The Fields Institute Turns Twenty-Five 170725 Final book with covers | Page 125

The Particle Accelerators
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organize a large national forum on mathematics education,
sponsored by the CMS (including a public lecture by
Stephen Lewis). Because of the credibility of the Forum
(in education) and Fields (in mathematics), the Ontario
Ministry of Education turned to Fields in 2006, when major
opposition developed over the Ministry’s proposals to change
the teaching of Calculus in grade 12. As a result, I ended
up chairing a Ministry task force struck to pick the direction
grade 12 math should take. We spent an intensive month
talking to stakeholders around the province, and ended up
recommending the creation of what is now the Calculus and
Vectors course. In doing so, we drew heavily on a proposal that
Walter Whiteley and Peter Taylor had floated at the Math Ed
forum itself. Though faculty will forever complain about the
preparation of their students, complaints today are an order of
magnitude less intense than they had been. These curricular
revisions improved the mathematical preparation of students,
making this is an area where the direct impact of Fields has
been widely felt.
Fields and Industry Liaison
In addition to its flagship thematic and focus programs, the
array of conferences and workshops it organizes as general
scientific activity, and its support for mathematical education,
the Fields Institute also has a long-running program in
Commercial and Industrial Mathematics (CIM). I’ve worked
on that program for the past year, as Associate Director for
Industry Liaison, having taken this over from Huaxiong Huang
when he became Deputy Director of the Institute.
The basic goal of this program is to stimulate useful
conversations and interactions between academic researchers
and practitioners from the private sector.
Fields has
successfully done this in the finance industry for years, in part
because the many mathematicians working in that sector make