Editorial: Looking Back, Looking Forward
By Kira Hamman
Happy New Year!
New year, new plans, new projects. For many of us, new classes and new students. For others, new jobs or new directions. For me, a new role as the editor of this amazing blog, trying to fill the very chic shoes of the inimitable Deanna Haunsperger . Deanna’s stewardship over the last three years has turned Math Values into a crucial forum for MAA conversations, and I am so excited to continue that work. I’m also incredibly lucky to be supported in this endeavor by a fabulous editorial board, who will be introducing themselves to you over the next few months. Watch this space!
Like many of you, I first experienced Math Values during the pandemic as a kind of antidote to the uncertainty and anxiety with which we were daily bombarded. Our institutions like to say we “pivoted” to remote learning, but we all know it was more like trying to steer the Titanic away from that iceberg. Still, we persevered, and Math Values made sure we knew we were not alone.
Starting in March 2020, Math Values offered not just MAA members but the entire extended mathematics community support for teaching online for the first time, advice on staying connected, and permission to care for ourselves. The blog published the MAA’s recommendations for educational policies and practices during remote learning. Some of our regular columnists weighed in on handling pandemic-related educational inequities and, of course, The Graph That Stopped The World. It was like being able to have a badly needed chat over coffee with a colleague during a time when none of us could do that in real life. The blog was a lifeline.
But Math Values actually began two years before that, in 2018, and was itself the continuation of work that began two decades earlier as MAA Online. You can read all about that in this delightful historical post from Keith Devlin. In other words, like all things internet, this blog has evolved tremendously in a relatively short period of time, and that evolution continues as we move forward into 2024. While we will, of course, continue to feature the wonderful columns and writers we all love, in the coming months we’ll also be introducing some new columnists and new streams to Math Values. Our intention is to welcome folks beyond the MAA community into our conversations, and maybe start some new conversations. Math Values is for everyone, the math-curious and the math-adjacent as well as the self-identified mathematician.
And that’s where all of you come in. You have something to say, I know you do. We want to hear it! Thoughts, opinions, experiences, ideas – they all have a home at Math Values. Diverse voices and perspectives make our community stronger and, frankly, more interesting. Send me an email at blogs@maa.org and we’ll talk.
Here’s to a spectacular 2024!
Kira Hamman is the incoming editor of Math Values and chair of the MAA’s Council on Communities. She teaches at a tiny little campus of Penn State and lives on a tiny little farm with her family and lots of animals.