The Lindsay Seminar

The Lindsay Seminar is a new program at Coe, instituted in the Fall of 2005. The seminar attempts to address the fact that students in high school and their first several college math courses are given a profoundly distorted view of what mathematics is, since all of the material is presented as a finished product. The Lindsay Seminar gives some of the most promising entering students a chance to experience mathematics as a creative endeavor, where conjectures and verifications take the place of routine computations. The work is collaborative and discovery-based – rather than being shown how to work things out, the students figure it out for themselves and explain their thinking to each other.

The Lindsay Seminar meets one evening a week through most of the fall term. Participants are selected based on a review of the records of incoming students, with very high standards (the ACT scores of the participants typically average over 30). If you would like to be considered, please contact Jon White to find out more.

The Lindsay Seminar has enjoyed the generous support of the Dean of the Faculty, and eventually hopes to receive outside funding as well.

Some quotes from past participants' program evaluations:

"I really enjoyed it and would love to participate in it again. I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys math and would like to learn more concepts that are included in math."

"I really enjoyed the Lindsay Seminar and I am glad I got involved in it. It really expanded my knowledge on math and made me even more interested in pursuing a math career."

"Knowing that it was like a club and not like a class, it was much easier to expand beyond the level of the classroom and work with others to solve problems I would have never thought I could solve before."

"The variety of activities that we did was very good, teaching a lot of different concepts. I really enjoyed learning about things I have never encountered before. I also enjoyed how challenging some of the activities were, so you really had to analyze it."

"What I liked most was the fact that everything was on us. We weren't given answers if we got stuck. It wasn't like a class, it was more like a research environment."