Donald L. Vestal Reviews In the Dark on the Sunny Side

Donald L. Vestal reviews In the Dark on the Sunny Side by Larry W. Baggett as part of MAA Reviews.

On a summer day in 1944, five-year-old Larry Baggett used a paring knife to cut a string for a much-needed ammo sack for his slingshot. But, after violating the “Never cut toward yourself” rule, he accidentally sent the point of the knife into his right eye. And over the next few weeks, after multiple treatments and surgeries, he gradually lost sight in both eyes. What becomes of a blind kid in 1940s America? Does he become a jazz musician? A lawyer? A physicist?

The answer turns out to be: a math professor. In this memoir, Baggett details his path towards professorhood. But the path is not so much about the math, but about the normal and sometimes abnormal things that people go through, some of which — but not all — are unique to the blind.

As a blind child in the 40s and 50s, Baggett experienced the very beginning of the mainstreaming movement. Although his early schooling took place at the Perkins School for the Blind, for fourth grade he left the community of the blind to be educated at Gotha School.

Read the full review here.

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Betty Mayfield Reviews Calculus: Modeling and Application

Betty Mayfield reviews Calculus: Modeling and Application by David Smith and Lang Moore in the November issue of The American Mathematical Monthly.

Sit back. Relax. Close your eyes. Now imagine that you are picking up a calculus textbook. Feel its mighty heft. Open it to see the formulas inside the front cover, the table of integrals at the back of the book, the solutions to odd-numbered exercises. Scan the table of contents for the familiar topics, in the familiar order. Flip open to a page at random and admire the colorful graphics, the theorems helpfully boxed and shaded, the examples carefully worked out. Note the many exercises you may assign to your students. Resist the urge to call the university bookstore and ask how much they are charging this semester for this impressive tome.

Now imagine a completely different kind of text—different both in content and delivery. In fact, you are reading it on your iPad. That book might be David Smith and Lang Moore’s Calculus: Modeling and Application (CMA), available through the MAA Bookstore as an electronic text. It is a direct descendent of The Calculus Reader [2], one of the more popular texts to grow out of the calculus reform movement of the 1990s [1], and it retains much of the flavor of that earlier book. Its emphasis is on the use of authentic real-world problems to motivate learning new mathematics; on the use of technology for graphing, computation and exploration; and on collaboration among students as they discover patterns and construct their own mathematical knowledge.

Read the full review here.

Annie Selden Reviews Distilling Ideas

Annie Selden reviews Distilling Ideas: An Introduction to Mathematical Thinking by Brian P. Katz and Michael Starbird as part of MAA Reviews. 

The authors of this book, as they explain in their first chapter, are taking readers/students on a journey — one that will “add new, powerful inquiry skills” to a student’s repertoire: abstraction, exploration, conjecture, justification, application, and extension. The book is clearly intended for inquiry-based mathematics courses. It is replete with explorations to undertake, definitions to explore, and theorems to prove, but there are no sample proofs or answers.

The book has five chapters, with the middle three chapters on graphs, groups, and ε-δ calculus constituting the bulk of the book. To me, it is clear that any one of these middle chapters by itself has the potential to be used for an entire one-semester course. There is really enough material in the ε-δ calculus chapter for an introductory junior level real analysis course. Similarly, the group theory chapter gets to Sylow’s Theorem and has more in it than most students could cover in one-semester when doing all the work themselves.

Read the full review here. 

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Annie Selden is Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at New Mexico State University and Professor Emerita of Mathematics from Tennessee Technological University. She regularly teaches graduate courses in mathematics and mathematics education.