We are excited to report that our Discovering the Art of Mathematics booth at the Joint Mathematics Meetings (meetings attended by almost 6,500 in Baltimore, MD from 15 - 18 January) met with enormous success!!
Great many thanks to all of you who visited! The outpouring of support, encouragement and gratitude we received was tremendous.
For those who were not at JMM, here's how it went…
Our booth was consistently busy throughout the 24 hours the Exhibition Hall was open. We had well over 500 visitors, signed up over 125 new people to our mailing list and distributed several hundred brochures. We were happy to validate the support the National Science Foundation has given us by consistently outperforming them — their booth, right across from ours, couldn't match our crowds.
Many times it felt like a mathematics for liberal arts classroom had materialized right in the 400-Aisle of Exhibition Hall as groups of people actively explored selected materials from our books. If you want to try some yourself, the selected topics' handouts are available here:
Many people were drawn to our exhibit by our students' beautiful, original artwork.
We repeatedly heard how "beautiful" our materials were. Visitors were amazed to learn that all eleven of our books were freely available online and shared their gratitude.
Well-known mathematician and author Steven Strogatz (author of the 15-part series "Elements of Math" for the New York Times and author of The Joy of X - A Guided Tour of Math from Zero to Infinity) appropriately summed up the excitement of the booth in his Tweet:
My favorite discovery at #JMM14 --artofmathematics.org I can't wait to teach from all the resources they offer. —Steven Strogatz (@stevenstrogatz)
We are excited and energized by the outpouring of support we received. We will carry this with us as fuel as the project continues forward.
