Math and Social Justice

Resources

To give a sense of what is possible, here is a very incomplete listing of resources that might be useful to participants. Please excuse the uneven nature of the resources currently listed; email your suggestions to rectify the situation.

Books

Here are some books that are available and might make useful reading. The links take you to Amazon’s main page for each book.

• Radical Equations: Civil Rights from Mississippi to the Algebra Project by Robert P. Moses and Charles E. Cobb paperback ISBN 0807031275
• Rethinking Mathematics by Eric Gutstein and Bob Peterson paperback ISBN 0942961544
• Reading And Writing The World With Mathematics: Toward a Pedagogy for Social Justice by Eric Gutstein paperback ISBN 0415950848
• The Shame of the Nation : The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America by Jonathan Kozol hardcover ISBN 1400052440
• Mathematics and Politics : Strategy, Voting, Power, and Proof by Alan D. Taylor paperback ISBN 0387943919
• Chaotic Elections! A Mathematician Looks at Voting by Donald Saari paperback ISBN 0821828479
• Fair Division : From Cake-Cutting to Dispute Resolution by Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor paperback ISBN 0521556449
• The Win-Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody by Steven J. Brams and Alan D. Taylor paperback ISBN 0393320812
• Mathematics in Service to the Community: Concepts and Models for Service-learning in the Mathmatical Sciences by Charles R. Hadlock, editor paperback ISBN 0883851768
• The Winner-Take-All Society : Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us by Robert H. Frank and Philip J. Cook paperback ISBN 0140259953
• What Price the Moral High Ground? : Ethical Dilemmas in Competitive Environments by Robert H. Frank hardcover ISBN 0691006725
• Luxury Fever : Why Money Fails to Satisfy In An Era of Excess by Robert H. Frank hardcover ISBN 0684842343
• Paying for Inequality : The economic cost of social injustice by Andrew Glyn and David Miliband, editors hardcover ISBN 1854890581
• Social Injustice and Public Health by Barry S.Levy, Victor W. Sidel, and Marian Wright Edelman hardcover ISBN 0195171853
• Health and Social Justice : Politics, Ideology, and Inequity in the Distribution of Disease by Richard Hofrichter, editor paperback ISBN 0787967335
• Mathematics and Democracy by Lynn Aurthur Steen, editor paperback ISBN 0970954700. The full text of this book is also available on the web, courtesy of the MAA.
• What the Numbers Say by Derrick Neiderman and David Boyum paperback ISBN # 0767909992.
• Natural Justice by Ken Binmore hardcover ISBN13 # 978-0195178111.

Web Resources

Joe Malkevitch at York College, CUNY, has written and taught extensively about the mathematics of fairness. Here are some feature columns he wrote for the AMS from 2002 to 2005

• The Mathematics of Voting and Elections (March 2002)
• Apportionment of Legislative Representatives, Part I and Part II (May and June 2002)
• Voting Games, Part I and Part II (September and October 2004)
• Resolving Bankrupcy Claims (March 2005)

Joe also has some curricular materials available on the web.

• An overview of his courses on fairness
• Curricular materials for many courses (A seminar in fairness and equity is near the bottom of the list.)

Larry Lesser (a speaker at the workshop) and Erik Nordenhaug have an article in the Journal of Statistics Education about ethics and statistics.

Larry Lesser also has a new article in the Journal of Statistics Education that includes extensive resources for teaching statistics using issues of social justice.

Jonathan Osler, a high school math teacher and workshop participant, has an entire web site of resources at RadicalMath.

Walter Whiteley of York University in Toronto passed on a link to a bibliography maintained by Arthur Powell and Sandy Dawson to resulted from a Working Group on Mathematics Education, Society, and Peace held in May 2005. This includes an article by Eric Gutstein, co-author of Rethinking Mathematics, cited above.

Bob Moses’ Algebra Project has a web site.

Gutstein and Peterson’s book has a web site, too. Gutstein has also published one of his lessons online.

For a stilted review of Rethinking Mathematics, see this column by Diane Ravitch. The column apparently was published in the Wall Street Journal, 20 June 2005.

An overview of voting methods with advocacy for the ranked pairs technique is provided at Condorcet.org

For a concise presentation on fair division, see Steve Brams’ handbook entry on the topic.

There is a cornucopia of statistically-oriented resources dealing with quantitative literacy at StatLit. There are further resources on this general topic at CAUSEweb, and a report on the topic available from the American Statistical Association.

The Swedish organization gapminder.org says on their home page that their vision is “Making sense of the world by having fun with statistics!” The 2005 presentation on human development trends seems to fit that vision admirably. This is an excellent presentation that was given only slightly modified at the 2006 TED conference. The TED version includes some helpful suggestions for classroom activities to accompany the presenations, as well as a very helpful audio narrative. This is a great tool for understanding international development.