Mathematics

At the chalkboard in Marilyn Rosenblatt's Pikesville Middle School classroom, 13-year-old Meghan Holly cranks out a wicked algebra problem."You're on today," Rosenblatt said. Meghan beams.In a nation full of adults petrified by fractions and percentages, eighth-grade pupils enrolled in the school's Algebra With Assistance tackle difficult equations involving negative integers with ease.The program, which serves predominantly black pupils, is aimed at narrowing the Baltimore County school system's minority achievement gap by encouraging black pupils to excel in mathematics -- a subject they must master to take advanced science and computer classes and to do well on college entrance exams.

Mistaken tax figures reflect education fads, declining math skillsAs a lifelong resident of Baltimore, I found Tom Pelton's article about the city's shrinking population interesting ("Differing views on housing problem," Oct. 22).As a mathematics teacher in Baltimore for more than 20 years, I found Mr. Pelton's inability to compute percentages disconcerting.Based on the numbers the article supplied for property taxes on a $100,000 house, Mr. Pelton actually understated the disparity in tax bills between the city and other localities.

It has been 30 years since Johns Hopkins University professor Julian C. Stanley first set sight on a 12-year-old with SAT scores that would make a college admissions director drool. The world of education for gifted children has never been the same.A decade later, in 1979, Johns Hopkins started what is now the Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth. It turned Stanley's work with a handful of mathematically precocious children into a nationwide group of universities that seeks the intellectually gifted and offer them challenging courses.

FORTY-ONE NATIONS participated in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in eighth-grade science and mathematics in 1995.If eighth-graders in Maryland had participated, how would they have stacked up, based on their performance on a similar test in the United States?As usual, Maryland students would be in the middle, along with most other eighth-graders in Sweden, Iceland, Cyprus, the United States and 13 other nations.We would be ahead of Iran, Portugal and Kuwait.

Jostein Gaarder wrote that "to wonder about life is not something we learn, it is something we forget." We forget, of course, at the peril of letting our heads turn to Mallomars. If you doubt the exhilaration of exercising the mind, spend a couple of hours with "The Number Devil:A Mathematical Adventure," by Hans Magnus Enzensberger (Metropolitan/Henry Holt, 263 pages, $22).The book's purpose, I think, or anyway its effect, is to take the mind for a fast romp, and prove that with a bit of exercise it can climb trees and leap roaring torrents.

Being a mathematician out to improve mathematical literacy in the United States sounds like serious business. John Allen Paulos insists it isn't.Paulos' crusade has landed him on "Late Show with David Letterman" and Larry King's radio show, not to mention "Nightline" and C-SPAN. Critics describe his most recent book, "A Mathematician Reads the Newspaper," as "witty," "fun and spunky" and "subversive." Fun and spunky? Math?"You don't have to be so deathly earnest about such matters," Paulos says.

DURING HIS 56 YEARS as the longest-serving professor at the U.S. Naval Academy, Theodore J. Benac revealed the secrets of mathematics to some 10,000 midshipmen. As years went by, classes would graduate, younger colleagues would retire, but Dr. Benac went on instructing and grilling students five days a week in Annapolis.He was such an institution at the training school for Navy and Marine Corps officers that when he died last week at age 85 of prostrate cancer, a long-time friend mused, "I was really shocked when I heard about it. I thought Ted would never die."

Settle back, because today I'm going to tell you the dramatic true story of what happened when some Japanese researchers decided to re-create the historic discovery of the law of gravity.As you recall, this discovery occurred in an English orchard in 1666, when, according to legend, Isaac Newton, the brilliant mathematician, fell out of a tree and landed on an apple.No, hold it. Upon reviewing the videotape, I see that in fact the apple fell out of the tree and landed on Newton. Had this occurred today, of course, Newton would have simply put on a foam neck brace and sued everybody within a radius of 125 miles.

The Park School in Brooklandville will break ground this afternoon for a mathematics and science center.Named for a Park alumnus, the Morton K. Blaustein Center for Science, Mathematics and Technology will house classrooms, laboratories, a 100-seat lecture hall and areas for independent student research. The 28,000-square-foot center will allow students to do science rather than just learn about it, said David Jackson, head of the school.Through two foundations, the family of Mr. Blaustein, who died in 1990, contributed $1.5 million toward the $2.9 million project.

How to build a bridge and figure out the number of tiles needed to cover a bathroom floor are just two of life's more difficult problems. Yesterday, 289 Baltimore-area fourth-graders offered answers."

