What's COMAP?

Let me tell you a little bit about the nonprofit organization COMAP and its history. The name is an acronym from the first initials of the words in its full name, and many of COMAP's projects have the syllable “MAP” at the ends of their names. COMAP, the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, was founded more than 25 years ago by Sol Garfunkel, who had been a professor of mathematical logic at Cornell University and a teacher of mine. COMAP has a multi-million dollar annual budget (a substantial fraction of that of the Mathematical Association of America, for instance). Most of COMAP's funding comes from grants, and there are about 20 full-time people on staff at the headquarters near Boston.

It all began with a 1976 NSF grant for the “Undergraduate Mathematics Applications Project” (UMAP) and has continued under its own steam ever since. The COMAP mission is to

• develop new instructional materials and

• create an interdisciplinary consortium within the academic community to produce and disseminate them.

COMAP distributes curriculum materials prepared by college and high-school instructors. COMAP originally started out with print media but has branched out into video, CD-ROMs, and the WorldWideWeb.

The original impetus for COMAP arose from the conviction that at all educational levels, mathematics instruction could be enriched, student motivation enhanced, and student success increased by the introduction of applications–not just realistic applications, but real applications.

UMAP Modules

The original goal was to develop lesson-length instructional units specifically about applications of under- graduate mathematics, from a vast variety of fields.