Members: Jörgen Andersen, John Brothers, Ralph Cohen, Stephen Fisher, Andrew Gleason, James Lin, Lea Murphy, Richard Montgomery, Y. S. Poon, Ken Ross (Reporter), Anthony Tromba (Discussion Leader)

Questions for Day 1

• • Are you satisfied with the experience for mathematics majors at your institution? In what ways have you tried to improve it? (Tracks for different professional interests, undergraduate research projects, math clubs, mentoring, capstone courses, summer internships.)

• • What worked and what didn't?

• • Do you have many students from other departments taking your upper division courses? How do these students compare with your majors?

Questions for Day 2

• • What should we be trying to provide most of our math majors: training for graduate school, training for professional careers, a general education in mathematics?

• • What strategies do you recommend for improving the education of math majors? At what stage should majors be introduced to proofs?

Summary of Previous Activities. It has been the case historically that mathematics majors have been produced by schools of every type, from liberal arts college to technical institute. Any discussion of the mathematics major should take into account the various types of mathematics majors that there are, and where they are trained.

Here are some general trends concerning the major; these are distilled from questionnaires that we distributed among the panel members:

• • Tracking in the mathematics major, also known as a choice of “options”, is a common device for helping the student to have a focus for his/her studies. A typical example of a track is an “applied mathematics track”. It consists of a specific curriculum of courses and activities that will help an undergraduate student to train as a mathematics major with applied skills.