Resources''. These were followed in 2004 by ''Convergence'', an online-only history magazine, and in 2005 by ''MAA Reviews'', an online book review service, and ''Classroom Capsules and Notes'', a set of classroom notes.
Competitions
The MAA sponsors numerous competitions for students, including the William Lowell Putnam Competition for undergraduate students, the online competition series, and the American Mathematics Competitions (AMC) for middle- and high-school students. This series of competitions is as follows:
* AMC 8: 25 multiple choice questions in 40 minutes
* AMC 10/ AMC 12: 25 multiple choice questions in 75 minutes
*
AIME
Aime (; frp, Éma) is a former commune in the Savoie ''département'' in the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region in south-eastern France. On 1 January 2016, it was merged into the new commune of Aime-la-Plagne.USAMO/ USAJMO: 6 question, 2 day, 9 hour, proof-based olympiad
Through this program, outstanding students are identified and invited to participate in the Mathematical Olympiad Program. Ultimately, six high school students are chosen to represent the U.S. at the International Mathematics Olympiad.
Sections
The MAA is composed of the following twenty-nine regional sections:
Allegheny Mountain, EPADEL, Florida, Illinois, Indiana, Intermountain, Iowa, Kansas, Kentucky, Louisiana/Mississippi, MD-DC-VA, Metro New York, Michigan, Missouri, Nebraska – SE SD, New Jersey, North Central, Northeastern, Northern CA – NV-HI, Ohio, Oklahoma-Arkansas, Pacific Northwest, Rocky Mountain, Seaway, Southeastern, Southern CA – NV, Southwestern, Texas, Wisconsin
Special Interest Groups
There are seventeen Special Interest Groups of the Mathematical Association of America (SIGMAAs). These SIGMAAs were established to advance the MAA mission by supporting groups with a common mathematical interest, and facilitating interaction between such groups and the greater mathematics community.
* Mathematics and the Arts
* Business, Industry, Government
* Mathematical and Computational Biology
* Environmental Mathematics
* History of Mathematics
* Inquiry-Based Learning
* Math Circles for Students and Teachers
* Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching
* Philosophy of Mathematics
* Quantitative Literacy
* Recreational MathematicsThree New Sigmaas Formed by Jacqueline Jensen-Vallin, MAA
* Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education
* Mathematics and Sports
* Statistics Education
* Teaching Advanced High School Mathematics
* Undergraduate Research
* Mathematics Instruction Using the WEB
A detailed history of the first fifty years of the MAA appears in . A report on activities prior to World War II appears in . Further details of its history can be found in . In addition numerous regional sections of the MAA have published accounts of their local history.
The MAA was established in 1915. But the roots of the Association can be traced to the 1894 founding of the American Mathematical Monthly by Benjamin Finkel, who wrote "Most of our existing journals deal almost exclusively with subjects beyond the reach of the average student or teacher of mathematics or at least with subjects with which they are familiar, and little, if any, space, is devoted to the solution of problems…No pains will be spared on the part of the Editors to make this the most interesting and most popular journal published in America."
Inclusiveness
The MAA has for a long time followed a strict policy of inclusiveness and non-discrimination.
In previous periods it was subject to the same problems of discrimination that were widespread across the United States. One notorious incident at a south-eastern sectional meeting in
Nashville
Nashville is the capital city of the U.S. state of Tennessee and the seat of Davidson County. With a population of 689,447 at the 2020 U.S. census, Nashville is the most populous city in the state, 21st most-populous city in the U.S., and the ...
in 1951 has been documented by the American mathematician and equal rights activist
Lee Lorch
Lee Alexander Lorch (September 20, 1915 – February 28, 2014) was an American mathematician, early civil rights activist, and communist. His leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development on the East Side o ...
, who in 2007
received the most prestigious award given by the MAA (the Yueh-Gin Gung and Dr. Charles Y. Hu Award for Distinguished Service to Mathematics). The citation delivered at the 2007 MAA awards presentation, where Lorch received a standing ovation, recorded that:
:"''Lee Lorch, the chair of the mathematics department at Fisk University, and three Black colleagues, Evelyn Boyd (now Granville), Walter Brown, and H. M. Holloway came to the meeting and were able to attend the scientific sessions. However, the organizer for the closing banquet refused to honor the reservations of these four mathematicians. (Letters in Science, August 10, 1951, pp. 161–162 spell out the details). Lorch and his colleagues wrote to the governing bodies of the AMS and MAA seeking bylaws against discrimination. Bylaws were not changed, but non-discriminatory policies were established and have been strictly observed since then.''"
The Association's first woman president was Dorothy Lewis Bernstein (1979–1980).Moskol, Ann. 1987. "Dorothy Lewis Bernstein" ''Women of Mathematics''. eds. Louise S. Grinstein and Paul J. Campbell. Greenwood Press.
MAA Carriage House
The Carriage House that belonged to the residents at 1529 18th Street, N.W. dates to around 1900. It is older than the 5-story townhouse where the MAA Headquarters is currently located, which was completed in 1903. Charles Evans Hughes occupied the house while he was Secretary of State (1921–1925) and a Supreme Court Justice (1910–1916 and 1930–1941).
The Carriage House would have been used by the owners as a livery stable to house the family carriage, though little else is known about its history today. There are huge doors that were once used as an entrance for horses and carriages. Iron rings used to tie up horses can still be seen on an adjacent building. The Carriage House would have perhaps also been used as living quarters for a coachman, as was typical for the time period.
Dunham Jackson
Dunham Jackson (July 24, 1888 in Bridgewater, Massachusetts – November 6, 1946) was a mathematician who worked within approximation theory, notably with trigonometrical and orthogonal polynomials. He is known for Jackson's inequality. He ...
Arnold Dresden
Arnold Dresden (1882–1954) was a Dutch-American mathematician, known for his work in the calculus of variations and collegiate mathematics education. He was a president of the Mathematical Association of America.
Background
Dresden was born in ...
Raymond Woodard Brink
Raymond Woodard Brink (4 January 1890 in Newark, New Jersey – 27 December 1973 in La Jolla, California) was an American mathematician. His Ph.D. advisor at Harvard was George David Birkhoff.
Brink entered Kansas State College at age 14 and ...
R H Bing
R. H. Bing (October 20, 1914 – April 28, 1986) was an American mathematician who worked mainly in the areas of geometric topology and continuum theory. His father was named Rupert Henry, but Bing's mother thought that "Rupert Henry" was to ...
Deborah Tepper Haimo
Deborah Tepper Haimo (1921–2007) was an American mathematician who became president of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Her research concerned "classical analysis, in particular, generalizations of the heat equation, special functi ...
Ann E. Watkins
Ann Esther Watkins is an American mathematician and statistician specializing in statistics education. She edited the ''College Mathematics Journal'' from 1989 to 1994, chaired the Advanced Placement Statistics Development Committee from 1997 to 19 ...
American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges
The American Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges (AMATYC) is an organization dedicated to the improvement of education in the first two years of college mathematics in the United States and Canada. AMATYC hosts an annual conference, su ...
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) is a professional society dedicated to applied mathematics, computational science, and data science through research, publications, and community. SIAM is the world's largest scientific socie ...
Notes
References
*
*, talk by Lee Lorch at AMS Special Session, Cincinnati, January 1994. Reprinted in .
*
*
*
* (includes citation for
Lee Lorch
Lee Alexander Lorch (September 20, 1915 – February 28, 2014) was an American mathematician, early civil rights activist, and communist. His leadership in the campaign to desegregate Stuyvesant Town, a large housing development on the East Side o ...