About the
This Week in Mathematics
Bulletin Board

To encourage students' interest in mathematics, a few months ago I installed a "This Week in Math" bulletin board in the main hallway of my university's mathematics building. I don't have any measurements of the board's effectiveness, but I believe it is helping at least a little in getting students interested in mathematics. At any rate, the board is easy (and fun!) to maintain. In this note I will describe the bulletin board and its operation, so that other math departments may install similar bulletin boards if they so desire. I'd be interested in hearing about any variants devised by other departments -- e.g., a different selection of topics.

Our bulletin board is a pretty one, with a colored plastic frame and a cloth backing. It is 2 feet wide and 3 feet tall; that's big enough to hold four printed 8.5-by-11-inch sheets of paper separated by some blank space. Across the middle of the bulletin board is a caption strip, reading "This Week in Mathematics" in big letters. In medium-sized letters, the caption also has the words "Cool Link," "Problem," "Birthday," and "Here," identifying the four printed sheets that occupy the four corners of the bulletin board. In smaller letters the caption gives the URLs for the four relevant World Wide Web sites, described below.

The four web sites are changed each week by their respective webmasters (i.e., editors). I simply print out the contents of the web pages and post the resulting sheets on the bulletin board; this is very easy for me to do. The bulletin board catches the eye of some of the students who walk past it; that is the whole point of my invention. The four web sites that I've chosen are as follows:

• The Canadian Mathematical Society maintains a number of web pages. One of them is titled "Knot a Braid of Links" (abbreviated "kabol"); it is located at http://camel.math.ca/Recreation/kabol/. This is a mathematical "cool website of the week." The kabol page is changed on Tuesdays; each week it features a different mathematical website that has been selected by the kabol webmaster. The websites selected have some substantial mathematical content, but generally they are also interesting in their use of graphics and/or computer software. I think they are ideal for catching the attention of students.

• I like to have a Math Problem of the Week, but currently I don't have a consistent source for such problems. I used to use the problem provided by the Math Forum at Swarthmore College, but I'm uncomfortable with their recent policy of adding advertisements to their pages. So now I'm picking some other POW sources, not always the same source each week. I look for problems that are about the right level of difficulty for our undergraduate students, on web pages that look good -- preferably good typesetting, no advertisements, not much irrelevant graphics, and with some relevant graphics if possible. I may use some of theses sites:

  Weekly: Bradley U., Duisenberg, Purdue, Wayne State, Nick's.

  Fortnightly or monthly: SW MO SU Advanced, SW MO SU Challenge, Hamline U., Stetson U., Quantum CyberTeaser.

• The MacTutor History Project at the University of St. Andrews is a huge database of web pages about the history of mathematics, including biographies of over 1100 mathematicians and much other material as well. The link http://www-groups.dcs.st-and.ac.uk:80/~history/Day_files/Now.html points to the "Mathematicians of the Day" -- i.e., a list of mathematicians with the current day of the year for their date of birth or demise. This is not really a "weekly" site, since I have about 20 birthdays a week to choose from. I change the birthday page on varying days, not necessarily Monday or Tuesday. Each week I choose the one or two mathematicians who have (in my opinion) the most interesting biographies for that week.

  Occasionally I use some source other than the MacTutor History Project. For instance, the Mathematicians of the African Diaspora and Faces of Science websites both contain a few biographies of black mathematicians, and the students at Agnes Scott College have put together a big collection of biographies of women mathematicians. In order to provide role models for the students who may need them most, I try to give extra weight to women or minority mathematicians when other factors are comparable -- e.g., preferring Kovalevskaya (January 15) over Tarski (January 14), and preferring Blackwell (April 24) over Kolmogorov (April 25).

• Each Monday, one of my department's administrative assistants prints a calendar and distributes copies to all members of my department. It lists our seminars, colloquia, etc. We also copy it onto the World Wide Web, at http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/~calendar/. Of course, if you're putting up a bulletin board in your own department, you can use your own calendar, or omit this section, or replace it with some other topic.

http://www.math.vanderbilt.edu/links/thisweek/

If you click on the link at the middle of my caption frame, you'll get to the web page that you're now reading. If you want to create a frames page like mine and you're familiar with basic HTML but not with frames, you may find it helpful to study my text copy of the HTML code that holds all the frames together. Just edit your own copy of that textfile, move it to an appropriate subdirectory, rename it "index.html," and you're ready to view it on the World Wide Web.

Note to students: Now that I've caught your attention, you might want to look at our large collection of links to mathematical web sites, or at our smaller collection of mathematical links chosen especially for nonmathematicians and beginning mathematicians.

Version of 5 Nov 2000.