Teaching in Class and on MIT's OpenCourseWare

Abstract

Ten years ago Prof. Gilbert Strang was given a chance to have his MIT linear algebra course (18.06) videotaped. It was in the normal classroom and no special effects! His only idea was to encourage other mathematics faculty to be recorded before their lectures were lost. Then the OpenCourseWare project [http://ocw.mit.edu] started soon after, and it was natural to include those videos. This has changed his life.

Prof. Strang hopes that by watching a few minutes of these videos and discussing what is successful and what is not, faculty members can together improve their teaching - and see what qualities are important to develop. He is not sure what the most important qualities are, and it would be very valuable to know.

About the Speaker

Prof. Gilbert Strang received his PhD from University of California at Los Angeles in 1959 and has since then been teaching at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He has been a Sloan Fellow and a Fairchild Scholar and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is a Professor of Mathematics at MIT and an Honorary Fellow of Balliol College.

Prof. Strang was the President of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) during 1999 and 2000, and Chair of the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics. He received the von Neumann Medal of the US Association for Computational Mechanics, and the Henrici Prize for applied analysis. The first Su Buchin Prize from the International Congress of Industrial and Applied Mathematics and the Haimo Prize from the Mathematical Association of America were awarded for his contributions to teaching around the world. He has published eight textbooks and his video lectures on linear algebra and on computational science and engineering are on MIT OpenCourseWare at http://ocw.mit.edu.

Note: Prof. Strang's visit is sponsored by Hang Lung Mathematics Awards