Using and understanding mathematics

1958-11-25

Dr. Jeffrey O. Bennett holds a B.A. (1981) in Biophysics from the University of California, San Diego, and an M.S. and Ph.D. (1987) in Astrophysics from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He has taught at every level from preschool through graduate school, including more than 50 college classes in astronomy, physics, mathematics, and education. He served 2 years as a visiting senior scientist at NASA headquarters, where he created NASA's "IDEAS" program, started a program to fly teachers aboard NASA's airborne observatories (including SOFIA), and worked on numerous educational programs for the Hubble Space Telescope and other space science missions. He also proposed the idea for and helped…

William L. Briggs has been on the mathematics faculty at the University of Colorado at Denver for 22 years. He teaches numerous courses within the undergraduate and graduate curriculum, and has special interest in teaching calculus, differential equations, and mathematical modeling. He developed the quantitative reasoning course for liberal arts students at University of Colorado at Denver supported by his textbook *Using and Understanding Mathematics*. He has written 2 other tutorial monographs, *The Multigrid Tutorial* and *The DFT: An Owner's Manual for the Discrete Fourier Transform*, as well as *Ants, Bikes, Clocks, a mathematical problem-solving text for undergraduates*. He is a Univer…