The 2010 Annual Meeting of the Illinois Section of the MAA

Next year's ISMAA annual meeting will be held April 9-10 at Augustana College in Rock Island, Illinois. The plenary talks are:

Opening talk, 12:50pm-1:50pm, Friday, April 9, 2010.

Title: Stories from the Development of real analysis

Prof. David Bressoud, President of MAA, Macalester College 

Abstract: Analysis is what happened to calculus in the 19th century as mathematicians discovered that their intuition of how to apply calculus was failing them, especially as their repertoire of infinite series expanded. The conceptual difficulties that they encountered are precisely where we should expect our own students to have trouble. Understanding how these controversies were resolved illuminates many of the definitions, axioms, and theorems that baffle our students. This talk will focus on how our modern understanding of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus arose and what it really says.

Banquet talk, around 8:00pm, Friday, April 9, 2010.

Title: Math is music--stats is literature

Prof. Richard D. De Veaux, Williams College

(He gave a short course in the AMS-MAA annual joint meeting in 2009) 

Abstract: Gauss could add up hundreds of numbers in his head by the age of 3 and Mozart was playing the pieces he'd heard in church at home by about the same age. But who ever heard of a literary prodigy? Why not? Because literature is about the world and the wisdom one gains with experience, not about abstract rules and symbols. The same is true of Statistics. Rather than highlight the formulas that underlie Statistics, we need to emphasize the learning that Statistics gives us about the world. That makes our jobs harder, but ultimately more rewarding. The most common mistakes students and practitioners make in Statistics have nothing to do with calculation but everything to do with interpretation and context. How can we help students to use statistical thinking effectively in the chaotic maze of the real world? We think this is best done by outlining the steps in statistical thinking. We'll outline our strategy for informing and exciting students about Statistics and how we use these steps in an introductory course.

Opening talk, 8:30-9:30am, Saturday, April 10, 2010.

Title: My Teaching philosophy and the development of the keystone method

Prof. Vali Siadat, Daley College

(He was an MAA's Haimo Award winner in 2009) 

Closing talk, 12:05-1:05pm, Saturday, April 10, 2010.

Title: Rogue Waves, Tsunamis and Sand Bars

Prof. Jerry Lloyd Bona, University of Illinois at Chicago(He was a plenary speaker in the AMS-MAA annual joint meeting in 2007) 

Conference Workshop, 8:45am-11:45am, Friday, April 9, 2010.Title: Data Mining and New Trends in Teaching Statistics

Prof. Richard D. De Veaux, Williams College

Abstract: Forty years ago, the emphasis in Introductory Statistics was on formulas and their calculation. For example, students were taught the formula for standard deviation and learned alternatives for avoiding rounding errors and short cuts for grouped data. Technology has made much of that subject matter irrelevant and obsolete. Today, we have been freed by technology to focus on the concepts of data analysis and inference. Where is this trend taking us? This workshop will discuss how the introductory course has changed and how the course differs from a mathematics course. It should be especially valuable to the mathematician who is faced with teaching an introductory statistics course for the first time.

The workshop will start with an overview of how the Introductory course is taught today and what the main concepts are. Examples of how technology enables us to get to the heart of the subject early will be given. Some elementary modeling concepts will be reviewed before we embark on an introduction to data mining. Then, we will use case studies and real data sets to illustrate many of the algorithms used in data mining. The applications will come from a wide variety of industries and include applications from my personal experiences as a consultant for companies that deal with such topics as financial services, chemical processing, e-commerce, pharmaceuticals, and insurance.