*Concerns of Young Mathematicians* Volume 1 Issue 22 December 01, 1993 An electronically distributed digest for discussions of the issues of concern to mathematicians at the beginning of their careers. PLEASE FORWARD TO ANY POTENTIALLY INTERESTED INDIVIDUALS Please, direct submissions and questions to Vic Perera (vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu), editor for the month of December. Next issue: Wednesday, December 08 Editor for January will be Kalin Godev (kalin@math.psu.edu). To subscribe: Send mail to Charles Yeomans at cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Back issues and other information are available via anonymous FTP to ftp.ms.uky.edu, in pub3/mailing.lists/ymn-list. Editor for September was Ed Aboufadel (aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu). Editor for October was Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu . Editor for November was Steve Kennedy kennedy@math.stolaf.edu . The opinions expressed herein are those of the contributors and not necessarily those of the YMN or the editorial board. Table of Contents Item # Title Author Line # ------ ----- ------ ------ 1 Editorial 40 2 News and Notes 65 3 Mathematical Training? Clemens H. Cap 86 4 Advice to Undergrads ? Heidi Burgiel 125 5 Resources for Statistics? John A. Hendrickson 159 6 An update on Surveys Curtis Bennett 238 7 Closing credits 258 _____________________________________________________________________ Item #1 Editorial: Are we producing too many math PhD's? Should we encourage our under- graduate students to pursue graduate studies in Mathematics regardless of the troubled job market? Are Math PhD's ready for industry and solve real-world problems? Are they trained to be excellent or at least above average mathematics teachers? Are they even matured enough to maintain their own research program? These are few of the concerns of Young Mathematicians in particular and that of mathematicians in general. There are places devoted to discuss issues of this nature which include "Notices of AMS", "Focus" and "AWM Newsletter". But "Concerns of Young Mathematicians" may be the only forum for Young Mathematicians who traditionaly do not hold "decision-making" positions. It is my privilege to be your editor for the month of December and I will be very happy if we could make a contribution, however small towards the future of Young Mathematicians. Vic Perera Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Item #2 News and Notes 1) Cincinnati Meeting: a) If you are planning to attend Employment Register at Cincinnati and haven't send in your registration forms, you must do so before Dec. 13, 1993 (Advance Registration Deadline). After Dec. 13, you can only register on site at the ER Desk on Jan.12, 1994 between 7.30AM and 4.00PM. b) There will be a panel discussion (Jan. 14,1994 : 5.00PM-6.15PM) on "What can be done about Employment of Mathematicians in the 90's and beyond?" co-sponsored by JCEO and our own YMN. Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu will sit on that panel. c) Mark Winstead winstead@ml.kva.se was invited to serve on a panel discussion of the AWM entitled "Are Women Getting All the Jobs?". 2) Our readers may have noticed that YMN was mentioned in last Friday (11/26/1993) New York Times. They published the letter that Ed Aboufadel sent and also appeared in [Vol.1 Issue 20]. ____________________________________________________________________ Item #3 Mathematical training ignores applications to real world problems? In my opinion a very important reason for the present employment problems in mathematics is the ignorance of applications throughout the training. There are a number of very important problems, which industry and other branches of research really would like to solve. Yet what usually is known as "applied mathematics" still deals with rather abstract topics and is useless for many potential employers. In several discussions with younger and with more experienced mathematicians I still notice reluctance in dealing with real problems. For a mathematician the problem is solved, when there is a nice little theorem that, under conditions so and so there exists a unique solution. A number of ambitious people even consider constructive computability of these solutions and complexity classes - however on a rather abstract level. Further work on the problem, like an efficient implementation on a computer, the demonstration of some real example problems, the documentation and description of the algorithm for non-specialists, a nice kind of visualization and similar stuff usually is considered as trivial: Normally there is no grant money, no academic degree and no paper available with such work. In fact, it is true, that most of the mentioned work seems to be easy at first sight and seldom provides as much fun and insight as proving a new theorem. However, the attitude towards real problems, which is exhibited by a large number of mathematicians, seems to be the immediate and direct proof for what can be considered a major obstacle for hiring mathematicians: That we are unable solving real world problems. The high success of some new European math-and-industry programs even in times of recession show, that if we cope with real problems and solve them completely (as described above) we are able to improve not only our hiring chances in industry AND academics but also become more credible as "problem solvers". Clemens H. CAP University of Zurich cap@ifi.unizh.ch ____________________________________________________________________ Item #4 Should we discourage the grad school bound? In item 4 of the last newsletter [Vol. 1 #21, Ed], Pengyuan Chen asked "Should we discourage the grad school bound?" I'd like to share my own experience as an undergrad with the YMN. In fall of 1989 I was a senior math major at MIT with (approximately) a B+ average. I went to my advisor and asked him what graduate schools I should apply to. He, in return, asked me if I really wanted to go to graduate school. At that point, I was not sure whether or not I should feel insulted by the question. We reviewed most of the jobs traditionally available to math graduates, and I was able to say I didn't really want any of them. I knew I wanted to go to graduate school, but after four years of mind-crushing undergraduate classes I was unable