Math curriculum needs remediation The article written by Liz Bowie about the mathematics gap in Maryland ("Math gap hits many in Md.," July 12), was very refreshing. The gap is not unique to Maryland. It is a nationwide and a societal problem. A 2004 study by the U.S. Department of Education found that more than 40 percent of all students and over 60 percent of community college students need remediation. The attitude of the K-12 system is that every student who graduates and enrolls in college should be considered as a success and anything that happens afterward is someone else's problem.

Pam Tabor vividly recalled a day in high school when she asked her Algebra II teacher, "Why is x to the zero power 1 and not zero?" to which the teacher responded, "That's just the way it is, Pam. Just accept it and go on." She decided that math was illogical, and therefore not something to be pursued. But then she had the opportunity to ask a college professor the same question, and he explained it to her with a simple proof. Math became sensible, and her life's passion. "From that point on, I decided that I would do everything within my power to help children make sense of mathematics," she said.

Growing up in rural Iowa, Carey E. Priebe said, he knew early on that he wanted a career in mathematics. "I was clearly going to be a failure at farming," joked Priebe, 45, a professor of applied mathematics and statistics at the Johns Hopkins University. Priebe, who calls himself "just a math guy," won a $3 million federal grant last week as one of the first six university professors to be named National Security Science and Engineering Fellows. The new fellowship program provides the first unrestricted grants of such magnitude that the Department of Defense has awarded to university faculty members.

American students' math achievement is "at a mediocre level" compared with that of their peers worldwide, according to a new report by a federal panel. The panel said that math curriculums from preschool to eighth grade should be streamlined to focus on key skills - the handling of whole numbers and fractions, and certain aspects of geometry and measurement - to prepare students to learn algebra. "The sharp falloff in mathematics achievement in the U.S. begins as students reach late middle school, where, for more and more students, algebra course work begins," said the report of the National Mathematics Advisory Panel, appointed two years ago by President Bush.

What would cause someone to take a pass on fame, honors, a lot of money and everything he worked toward in life? After years of work, Grigory Perelman of St. Petersburg, Russia, solved one of mathematics' most tantalizing challenges - the century-old Poincare conjecture - and at the age of 40 he has apparently decided that that was enough. At the 25th International Congress of Mathematicians, meeting in Madrid, Spain, he was announced as one of the winners of the Fields Medal, considered as great an honor in its field as the Nobel.

A popular expression in poker is that "you don't play the cards, you play the player." The adage refers to the belief that successful poker playing, especially at the highest levels, is about reading opponents and psychological gamesmanship rather than merely figuring odds. While there's certainly truth to all that, Bill Chen, the winner of two championship bracelets at the current World Series of Poker being held at the Rio All-Suites Resort & Casino in Las Vegas, is proving that superior mathematical analysis is still a handy skill to bring to the table.

School board Chairman Joshua Kaufman was all smiles. He had just successfully answered a questions in a "Math Jeopardy" game - "I'll take students for $500," Kaufman said - and the exercise gave him a bit more appreciation for the scope of school system's mathematics programs. "I think the board really enjoyed it," Kaufman said of the game, which took place at Thursday night's board meeting, part of a half-hour overview of math programs by Bryan Scott Ruehl, coordinator of secondary mathematics, and Kay B. Sammons, coordinator of elementary mathematics.

In the real world, organ transplant physicians use sophisticated computer programs to find scarce donors of medically compatible kidneys for their most desperately ill patients. It's math saving lives. But in Hollywood, writers for the hit CBS crime drama Numb3rs wondered whether the FBI could use the same organ-matching mathematics in reverse - to track down the most likely recipient of a black-market kidney, so they can nab the criminals behind the scheme. That's math catching crooks, and it's the premise of tonight's episode of Numb3rs, with a script inspired by organ-pairing mathematics done at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine.

Math lecture -- St. John's College will present Sir Michael Berry, physics professor at Bristol University in England, in a free lecture at 8:15 p.m. Friday in the Francis Scott Key Auditorium in Mellon Hall. "Making Light of Mathematics" will consider mathematical phenomena that find application and physical illustration in the physics of light and how these concepts are needed to understand rainbows, twinkling starlight and sparkling seas. 410-626-2539.

On October 22, 2004 MARY BEAR MCCLAY, 88, a former Mathematics Instructor at the University of Mary land and longtime resident of Severna Park, died of complications from stroke in Chattanooga, Tennessee. A Native of the Midwestern Prairies, Mary was educated at Eastern Illinois State Teachers College and the University of Illinois. She married Clarence H. "Mac" Mc Clay, a Mechanical Engineer, in Seattle in 1943. When the Mc Clay family moved to Maryland in 1955, Mary began teaching mathematics at the University of Maryland, where she directed the mathematics program for non-math majors.