Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article presents an overview of the history of the Mathematical Association of America as part of the celebration of its centennial in 2015. It describes events this author regards as the most important over the century but the account is certainly not exhaustive; for example, it makes little mention of competitions conducted under the aegis of the Association or of the expanded book publication program. Our account begins with the founding of the MAA and then describes its sections, governance, and meetings. Overarching activities are outlined in two distinct periods, 1916-1955 and 1955-2014, with an explanation for the separation into disjoint stages. The article discusses prizes and awards before ending with a brief mention of MAA headquarters. Founding One of the most historic moments for mathematics in America occurred with the establishment of a national organization on the last two days of 1915. It is rather miraculous that the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) was founded amidst World War I, a year after Canada entered the fray as a Dominion of the British Empire and 16 months before the U.S. Congress declared war. It is important to note that the use of “America ” in the title of the Association includes both Canada and the U.S. As Albert Bennett wrote upon the 50th anniversary of the MAA in 1965, “The phrase ‘of America ’ was interpreted from the start to include Canada and indeed the North American continent ” [3, p. 1]. Since that time, members living in the Caribbean areas belong to the Florida Section of the MAA. The founding of the MAA took the reverse of the usual route whereby an organization is established first and creates its official journal later. For instance, the American Statistical Association was formed in 1839 but did not establish a publication for another 49 years. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) was quicker, being founded in 1888 but creating the Bulletin as its first periodical three years later. Yet the MAA’s official journal, the American
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.006 | 0.013 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.007 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.011 | 0.012 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.014 | 0.005 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".