Here is an interesting article from MIT on patterns in high math achievement based on a study of AMC data.  This research follows on the heels of the paper written by Dr. Andreescu and his colleagues last year.  The study seems to conclude that girls (and presumably also boys) thrive when they are able to study math in a community that reinforces their interests and encourages their talents.

Here are some key excerpts from the article:

Ellison and Swanson arrived at their findings by using a novel source of data: the American Mathematics Competitions (AMC), a 60-year-old annual contest involving 125,000 exceptional high-school students. A select group of students who do especially well on the AMC compete in a series of annual competitions, the U.S. Mathematical Olympiad and the International Mathematical Olympiad. This focus on standout students differs from most studies about math and gender in schools…

The numbers Ellison and Swanson scrutinized indicate that the gender disparity among star math students widens as performance levels increase. In 2007, about 800,000 girls took the math SAT, compared to about 700,000 boys. Yet at the 99th percentile of the math SATs, boys outnumber girls two to one. In their research, Ellison and Swanson divide that upper tier into even smaller segments, using AMC results. Among students in the 94th percentile of the AMC tests, they found, the top boys outnumbered the top girls four to one; at the 99th AMC percentile, six to one; and at the 99.9th AMC percentile, 12 to one…

Ellison thinks this huge gender disparity is linked to another fact: Among those students scoring so highly on the AMC and participating in the math Olympiads, the range of high schools represented is much greater for boys than for girls. “The top boys in the Olympiads come from all over the United States,” says Ellison. “Some of them are from big powerhouse schools, and some are from schools where they’re the only student who’s really good at math. But it’s these 20 high schools where the majority of the girls are coming from.” Those institutions range from Phillips Exeter Academy, an elite New England prep school, to a fistful of public high schools in Northern California, from Palo Alto to San Jose. By contrast, Ellison and Swanson note, half of the boys in the Olympiads come from about 200 high schools…

O’Keeffe, who has a daughter who competed in the math Olympiad, is inclined to agree. “Anecdotally, I do think the difference a community makes is enormous,” she says. “If you’re lucky enough to be at a school with a math club, you might be the only girl in it. At Exeter or Stuyvesant [a prominent Manhattan public high school], you might be in a minority, but you won’t be alone.” To be more rigorous, though, Ellison wants to track many individual students over time…

Ivan Matic, assistant director of the Berkeley Math Circle and a former IMO medalist will teach our students a variety of pricinples related to Combinatorial Games.

Winning strategy for a particular game is a procedure that will ensure a victory no matter how the opponent is playing.   We will discuss some of the two player games that have winning strategies, and try to recognize the patterns for finding the strategies.   After that we will talk about multi-player games and probabilistic games.

This weekend should be a very interesting and accessible lecture by Dr. Harold Reiter:

Exploding Dots is an alternative method for examining place value. We’ll look at some exotic methods of representing numbers and see a few applications. Some methods make use of antidots and some require black holes.

Dr. Reiter is a professor at the University of North Carolina.  Following are some of his many accomplishments:

• Member of the College Board’s College-Level Examination Program (CLEP) Pre Calculus Mathematics Committee
• Chair of the MAA’s Edith May Sliffe Award Committee.
• Former chair of the MATHCOUNTS Question Writing Committee
• Former member of AIME and USAMO committees
• Former chair of SAT II Test Development Committee with ETS. advanced mathematics

Richard Rusczyk linked to a great article based on some recent research suggesting that students benefit from struggling with Hard Problems.

“We’ve found there is a healthy amount of frustration that’s productive; there is a satisfaction after having struggled with it,” says Roberta Schorr, associate professor in Rutgers University at Newark’s Urban Education Department. Her group has also found that, though conventional wisdom says certain abilities are innate, a lot of kids’ talents and capabilities go unnoticed unless they are effectively challenged; the key is to do it in a nurturing environment.

“Most of the literature describes student engagement and motivation as having to do with their attitudes about math — whether they like it or not,” Schorr says. “That’s different from the engagement we’ve found. When students are working on conceptually complex problems in a supportive environment, they do better. They report feeling frustrated, but also satisfaction, pride and a willingness to work harder next time.”

“Motivation is a key aspect of achievement that we often ignore in math; it’s the missing link,” Schorr says. “We need to provide kids with conceptually challenging math problems in an emotionally safe environment, and the teacher plays a critical role in that. Kids can view frustration as an opportunity for success instead of an indication of failure, but that won’t happen without teachers letting the students experience productive struggles.”

