A little less than a month ago, the National Mathematics Advisory Panel published their final report on the future of mathematics education in the U.S. The report has raised much discussion in the U.S., and today I came across an interesting blog called After the Math Panel. In this blog, an educator and mom gives us her opinions and analyses of the report. The blog contains some interesting and readable summaries of the report, and I think it is worth reading!

According to the Math Forum, the following people have been given awards in our field recently:

• Anna Sfard has received the Hans Freudenthal Medal for 2007 (see this post for more information)
• Jeremy Kilpatrick has received the Felix Klein Medal for 2007 (see this post for more information)

Both news were posted at the request of Mogens Niss, who is Chair of the ICMI Awards Committee. The posts linked above give a nice overview of the research efforts of these two distinguished scholars.

Both National Geographic and Scientific American published articles about Aztec mathematics yesterday. The article in National Geographic focused on a specialized arithmetic that Aztec mathematicians developed to measure tracts of taxable land. In this arithmetic they used symbols like hearts, hands and arrows, which probably had a relation to the human body. The article refers to a study that was reported in this week’s issue of Science. Science covers the topic in a news story as well as the research article. The Scientific American article also focus on the hearts and arrows, and they also refer to another article (in Science) about the Aztec number system. So, for those interested in Aztec mathematics in particular, and history of mathematics in general, there are lots of interesting and up to date articles to read here!

There are many academic journals in our field, and there are many articles to read if you want to keep up. On some occasions though, a couple of days might pass by without any new publications from the major journals. On instances like that, you might want to take a look at some of the mathematics related blogs on the internet. One of my favorites is Wild About Math! by Sol Lederman. This blog presents several interesting articles about mathematics and how to learn “to get wild about Math“, and a regular feature of the blog is the “Monday Math Madness contest” (Sol loves mathematical problems and puzzles). You can also find a list of links to other web pages with mathematical problems and puzzles.

A. Hawkins and N. Sinclair have written an article that has been published (online first) by International Journal of Computers for Mathematical Learning. The article is entitled “Explorations with Sketchpad in Topogeometry“, and the authors describe how they created several microworlds of topological surfaces using The Geometer’s Sketchpad. Among the surfaces described are: the Moebius strip, the torus and the Klein bottle. The article contain lots of interesting examples and information about topological geometry, as well as about using this particular software.

(See also this list of interactive geometry software!)

There are so many journals, so many conferences, so many web-sites that cover research in mathematics education. This blog will be my humble attempt to cover the most important ones. In the sidebar, you can find feeds from the most important scientific journals in mathematics education research. In this blog, I will comment on new and interesting (to me at least) articles in these and other journals. I will also try to follow some of the most important conferences in mathematics education, as well as sharing interesting bookmarks regarding mathematics education.

I know, this sounds like a huge challenge, and it is! I will, however, do my best to follow up on it, and if anyone else is interested in joining this attempt, I would like to invite you to contribute. This starts off as something I find interesting for myself, but I hope that several colleague researchers and educators will find this attempt interesting as well.