Yesterday I went to a workshop called “Diversifying the Curriculum” organised by Christopher Hollings and Vicky Neale at the University of Oxford. Their aim was to

…explore ways to incorporate the history of mathematics into the teaching of mathematics at undergraduate level, and in particular how this can help undergraduates to meet a more diverse collection of historical figures and to learn more about diversity in the history of mathematics. The workshop is about teaching mathematics, rather than about teaching history of mathematics. The aim is to explore and to gather examples of possible approaches that mathematics lecturers and tutors can, in practice, use in their teaching to diversify the curriculum.

You can read their hashtag on Twitter for some more views from participants.

There were six half-hour talks on these themes, but they all had enough content for much longer than that. I’ve tried to write up a couple of things I took from each talk below, but these are definitely not summaries of even a small fraction of what was covered.

June Barrow-Green - Towards a diversity resource for undergraduate mathematics

Professor Barrow-Green brought up the Open University’s OpenLearn webpage - their version of edX or ocw, and the idea of using this as a repository of content that people could use when making course resources. It seems a really interesting project.

There was a really good anecdote from the first European Congress of Mathematics in 1992. Before the arXiv and the internet in general you would request copies of someone’s article by filling out a postcard, which you could find pre-printed in maths department common rooms, and sending it to the author. One ECM participant complained that the cards in their institution were addressed in three languages, but to men in every language:

Lieber Herr Prof./ Monsieur le Prof./ Dear Sir,

Two slides with stats on the percentage of women math faculty in Europe by country in two different years were fascinating, but I didn’t get time to copy the map - I had forgotten what an outlier Portugal was.

Deborah Kent - Omar Khayyam’s Geometrical Solution of the Cubic: An Example of Using History in the Teaching of Mathematics

Professor Kent talked about Byrne’s colourful Euclid and how its presentation could be engaging to students. She showed a Byrne-style illustration of Omar Khayyam’s geometric solution of the cubic and contrasted it with the original text: it was really amazing to see. She has an article about this exposition in the American Mathematical Monthly joint with David Muraki.

Byrne taught at the College for Civil Engineers in Putney around 1840. His preface to his edition of Euclid said

We are happy to find that the Elements of Mathematics now forms a considerable part of every sound female education, therefore we call the attention of those interested or engaged in the education of ladies to this very attractive mode of communicating knowledge, and to the succeeding work for its future developement.

which Professor Kent said prompted a lot of discussion in her classes. Despite the “ladies love colourful things!” tone, apparently students really engaged with this kind of exposition.

She also mentioned catalyst.org as a resource for statistics and articles on diversity.

Calvin Smith - Towards a More Diverse Curriculum through Role Models and Assessment

Dr Smith mentioned David Smith’s 2014 article ‘No sexuality please, we’re scientists in the context the importance of role models. He mentioned the University of Reading Curriculum Framework which has “diverse and inclusive” as one of its “pedagogic principles.” There were loads of examples of what they have done at Reading to incorporate diversity in their curriculum - not just through role-modelling but things like using Athena Swan data in statistics projects, using datasets from non-European sources, his work with Dr Joy Singarayer on the website “stemsational figures” for example.

Peter Rowlett - Diversity in the Teaching of Communication and Basic Research Skills

Dr Rowlett is a senior lecturer at Sheffield Hallam University, and he began by reminding us of how much UK math degrees can differ, something people definitely forget. He gave the example of being asked (by someone looking to survey the difference between UK maths undergraduate programmes) what their first year analysis module looked like, and responding that they don’t have a first year analysis module.

Dr Rowlett talked about his teaching of History of Maths to first years in their first term at university who therefore don’t know much maths. There were a lot of interesting teaching ideas, especially around the method of assessment and how little lecturing he did: students worked in groups to produce weekly mini-projects, but they are assessed on a writeup of their one most successful project. He talked about the kind of nudges he gave them toward diversifying the things they wrote about. I really liked the idea of asking groups to reflect on the reliability and quality of the sources they used.

Brigitte Stenhouse - Benefits to Students of Diversifying the Curriculum

Brigitte talked about using the history of maths to broaden ideas about what is valuable mathematical practise, and how this affects our ideas about who does mathematics. A couple of examples were Mary Somerville and Émilie du Châtelet, both famous in part for “translations” of the work of Laplace and Newton respectively. She gave some great examples of mathematicians struggling with “thus it plainly appears” and “it follows easily” as an example of how history of math can help students develop mathematical resiliance and think critically about proofs and about mathematics.