The Audience

Contemporary Mathematics (M116) draws more students than any other math course at the University of Hartford because it is generally viewed as the least onerous path to satisfying our university's mathematics graduation requirement. Most students are future musicians or artists and frankly would rather be in a recording session or art studio than giving up three hours a week for mathematics. A significant number have not taken a math course in three years. Furthermore, in a paper we assign on the first day of class, most students describe their mathematical history as a series of repeated frustrations, failures, and occasional humiliations. Interestingly, on the first day of class we also ask students to respond to two questions using a Likert scale of 1(low) – 5 (high): “What is your ability in math?” and “What is your interest level in math?” The vast majority of responses are 1 and 2. (We also ask them what grade they expect and their answers are generally A's and B's. Go figure.)

The Course

We designed M116 several years ago believing that any remediation of high school math would be a waste of the students' time and ours. More constructively, we wanted to show students another, more useful and up-to-date, side of mathematics that was essentially independent of the high school curriculum. To do so we chose four topics from discrete mathematics:

1. Voting Methods — Plurality, Instant Run-off, Hare, Borda, Condorcet and Approval together with Arrow's Theorem.

2. […]