This Saturday Dr. Dorin Andrica will continue exploring the Triangle Inequality.  For students who may have missed last week’s session he will begin with a brief review.

A good friend of the Metroplex Math Circle, Dr. Arthur Benjamin, is a popular speaker at the world famous TED conference.  Recently, he offered his own idea for fundamentally changing math education in our country.  Like Richard Rusczyk, he sees the singular focus on Calculus as insufficient and distracting from a full math education.

]]> http://metroplexmathcircle.wordpress.com/2009/10/23/arthur-benjamins-formula-for-changing-math/feed/ 0 Metroplex Math Circle http://metroplexmathcircle.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/october-24-the-triangle-inequality/ http://metroplexmathcircle.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/october-24-the-triangle-inequality/#comments Fri, 23 Oct 2009 02:49:13 +0000 Metroplex Math Circle http://metroplexmathcircle.wordpress.com/?p=705 ]]>

This Saturday we are very pleased to have as our returning speaker, Dr. Dorin Andrica.   He will share with us many applications of the Triangle Inequality which students will find useful on upcoming math contests.

Dorin Andrica received his Ph.D. in 1992 from “Babes-Bolyai” University in Cluj-Napoca, Romania; his thesis treated critical points and applications to the geometry of differentiable submanifolds. Professor Andrica has been chairman of the Department of Geometry at “Babes-Bolyai” since 1995. He has written and contributed to numerous mathematics textbooks, problem books, articles and scientific papers at various levels. He is an invited lecturer at university conferences around the world: Austria, Bulgaria, Czech Republic, Egypt, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, the Netherlands, Portugal, Serbia, Turkey, and the USA. Dorin is a member of the Romanian Committee for the Mathematics Olympiad and is a member on the editorial boards of several international journals. Also, he is well known for his conjecture about consecutive primes called “Andrica’s Conjecture.” He has been a regular faculty member at the Canada–USA Mathcamps between 2001–2005 and at the AwesomeMath Summer Program (AMSP) since 2006. Related articles on this site.

Please note that this meeting will be held in ECSS 2.311.

The morning of the 24th the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas is hosting a tournament that includes math and science contests.   Registration is open through tomorrow for various levels of math and science tests.

Don’t let the title mislead you, coloring isn’t kid’s stuff.  Coloring of graphs is a rich mathematical area of research which young mathematicians will encounter frequently.

Mr. Maier is going to talk about coloring arguments and some of their applications to combinatorial problems, especially problems from the theory of plane tilings, but also from knot theory, probability, and some popular puzzles.  Is it possible to cover an eight-by-eight inch chessboard with two-by-one inch dominos? Is it possible to cover the remainder with dominos? If so, how, and if not, why not?

If you’d like to learn more about coloring the following links may be useful:

• Four Color Theorem
• Graph Coloring

This Saturday we are very pleased to have Dr. Frank Wang speak to us on Beauty and Mathematics.

Beauty and Mathematics — Mathematicians’ Search for Order and Pattern.  Dr. Wang will perform demonstrations to illustrate what he believes to be a higher purpose of mathematicians — to find order and pattern in virtually any situation, no matter how dis-ordered and random it may seem.  This talk is suitable for anyone who has a knowledge of basic algebra.

Dr. Wang has had a fascinating life including significant accomplishments in academia and business:

Dr. Wang received his bachelors degree in math at Princeton University (studying under Prof. Bernard Dwork) in 1986 and his PhD in pure math from MIT in 1991 (under the direction of Prof. Harold Stark).  His thesis was in the area of algebraic number theory.  At the age of 23 in 1988, he co-authored and had published a widely used high school calculus textbook.  After receiving his PhD, Dr. Wang went on to run a textbook publishing company (Saxon Publishers), growing it from about 20 employees to major textbook publishing company with nearly 250 employees and $ 100 million in annual sales.  In 2003, he stepped down as Chairman of the company, took a 90 % + paycut and became a public school teacher, teaching at the OK School of Science and Math and the University of Oklahoma.  Recently, he has moved to the Dallas area to be close to DFW airport.  (He has earned more than 1.5 million frequent miles on American Airlines.)  His passion is for making the concepts of math understandable and interesting to students of all ages and abilities.