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EPaDel Section Governor's Report

Section Governor, Annalisa Crannell, Franklin & Marshall College

Summer 2009

The MAA likes to bill itself as a “grass roots” organization. Although its intellectual emphasis—its ‘head’, if you will—is always in mathematics, its heart is in the communities it helps to build. The MAA builds geographic communities (through 29 geographic sections like EPaDel), communities based on mathematical disciplines (through SIGMAAs—Special Interest Groups of the MAA), and international communities (have you considered going on an MAA study tour)?

Our increasingly electronic world allows the MAA to be at the forefront of establishing new ways of strengthening our communities. The wildly successful Project NExT program combines face-to-face meetings with an active email list serve. The MathFest Wiki and twitters kept the technologically savvy mathematicians up-to-date, while letting old-timers like me cling to our traditional paper programs. Math Alerts and Focus keep our members in touch with the MAA and with our colleagues all over the nation.

The Board of Governors decided this summer to take the next e-step in this direction: when you get your membership materials this year, you’ll see that there is now an electronic membership option, allowing our regular members online access to our popular journals, and reducing the amount of paper that gets shipped across the country to your mailbox. Student memberships will soon become exclusively electronic, which we hope will simplify the interactions between departments and their students. Please let me know what you think of this!

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All of the emphasis above on electronic connection via MAA On-Line points to the changes that our Association – and every professional association – will have to make to meet the changing ways in which we communicate with our peers and colleagues. Underlying these changes, though, the core mission of the MAA remains the same: to promote mathematics, to communicate mathematics, and to celebrate mathematics together as a community. I continue to be impressed by all the MAA does:

• by the depth and breadth of our meetings (sectional and national),

• by our journals (both print and electronic),

• by our mentoring programs (particularly NExT),

• and by our professional development programs (SIGMAAs and PREP workshops).

yours,

Annalisa Crannell