I will draw from a range of experiences at York University, and from some workshops with people from across Canada addressing a range of promising possibilities that arise from growing collaborations among people from a variety of backgrounds in mathematics, statistics and education. Some areas of active collaboration have included: designing and implementing programs for the preparation of future teachers of mathematics; supporting professional development of in-service teachers; improving the teaching and learning in a broad range of mathematics and statistics courses; developing joint research to address key research issues in Mathematics Education; preparing mathematics graduate students for careers which include teaching. I will describe some specific examples, which students and colleagues describe as positive, as well as note the barriers and sources of ‘push back’ against the changes that collaborative support for mathematics education requires. In my experience, working collaboratively in areas of mathematics and statistics education has been richly rewarding, addressing some of the biggest intellectual issues of our time.
I hope the stories and the questions posed will provide a focus for a wider conversion on Tuesday at lunch time from which we can all learn. Some background is provided through the site: http://wiki.math.yorku.ca/index.php/Math_to_Math_Ed

Refreshments 3:30 PM 745 POT
Lunch-Round table discussion on Mathematics Teaching and Education: Tuesday, 12:00 PM 745 POT (lunch provided, sign-up in 707 POT)
Partially supported by the Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and the Mathematics Department.

In recent work of Baas-Dundas-Richter-Rognes, the authors define 2-vector bundles and prove that their classifying spaces, K(Vect) is equivalent to the algebraic K-theory of the connective K-theory spectrum ku. In this talk we will give an introduction to bicategories and 2-vector spaces, explain the construction of the classifying space K(Vect). Finally we will explain how some extra structure in the bicategory of 2-vector spaces translate into an infinite loop space structure on K(Vect).

In this talk, we will first discuss the topology of the Frobenius complex, the order complex of a poset motivated by the classical Frobenius problem. Specifically, we will determine the homotopy type of the Frobenius complex in certain cases using discrete Morse theory. In the second half of the talk, we will extend the classical excedancestatistic of the symmetric group to the affine symmetric group and determine the generating function of its distribution. The proof involves enumerating lattice points in a skew version of the root polytope of type $A$.

There will be a reception for Eric at 4:00 p.m. in POT 745.