Stephen B Maurer (B.A. Swarthmore 1967, Ph.D. Princeton 1972) is a Professor of Mathematics at Swarthmore College, and, during 2004-11, Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics. During 2000-03, he was Swarthmore's Associate Provost for Information Technology. Previously he taught at the Phillips Exeter Academy (1969-73), the University of Waterloo in Ontario (73-74), Princeton (74-79), and the Hampshire College summer math enrichment program for high school students (76,78). During 1982-84, he was on Leave from Swarthmore as a Program Officer at the Sloan Foundation, working primarily on quantitative education. Most summers since 2003 he has taught at MathPath, an international summer math enrichment program for middle school kids. Since 2006 he has been its academic director.

Maurer's research has been in combinatorics, with forays (sometimes continuous) into mathematical biology, economics and anthropology. As for expository and curricular activities, he has written and spoken widely on discrete mathematics and has been involved with calculus reform as well.

Maurer won the Allendorfer Award of the MAA in 1980 for his article "The King Chicken Theorems" in Mathematics Magazine. From 1981 to 1987, he chaired the MAA committee on high school contests, producing the AHSME (now called the AMC10 and AMC12), the AIME, and the USAMO. Later he published "Contest Problem Book V" (with George Berzsenyi), which compiles and augments the problems and solutions of the AHSME and AIME from those years. His freshman-sophomore text, Discrete Algorithmic Mathematics (with Anthony Ralston) appeared in Fall 1990. A substantially revised third edition was published in 2004.

Maurer is interested in the special nature of writing in mathematics. He has published articles on this subject and has prepared a Short Guide to Writing Mathematics for undergraduates. In recent years he has primarily taught discrete math and linear algebra, and his discrete math course has been designated a writing course. In 2005 he started teaching analysis again, from a gentle multivariate calculus course through an honors seminar on calculus on manifolds.

Maurer is interested in mathematics education from childhood through undergraduate studies. He has served on the MAA's Committee on the Undergraduate Program, its editorial Board for the Classroom Resources series, and is currently the Editor for the MAA Notes series. He served on and sometimes chaired the Dimensions in Math committee of his local elementary school when his kids were there, where he acted as a "Math Parent" and ran the computers and software in the "math room". He was a consultant to the second edition of the CorePlus program, a "reform" national high school math curriculum, and the lead writer of the matrix algebra chapter for the CME Project, another new high school math curriculum developed by the Educational Development Center (EDC). Currently he is a writer for another EDC project, a linear algebra course for high schools.

(last updated 8/26/08)

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