MAA
MAA Rocky Mountain Section
The Mathematical Association of America was founded at the end of 1915. Florian Cajori was a founder Council member, and spoke at its second annual meeting, at Columbia University, New York, on December 28-30, 1916. At this meeting Cajori was elected the MAA's second President, for 1917 (by 203 votes to the 202 cast for his rival E V Huntington). Several charter members of the MAA (ie those elected before April 1, 1916) were associated then or later with Colorado College: besides Cajori and his emeritus colleague Frank Loud, two masters students, Mabel Bateman (1910) and Adelaide Denis (1903) -- both teachers at Colorado Springs High School -- were charter members of the MAA, as were the two mathematicians who were to join the college faculty within a couple of years, Charles Sisam (then at University of Illinois) and William Lovitt (then at Purdue University, Indiana). Besides these individual memberships, Colorado College was an early institutional member of the MAA.
The Rocky Mountain Section of the MAA was suggested only a few months later, in September 1916, to cover the states of Colorado and Wyoming, and the inaugural meeting was held in April 1917 at the University of Colorado: Florian Cajori read a paper at this meeting, on "Fluxions". Cajori also spoke at the next year's meeting (1918), at the University of Wyoming, where he gave two talks, on the origins of the names "Rolle's curve" and "Mathematical induction".
Colorado College first hosted the annual meeting of the MAA's Rocky Mountain section in 1920, presided over by Charles Sisam. Eight meetings have been held at the college:
- 1920 (Sisam)
- 1927 (Lovitt)
- 1934 (Sisam)
- 1941 (Lovitt)
- 1964 (Leech)
- 1981 (program chair Steve Schiffman)
- 1992 (program chair John Watkins)
- 2015 (program chairs Andrea Bruder & Marlow Anderson).
(Reports of these meetings are referenced below.)
Members of the College played prominent roles in the early years of the Rocky Mountain Section. The meetings often had papers from Charles Sisam and Frank Loud, and it is noticeable that several years the only Colorado Springs members of the MAA were associated with the College. For instance, in 1918 the five MAA members located in Colorado Springs were Charles Barnhart, Florian Cajori, Harold Davis (by then a teacher at Cheyenne High School, Colorado Springs), Adelaide Denis, and Frank Loud.
The 1926 meeting of the Rocky Mountain section, which took place at the Colorado Agricultural College, Fort Collins, had a statistical paper by William Lovitt and was notable for a paper by Frank Loud (whose abstract was read in his absence by the secretary) on "Root extraction with the adding machine". This used Newton's binomial formula as a method, and the adding machine as an instrument, resulting in the extraction of several cube roots. This was a significant presentation both as exploring a line of research into efficiency of calculation by commercial machines that was being developed in the UK at that time by D J Comrie, and as one of the last papers written, at the age of 74, by Colorado College's distinguished mathematician and meteorologist emeritus.
The 1927 meeting, at Colorado College, had 40 attendees. Among the activities of the meeting, the third Carus Monograph (on statistics) was discussed, and papers were presented three professors in the college's mathematics department: Charles Sisam ('On a type of involutions in space'), William Lovitt ('Index number bias') and Guy Albright ('A grade weigher'). The abstract of the latter talk reads:
In this paper Professor Albright described the construction and manipulation of a device for determining the average grade of a student involving the weighing of his various marks to correspond to the units of credit carried by his course. The device was of the type of a simple lever. Such an instrument was exhibited which could calculate the average with an error not exceeding three-hundredths of one percent.
There seems to be no surviving trace of this instrument, unfortunately.
This seems to have been the last meeting for some time, of those held at the Colorado College, to which members of the college mathematics faculty contributed. The 1934 meeting, hosted by Colorado College, had 45 attendees, including Charles Sisam and William Lovitt, but neither read papers. Nor did they at the 1941 meeting, again attended by both of them. The meetings of 1964 (at which Joseph Leech was chair) and 1981 (which had 120 attendees) again had no contributions from the college itself. Thus for half a century, between the 1930's and the 1980's, the keen early interest in the MAA Rocky Mountain Section shown by Cajori and his colleagues seems to have petered out.
But the 1992 meeting, arranged by John Watkins, saw a resurgence of interest from the Colorado College itself. Thirteen of the 134 participants - 8 faculty, 5 students - were from the College, the opening address was given by Steven Janke ("Modeling the Growth of the AIDS Epidemic"), and students Laura Hegerle (who was to win the Cajori Prize that year) and Karin Riesbeck gave talks on "Edge Coloring Graphs" and "Investigations of Hausdorff Dimension" respectively.
Then Colorado College hosted the 2015 meeting (organized by Andrea Bruder and Marlow Anderson) where nationally known Bill Dunham and Karen Saxe gave the plenary lectures. David Brown (Colorado College) and Jim Powell (Utah State University) led a pre-meeting workshop on model fitting. Later at the meeting, Steven Janke (CC) gave a talk on Cajori, graduating senior Katy Martinez presented a mathematical model of bullying, and recent CC grad Charles Morgenstern talked of his Ph.D. research at Colorado School of Mines.
Bibliography
Reports of the MAA Rocky Mountain Section meetings at Colorado College were reported, generally with abstracts of the talks given, in the following issues of American Mathematical Monthly:
- 1920, April 2-3: AMM 27 (1920), 289-290
- 1927, April 22-23: AMM 34 (1927), 283-285
- 1934, April 20-21: AMM 41 (1934), 536-538
- 1941, April 18-19: AMM 48 (1941), 652-654
- 1964, May 1-2: AMM 71 (1964), 959-961
- 1981, May 1-2: AMM 88 (1981), 724-725
No report of the 1992 Meeting appeared in the Monthly.
We're grateful to Bill Ramaley (Fort Lewis College, Durango) for sharing his knowledge of and researches into the history of the MAA Rocky Mountain Section.