David Bressoud named head of MAA

Professor David Bressoud became the 53rd president of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) on January 8, 2009.

The MAA, headquartered in Washington, DC, is the world’s largest professional society devoted to collegiate mathematics, representing 23,000 members. It is noted for its journals of expository mathematics: The American Monthly Monthly, Mathematics Magazine, The College Math Journal, and a magazine designed specifically for undergraduates: Math Horizons. It has a large publishing arm producing textbooks, expository mathematics, problem books, and materials on teaching mathematics. Each year, it sponsors a national summer meeting, MathFest (to be held in Portland, Oregon the first week of August this year), a national joint meeting with the American Mathematical Society (to be held in San Francisco in January, 2010), and many regional conferences and workshops.

The MAA runs the American Mathematics Competitions, high school competitions that eventually lead to the American Invitational Mathematics Exam, the USA Olympiad, and the selection and preparation of the US International Olympiad Team. The MAA also oversees Project NExT, a professional development program for recent PhD’s in the mathematical sciences. Its many Special Interest Groups (or SIGMAAs) include Research in Undergraduate Mathematics Education, History of Mathematics, Mathematics and Art, Mathematics and Computational Biology, and Environmental Mathematics. Its Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics (CUPM) has for almost sixty years helped to shape undergraduate mathematics education in the United States

David’s term will run for two years during which time he will be the public face of the MAA and push his agenda of improving the MAA’s web-based services and focusing national attention on the transition from high school to college mathematics while seeking solutions to the many problems at that juncture.

David joined the Macalester faculty in 1994 after 17 years at Penn State. He has served as chair of Macalester’s Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, chair of CUPM, and chair of the College Board AP Calculus Development Committee, the committee that sets the AP Calculus syllabus and writes the exams. His books include Factorization and Primality Testing, Second Year Calculus from Celestial Mechanics to Special Relativity, A Radical Approach to Real Analysis, Proofs and Confirmations: The Story of the Alternating Sign Matrix Conjecture, A Course in Computational Number Theory (with Stan Wagon), and A Radical Approach to Lebesgue’s Theory of Integration. He was also one of the authors of the CUPM Curriculum Guide 2004.