Hope College Education department’s virtual Diversity and Equity in Education speaker series designed to inform our thinking and learning about teaching students in P-12 contexts and teacher education in ways that celebrate and affirm diversity and equity. 

Our speakers talk for 40 minutes and then there are 10 minutes of questions/discussion. A faculty member from the Education department moderates and hosts the presentation. We use Zoom as our virtual platform.

Description: People often think of math as set of skills, like doing arithmetic or factoring a quadratic. But math is much more about building a set of virtues: like persistence, creativity, and a competence to solve problems you've never seen before. All of us have deep human longings, such as for exploration, beauty, and truth and I'll explain how math can (and should) meet those desires. and how the resulting virtues will serve you well no matter what you do in life and no matter what life throws at you. An incarcerated man---now my friend---has helped me see this more clearly than ever before.

Speaker Bio: Francis Su is the Benediktsson-Karwa Professor of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College and a past president of the Mathematical Association of America. In 2013, he received the Haimo Award, a nationwide teaching prize for college math faculty, and in 2018 he won the Halmos-Ford writing award. His work has been featured in Quanta Magazine, Wired, and The New York Times. His book Mathematics for Human Flourishing (2020), winner of the 2021 Euler Book Prize, is an inclusive vision of what math is, who it's for, and why anyone should learn it.

For more information on Dr Su: 

https://math.hmc.edu/su/

https://www.francissu.com