The University of California Berkeley Mathematics Department VIGRE program is designed to improve the Department's training programs for mathematics scholars and educators at all levels. The program will try to create a community of scholars who all feel that they and their work are an integral part of a connected whole. During the last few years the Department has been engaged intensively in review and revision of the entire curriculum. The most extensive revision effort to date has been in the lower-division where teams of faculty and graduate students from the Mathematics Department, often joined by faculty and graduate students from other departments, have been designing worksheets and computer modules to be used in the discussion sections of our calculus courses. Students in these courses will experience a more active learning environment. At the upper-division level, we plan to introduce new courses to enrich the curriculum and that will introduce our majors to applications of mathematics. One such course already successfully in place is a course on Wavelets and Signal Processing. Others will follow. Professors Moore and Wu have been awarded a grant by the Stuart Foundation to develop materials for a new course for math majors going into secondary school teaching and as a course open to current secondary school teachers for professional development. The concept of the course would be "High School Mathematics from an Advanced (i.e. College) Point of View". The underlying idea flows from Felix Klein's famous little book "Elementary Mathematics from an Advanced Standpoint". The VIGRE grant will help us to employ this course for professional development of current high school teachers. The Department has also initiated a new program TeachMath to prepare secondary school mathematics teacher leaders. Mathematics majors can enroll in this program in their senior year and simultaneously complete the major and begin education courses and practice teaching. In a fifth year they complete their teacher training and take two additional mathematics course. We provide a stipend to students who are enrolled in the program. Graduate curriculum revision is underway but is only in its initial phase. The Department has started on an experimental basis a program of undergraduate research seminars. A senior faculty member will lead the seminar in which an average of about 7 or 8 of our most talented undergraduate majors will participate as an Undergraduate Research Experience and will receive a stipend. After a few initial lectures by the faculty member to set the stage, students will read journal articles and present, under the guidance of the faculty member, the results in the paper or papers, and in the process filling in some details. This experience will help students learn how to access and use the mathematics literature, and will enhance their communications skills. A graduate student, usually a student working on a dissertation with the faculty member, will assist in the seminar, thus leading to a vertical integration from research to graduate education to undergraduate education. VIGRE funding is needed to continue and increase this program by providing research stipends. We will also initiate a program of summer research projects that will in many cases flow out of these research seminars so students can deepen and extend their research experience and receive a stipend for work in the summer.
At the graduate level, our goal in the VIGRE program is first to decrease average time to degree, to build on the strengths of our applied mathematics program and our connections with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) in order to encourage more of our students to take advantage of the opportunities in applied areas that are available. We will strongly encourage all graduate students to take a summer internship in industry or a National Laboratory. The eleven VIGRE traineeships will be dedicated to support first year students with the goal of providing every first year student with fellowship or traineeship support. We believe that ensuring that no first year student serves as a Graduate Student Instructor (GSI) is the best use of the VIGRE funds to reduce average time to degree for our graduate students. During subsequent years the VIGRE trainees will serve as GSIs, will receive training and mentoring for their teaching, and will have a substantial teaching experience of having independent responsibility for a course in Summer Session, with appropriate mentoring by a senior faculty member.
The five half-time VIGRE postdoctoral fellowships will be coupled with teaching appointments funded by the University. All postdoctoral fellows will be assigned a mentor who will be a senior member of the faculty whose duties will include not only mentoring the research program of the fellow, but also their teaching. Teaching assignments will consist of upper division and graduate courses. Postdoctoral fellows will be encouraged to broaden their experience through contacts with other Departments on campus and through contacts at LBNL.
The Department will systematically collect quantitative and qualitative data concerning performance on a number of key indicators of the VIGRE program, and we will appoint a Visiting Committee which will visit the Department yearly and provide us with an external evaluation of our progress toward our goals.
Funding for this award is provided by the Division of Mathematical Sciences, the MPS Directorate's Office of Multidisciplinary Activities and Elementary, Secondary and Informal Education (ESIE).
