Introduction

Summary

The third chapter relates undergraduate mathematics to areas which were not an object of study just a few years ago. The paper by Timothy O'Brien of Loyola University Chicago discusses biostatistics courses that enroll both mathematics and biology majors. These courses use student projects to evaluate or limit the results of research papers in the biological sciences that use statistics as a tool. The paper by Janet Andersen of Hope College describes a team-taught sophomore level course in Biology and Mathematics. This course analyzes research papers that use matrices or differential equations in their development. In both cases there is a great deal of emphasis on student participation and presentations.

The subject of the next two papers in this chapter is voting theory, an ongoing area of mathematical research whose results are accessible to undergraduates. These two articles are a bit different from the rest of the papers in this volume in that the focus is more on the mathematical content of voting theory and a bit less on the approaches used to present this content to the students. These papers also serve in a certain sense as primers for both faculty and students in an area where there are no appropriate undergraduate texts available. In the first article, Tommy Ratliff of Wheaton College discusses the geometric framework underlying some of the recent results obtained in voting theory. The course, whose prerequisite is a course in discrete mathematics, makes active use of student readings, papers, and projects.