The Department
of Mathematics offers the major, minor and Teacher Certification
in Mathematics. A concentration in Applied & Computational
Mathematics is also offered. A Bachelor of Arts degree is
offered for those students completing the requirements for
the mathematics major. The faculty members are committed to
educating students in the liberal arts tradition. Through
mathematics courses, students will develop their logical reasoning,
critical thinking, technical communication, and computational
skills.
The Department
of Mathematics by virtue of the mission statement of Kansas
Wesleyan University serves students from other disciplines,
students in the science and mathematics department, and the
community by offering liberal studies and majors.
Educational
Philosophy
Mathematics is a method of quest through experiment, observation,
discovery and conjecture, and finally testing the result for
truth and validity. Throughout human history mathematics has
been used as a language of science of patterns, models, and
relationships to describe phenomena in the physical, social,
and natural environment. Historically, as a science of patterns,
mathematics is a mode of inquiry that reveals fundamental
truths about the order of our world. A person engaged in mathematics
gathers, discovers, creates and expresses facts and ideas
about how patterns can describe natural phenomena. Since the
beginning of ancient cultures, mathematics has been the precise
language of natural sciences and engineering. Nowadays, the
domain of mathematics is enhanced in new territories of other
disciplines like social sciences, industry, and medicine which
deal with uncertain phenomena from deterministic to stochastic.
Application
The era of information and space technology along with globalization
of productions has transformed the classroom into a worldwide
learning center. Thus the learning, teaching, and application
of mathematics have been fundamentally affected. With the
support of computers and worldwide communication, business
and industry depend increasingly on modern applied mathematics
and statistical analysis. Consequently, mathematics is tied
to all disciplines of the natural, social and behavioral sciences.
Pedagogy
Learning mathematics is to be engaged in the quest for understanding,
interpreting, problem solving, drawing inferences, and checking
the validity of the conclusion. Teaching as a process of transformation
and discovery can be achieved by emphasizing technology, multi-disciplinary
and modeling approaches, encouraging group learning, outside
of the classroom projects, and undergraduate research. Kansas
Wesleyan University strives for the learning environment to
become more dynamic, creative, and enjoyable. For these purposes,
we emphasize the experimental, laboratory, and fieldwork necessary
for understanding real life applications of mathematics.
Objectives
In general our objectives for teaching mathematics are to
provide opportunity for students to develop:
- capabilities to understand phenomena
related to their physical or social environments
- ability
to interpret everyday life problems
through mathematical representations
- knowledge
of how to solve problems using mathematics
and computational technology,
- ability
to draw inferences by reasoning and
to check the results of their mathematical representations
for accuracy and validity
