Grantee Reports

I spoke on a consistency result in set theory using iterated Sacks forcing which partially proves: Is the normal Moore space conjecture consistent with the cardinality of the reals being , assuming large cardinals?

There were 121 participants at the conference in Mexico City and 55 in Gyula.

Mexico City has a population of 25 million according to a local Taxi driver. In spite of that the population density is lower than many other cities. A cultural highlight was climbing a Mayan sun pyramid. This was one of two pyramids, the other called a moon pyramid, that are part of an ancient Temple city which at one time had a population of 200,000 people.

Gyula is a Hungarian town at the border of Transylvania, about 16 kilometres from the Hugarian/Romanian border. There was an Indonesian restaurant in Gyula and featured on it's menu were ``shellfish dishes from New Zealand''. I stayed with a geologist in Budapest. The streets are lined with buildings riddled with bullet holes from WWII. Just around the corner however were two of Hungary's best secrets. The opera house which is claimed to be acoustically third best in the world after La Scala in Milan and the opera house in Paris. The other little secret I found in a butchers, Tokaji wine. The 1983 Tokaji Oremus dessert wine is unique.

Coralie Daniel University of Otago

I wish to thank the Mathematical Society for their support of my attendance at the invitational meeting of the International Commission on Mathematics Instruction in France in April, and for their financial contribution towards my expenses. The week-long conference was held at CIRM (Center International de Rencontres Mathematiques), at the Luminy Campus of Marseilles University. CIRM is home to the SMF (Societe Mathematiques de France) and has a worldwide reputation for organizing meetings on various mathematical subjects (and is described at http://www.cirm.uni-mrs.fr).

The conference brought together sixty-five participants from twenty-seven countries. Less than a quarter of our number came from countries outside of Europe or North America, and I was the only participant from New Zealand. The purpose of the conference was to begin the writing of a book on the use of history in the teaching of mathematics. The publication date of the book is planned to coincide with the 9th International Congress on Mathematics Education in Tokyo, in 2000. John Fauvel, this year's NZMS Visiting Lecturer, and Jan van Maanen, from the Netherlands, are the co-authors of the book. Conference participants were invited for their ability to work on a specified chapter, but were also asked to select one other chapter to which they were willing and able to make a contribution.

I was invited in order to contribute on the use of the history of mathematics in support of the educational needs of mathematically gifted and talented students, and the relationships of thinking and learning aptitudes. In this group each person was asked to contribute from their own specific research area on different groups of students with requirements for specific attention including gifted students, adults returning to education, primary school children, students in less well resourced countries or environments, etc, and so while the sharing of research and ideas was extremely interesting, it did not lead to controversy among the group.

I elected to join the group writing a chapter on the philosophical, interdisciplinary and multi-cultural aspects of using history in the teaching of mathematics. This group turned out to be particular explosive in discussion, principally because its members had strong, and sometimes different, views on the extent to which mathematics is embedded in culture, and the ways in which the mathematics of non-european cultures have contributed to the body of mathematical understanding. Only three of the nineteen of us in this group came from the Southern Hemisphere, and we found that we had a very special contribution to make in regard to expressing the idea that the diversity, rather than the universality, of mathematical developments allows the world and its history to enter the classroom in a way that does not have nationalist or racist or colonial connotations. I found that many of the attitudes New Zealanders have learned through coming to terms with biculturalism and Treaty of Waitangi obligations provided words and ideas which it was important to have expressed in that context. Consequently, I was asked by the group to be the first writer of the draft for the section on multiculturalism. I felt that this in itself warranted the efforts to help me attend, made by the University of Otago and the NZMS.

I thank the Society for their financial support; and I am delighted to be able to report that since the conference individual members of the Society have been interested to discuss the chapters to which I am a contributor and thus have helped stimulate and focus my thoughts for the writing side of the conference tasks.

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