Download Toward a Calculus for our Era: Remodeling Maths Education in

Guest lecture by
Professor Daniel Kaplan
DeWitt Wallace Professor
Mathematics & Computer Science
Macalester College
Date: Tuesday June 24
Time: 10am - midday
Venue: Room 228
Molecular Biosciences Building (76)
Refreshments provided
Pleaser RSVP for catering purposes by 18 June
[email protected]
Toward a Calculus for our Era:
Remodeling Maths Education in
Today's University
Daniel Kaplan is the DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics
and Computer Science at Macalester College in Minnesota,
USA. His undergraduate work was in physics and philosophy
at Swarthmore College; his graduate work was in engineeringeconomic systems at Stanford University and biomedical engineering at Harvard University.
He has written textbooks on nonlinear dynamics and chaos
theory, computer science, and statistics. He's currently on
sabbatical at UQ, working with faculty in BACS on their revised BSc program.
Toward a Calculus for our Era:
Remodeling Maths Education in
Today's University
Abstract
It's a truism that quantitative thinking is becoming more
important for work and study in a large number of areas,
not only in science and technology but also in public policy and management. The expansion we are witnessing
today is analogous in some ways to the quantization of
physical science that started with Galileo and Newton. The intellectual triumph of this quantization was the
development of calculus and its application, playing out
over three centuries, to areas that were originally treated
qualitatively, such as electromagnetism.
Calculus remains at the center of a university maths education, but problematically. Students in most areas see
little applicability for differential and integral calculus;
faculty in those areas can't often justify requiring such
studies or even point to ways in which they use the material. Calculus was developed for studying problems of
physical motion and growth, not for the analysis of data,
the evaluation of trade-offs, or the untangling of multiple
contributing factors in complex systems. But just as
Newton and his successors invented the technology of
calculus and modern algebraic notation to solve physics
problems of their era, so new ``mathematical technologies'' --- often easier to use than the old ones --- have
been invented over the last century to deal with new
problems.
I will argue that in most areas students will be better
served by a university maths education that incorporates
these new mathematical technologies. I'll describe the
progress we have made at Macalester College in remodeling the introductory maths curriculum to do so.