to articulate my reason -- an intuition that mathematics is *beautiful*. So I was able to answer "yes" to the question "do you want to go to grad school?", but not able to coherently explain this decision. I don't regret that decision. (Yet.) I think Pengyuan Chen's suggestion that one explain to the prospective graduate student what she or he may be getting into is a good one. If they still want to go to graduate school after all that, and after considering other avenues open to them, they probably belong there. Heidi Burgiel University of Washington burgiel@math.washington.edu _______________________________________________________________________ Item #5 Resources for teachers of Statistics? Some resources available for the teacher of statistics. Since I made the blunder of commenting to Curtis Bennett that this topic had not yet been addressed in YMN newsletters, I was asked to prepare such an item. By way of identification, I am a biometrician who often teaches statistics as a part-timer at a local university. There are some resources out on the Internet for those who expect to be teaching introductory courses in statistics. According to at least one study, enrollment figures for statistics have risen to about 52% the size of the calculus enrollments, and most of that enrollment is taught in departments of mathematics. Hence, particularly at smaller schools lacking a separate statistics department, there is some positive probability that a mathematics chair may ask you if you can teach statistics. If you're already teaching this, I hope the resources are of help to you, too. There is now, and has been for several years, a statistics-reform effort which attempts to take into account the computing revolution, the need for current data to be used in the courses, and, based on those, the need to get students to get their hands on the computer dealing with "live" data. _Better yet, get the students dealing directly with gathering live data_. A lot of the resources for this are documented or provided in three sources on the Internet, which, in fact, have some partial overlap. The Journal of Statistics Education Information Service, provided by the Department of Statistics of North Carolina State University. Far and away the best access to this is through the gopher, if your institution runs a gopher client or server. For a direct connection, a command of the form gopher jse.stat.ncsu.edu will often work. Within this gopher interface, one can point at particular directories to view their contents, or even request that files be mailed to one's home computer system. So far, only Volume 1, Number 1 of the Journal of Statistics Education has been published electronically, but that is an issue rich in article coverage. Also on the same gopher server are the archives of discussion groups related to the teaching of statistics and/or statistical software. [If a gopher interface is not available from your computer, there are also telnet and ftp interfaces available. Failing even to have access of those kinds, one can send appropriate commands (requests) by e-mail to archive@jse.stat.ncsu.edu, and an appropriate file (or other response) will be delivered. If you need to take this approach, perhaps the best way to start is to send the one word 'help' help as the body of an e-mail message to archive@jse.stat.ncsu.edu .] The CHANCE database is available by gopher cameron.geom.umn.edu . CHANCE is the first choice in this menu (as of late November, anyway). Within that choice are a number of options including course outlines and, quite importantly, capsule descriptions of probability-related or statistics-related news items from the current month or from many preceding months. If you can find a news-y illustration appropriate to the topic of the day among these choices, it may help you in motivating the students for that day. On the whole, the course outlines are more likely to be helpful once you have taught an intro stat course for the first time than prior to that experience. The statlib gopher server at Carnegie-Mellon mainly archives software and data sets, but these, too, are likely to be helpful in putting together a presentation or a problem set. This is accessed by gopher lib.stat.cmu.edu . This gopher also maintains a copy of the jse gopher information, so you might not need to get access through ncsu for that. Going beyond the scope of this note, there are also summer workshops most years for mathematicians who want to become better teachers of statistics. There are likewise many articles devoted to teaching statistics, to various audiences, in such journals as _The American Statistician_. John A. Hendrickson, Jr. Academy of Natural Sciences, Philadelphia jhend@acnatsci.org ____________________________________________________________________ Item #6 An Update on Surveys I will be doing the tabulating on the surveys in the next few weeks depending on my schedule. Many people have commented that they would like to see more on non-academic hiring. Kalin Godev has been working on compiling information for non-academic hiring, and will eventually post it. We are also soliciting submissions from non-academic mathematicians. Unfortunately, these mathematicians are frequently very busy and often find themselves unable to write such articles. However, we/I will continue to try and get this information out. I hope that I can meet some people at the Cincinnati meetings who will help us out. If you haven't sent in your survey, there is still time. In the interest of saving space I won't reprint it, but you can find it in the YMN vol.1, #18. Curtis Bennett Bowling Green State University cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu ____________________________________________________________________ Item #7 Closing Credits: The Young Mathematicians' Network is administered by: Charles Yeomans cyeomans@s.ms.uky.edu Mark Winstead winstead@ml.kva.se Vic Perera vperera@silver.ucs.indiana.edu Franklin Mendivil mendivil@math.gatech.edu Stephen Kennedy kennedy@stolaf.edu Kalin Godev kalin@math.psu.edu Neil Calkin calkin@math.gatech.edu Curtis Bennett cbennet@andy.bgsu.edu Jeff Adams adams@bright.uoregon.edu Edward Aboufadel aboufade@scus1.ctstateu.edu ____________________________________________________________________ End of Journal -- Next week: The Discussion Continues