A Bimonthly Email Newsletter from the International Mathematical Union
Editor: Mireille Chaleyat-Maurel, Université René Descartes, Paris, France
Every student understands things worse than the best of his teachers. Therefore any closed educational system degenerates with exponential speed to a system of formal rituals, unless its continuous superior teacher is Nature. This theorem has numerous confirmations in countries where (by their own laziness or other reasons) the research scientists weaken their service as the intermediate link, i.e. in instructing the future teachers, or teachers of teachers, etc. I can only ask the Reader not to be this lazy...
The list of important purposes of education breaks quite artificially into two parts, depending on whether they can be explained to (and accepted by) politicians, taxpayers and lazy students, or not. The first list orients us to practical formal algorithms of everyday life, the second to understanding and concepts. In the case of mathematics, the discriminated against part contains, in particular, the art of distinguishing correct considerations from wrong ones and understanding the logical structure of everything; it has its origins in the techniques of proving, first of all in geometry. The number of logical oops in political talks, interviews and ads is huge, and the fact of their public success is horrible. (Occasionally, a meeting point of these two parts is Statistics : Pragmatically oriented courses and related tests often teach one to accept statistical information in a predictable and unified way rather than in the mathematically correct one.) In some countries these problems have been already widely discussed, while some others face them only now. I hope that the (sometimes sad) experience of the former can help the latter to avoid making the same errors. Again, the active expertise by professional scientists should be very important here.
Victor Vassiliev
Member of the Executive Committee of IMU
The IMU Executive Committee met in Berlin 27-28 February. The main topics of discussion involved preparations for ICM 2006 and for the IMU General Assembly to be held in Santiago de Compostela (Spain). Proposed changes to the Statutes and Procedures for Elections, together with the General Assembly agenda, will be communicated to Adhering Organizations in due course.
It's quite a bit easier to make a list of tasks to be done than actually to do them. In that spirit, I mention several IMU on the Web items I or my CEIC colleagues will write about --- one of these days.
There'll be more of this list next time I forget to write or to solicit suitable items.
Alf van der Poorten,
alf@maths.usyd.edu.au, member of the CEIC.
The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has decided to award the 2006 Abel Prize to Lennart Carleson, Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden. This was announced by the president of the Norwegian Academy, Ole Didrik Lærum, in Oslo on 23 March. Carleson receives the Abel Prize "for his profound and seminal contributions to harmonic analysis and the theory of smooth dynamical systems", says Erling Størmer, the chairman of the international Abel Committee. HRH King Harald will present the Abel Prize to Lennart Carleson at an award ceremony in Oslo 23 May 2006.
The International Commission for the History of Mathematics (ICHM) continues to pursue its dual aims of encouraging the study of the history of mathematics and of promoting a high level of historically and mathematically sophisticated scholarship in the field internationally.
Among its ongoing projects are:
In 2005, the ICHM also awarded the Kenneth O. May Medal, a prize given every four years to the historian or historians of mathematics whose work best exemplifies the high scholarly and intellectual contributions to the field that May worked so hard to achieve. It was awarded for the fifth time to Henk Bos (The Netherlands) for his ground-breaking work on the history of seventeenth-century mathematics. The ICHM also participated prominently in the International Congress for the History of Science (http://2005bj.ihns.ac.cn/) held in Beijing, China in July 2005.
In addition to these symposia, the ICHM also held its quadrennial general business meeting on Monday, 25 July at the China Museum of Science and Technology.
Finally, the ICHM co-sponsored a special session in the history of mathematics at the annual joint meetings of the American Mathematical Society held in San Antonio, Texas in January 2006.
Full accounts of all of the ICHM´s activities may be found on its website at http://www.math.uu.nl/ichm
Karen Hunger Parshall, Chair ICHM
Since the mid-80s, the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction (ICMI) has found it important to involve itself directly in the identification and investigation of issues or topics of particular significance to the theory or practice of contemporary mathematics education, and to invest efforts in mounting specific studies on these themes. This has resulted in a most successful set of activities of the Commission, the "ICMI Study Programme" (http://www.mathunion.org/ICMI/ICMIstudies_org.html).
Each ICMI Study addresses an issue or topic of particular significance in contemporary mathematics education, and is conducted by an international team of leading scholars and practitioners in that domain. The Study is built around an international conference gathering both experts and newcomers to the field, and is directed towards the preparation of a published volume which aims to offer a coherent, state-of-the art representation of the domain of the Study. These Study volumes appear in the New ICMI Study Series (NISS --- http://www.springeronline.com/series/6351), published by Springer under the general editorship of the President and Secretary-General of ICMI. The Study Volume resulting from the 13th ICMI Study ("Mathematics Education in Different Cultural Traditions: A Comparative Study of East-Asia and the West") has recently appeared (NISS, vol. 9). The next two volumes in the series (resulting from the 14th ICMI Study on "Applications and Modelling in Mathematics Education", and the 15th ICMI Study on "The Professional Education and Development of Teachers of Mathematics") will be published respectively in 2006 and 2007. Two study conferences will take place in 2006: ICMI Study 16 ("Challenging Mathematics In and Beyond the Classroom") and Study 17 ("Digital Technologies and Mathematics Teaching and Learning: Rethinking the Terrain"). The ICMI Executive Committee has recently launched two new Studies: the 18th Study, on "Statistics Education in School Mathematics: Challenges for Teaching and Teacher Education", organized jointly with the International Association for Statistical Education (IASE), and Study 19, on "The Role of Mathematical Reasoning and Proving in Mathematics Education". The corresponding study conferences will take place in 2008 and 2009.
Bernard R. Hodgson
Secretary-General of ICMI
bhodgson@mat.ulaval.ca
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