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Michael Starbird |
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Biography |
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Michael Starbird is Professor of Mathematics and a University Distinguished Teaching Professor at The University of Texas at Austin. He received his B.A. degree from Pomona College in 1970 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, in 1974. That same year, he joined the faculty of the Department of Mathematics of The University of Texas at Austin, where he has stayed except for leaves as a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey; a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California, San Diego; and a member of the technical staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California.
Starbird is a member of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers at UT. He has won many teaching awards, including the 2007 Mathematical Association of America Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo National Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, which is the MAA’s most prestigious teaching award and is awarded annually to three people from the MAA’s membership of 27,000; a Minnie Stevens Piper Professorship, which is awarded each year to 10 professors from any subject at any college or university in the state of Texas; the inaugural award of the Dad’s Association Centennial Teaching Fellowship; the Excellence Award from the Eyes of Texas, twice; the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award; the Jean Holloway Award for Teaching Excellence, which is the oldest teaching award at UT and is presented to one professor each year; the Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award, which is student-selected and awarded each year to one professor in the Plan II liberal arts honors program; and the Friar Society Centennial Teaching Fellowship, which is awarded to one professor at UT annually. Also, in 1989, Professor Starbird was the Recreational Sports Super Racquets Champion.
Starbird’s mathematical research is in the field of topology. He recently served as a member-at-large of the Council of the American Mathematical Society and on the national education committees of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America where he consistently promotes the significant role that mathematics can play in the general education of students. He has given more than 150 invited lectures at colleges and universities throughout the country and more than 20 minicourses and workshops to mathematics teachers.
Starbird strives to present higher-level mathematics authentically to students and the general public and to teach thinking strategies that go beyond the mathematics. With those goals in mind, he wrote, with co-author Edward B. Burger, The Heart of Mathematics: An invitation to effective thinking, which won a 2001 Robert W. Hamilton Book Award and which is now used in hundreds of colleges and universities nationally each year. Burger and Starbird have also written a book that brings intriguing mathematical ideas to the public, entitled Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas, published by W.W. Norton, 2005. Starbird has produced four courses for The Teaching Company: Change and Motion: Calculus Made Clear (1st edition, 2001, and 2nd edition, 2007); Meaning from Data: Statistics Made Clear, 2005; What are the Chances? Probability Made Clear, 2007; and, with collaborator Edward Burger, The Joy of Thinking: The Beauty and Power of Classical Mathematical Ideas, 2003. These courses bring an authentic understanding of significant ideas in mathematics to tens of thousands of people who are not necessarily mathematically oriented. Starbird loves to see real people find the intrigue and fascination that mathematical thinking can bring. |
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Link to Wikipedia site on Michael Starbird. |
