2008-02-04 18:54MATH 880 PROSEMINAR JT SMITHOUTLINE 5 SPRING 20081. Assignmenta. Continue consideration of Tarski 1955.b. Continue formulating questions about the social organization of mathematics.Why should professionals belong to societies?c. Consider possible topics for an in-class outline of an expository paper.2. In-class outlinea. A successful activity of the two previous offerings of this course was construc-tion in class of an outline for a hypothetical expository paper. In each case,the class chose a topic, then we brainstormed in c las s, w ith me a s re cor de r an doutliner. We chose a topic for which the students shared a common back-ground. Where a real expository paper would go beyond that background Iprovided some information from mine, and we worked it into the outline.b. Imitating that practice requires choosing a topic of reasonably major interest,for which the class shares a common background, which I can extend withouthaving to study too much.c. The previous topics werei. the fundamental theorem of calculus, andii. the fundamental theorem of algebra.d. I quipped that we might be running out of fundamental theorems. Thefollowing suggestions were bandied about briefly.i. The fundamental theorem of arithmetic. The problem: extending itbeyond common knowledge enough to make it interesting would requiresome ideal theory that I haven’t studied for about 40 years.ii. The fundamental theorem of linear algebra. I don’t think that’s adefinite term, but “dimension considerations in linear algebra” is. Icertainly know enough about that, because it was involved, for infinitedimensions, in my PhD research, and even touches Math. 800 a bit. Theonly problem I see there is that it’s rather close to one student’s alreadychosen topic. We might have to jockey a bit not to be writing the firstpart of his paper.e. You all should think about this and maybe we can brainstorm a selection atthe next meeting.3. Social Organization of Mathematicsa. We continued discussion of the American societies: CBMS, AMS, MAA,AMATYC, NCTM, and more specialized societies such as SIAM, ACM, ASL,and ASA. Some of those are in fact international.b. I forgot to mention that there are also organizations fostering the needs ofparticular groups of people as opposed to subjects or professions: for example,the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM; I used to belong), and theNational Association of Mathematicians, which is dedicated to underrepresen-ted minorities.Page 2 MATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 52008-02-04 18:54c. What happened in San Diego this January at the Joint Meetings of the AMS,MAA, and ASL?i. Plenary one-hour talks on research of major common interest.(1) I attended a good one on the history of algebra by Karen Parshallof the University of Virginia.(2) I attended a much less distinguished one on the problems of reap-portionment in a body such as the U. S. House of Representatives,which is reconstituted with fixed size every decade according to thechanging ratios of population among the states. There was a badproblem with unreadable displays.(3) The speaker I most wanted to hear, John Conway, slated to speakon crystallography, didn’t show up.ii. Specialized half-hour talks on research of limited interest.(1) I went to one, on the application of logic to the study of random-ness, only a little outside my area, but failed to understand a thing.(2) But the history talks, my passion now, proved of uniform unexpect-edly high quality. I attended at least a dozen.iii. Half-hour talks on teaching techniques.(1) I attended one by my coauthor Elena Marchisotto on her Internet-based capstone course at CSU Northridge for future elementaryteachers. While I don’t think much about such things anymore,this proved more interesting and substantial than I had expected.Glad I went.iv. Book sales, etc.(1) The major publishers display their latest wares and sell at a dis-count. I spent a small fortune.(2) I talked with a techie at the MathType booth and determined thatthey couldn’t fix a bug in their interface to WordPerfect.(3) I agreed to provide some data on Italians to the Math Genealogywebsite management, who had a booth.(4) I spoke with some agents of Elena’s and my publisher, Birkhäuser,about our plans.v. The Meat Market(1) Thank heavens I no longer need to deal with this. This is the in-person aspect of the mechanism the AMS has developed to facilitatejob seekers’ and prospective employers’ contacts. It’s inhumane—fifteen-minute interviews in a public hall—but that’s one waymany departments pare down their long lists of applicants. Or, asI experienced several times in ACM meetings as a chair seekingcomputer-science faculty, how many applicants pare down theirlong lists of courting employers.(2) SFSU hasn’t used that AMS service recently, but senior facultyhave occasionally held longer conversations with prospective hiresin less formal settings.MATH 880 SPRING 2008 OUTLINE 5 Page 32008-02-04 18:54vi. I missed meetings devoted to awards to outstanding researchers, teach-ers, and managers, and to considerations of national science policy.d. I circulated examples of all the journals published by the MAA: AmericanMathematical Monthly, Mathematics Magazine, College Mathematics Journal,Math Horizons and Focus. The first four are expository journals, with adecreasing level of sophistication; the last, a news organ. Math Horizons isaimed at undergraduate students.e. I sketched the process of refereeing articles for research and expositoryjournals.f. You should visit the websites of some of these societies. They are a majorsource of information that even I am not utilitizing as well as I could.g. Various countries have counterparts of the American societies. Their activi-ties are quite parallel.i. For the UK and Russia, perhaps I should say various major cities.ii. For example, I belong to the Deutsche Mathematiker-Vereinigung (DMV),because my work in geometry has been almost entirely in a Germancontext. They, the AMS, many other national societies, give majordiscounts to permit multiple memberships.h. There are international bodies, too:i. The European Mathematical Society hosts international meetings. Iwent to one in 2000 in Barcelona. Their website is in English.ii. The International Mathematical Union hosts a worldwide meeting everyfour years, and awards the Fields medals, our equivalent of the Nobelprize. Their website is in