EPADEL:A Semisesquicentennial History, 1926-2000

The minutes from the meeting of the Board of Trustees (now Governors) that was held during the annual MAA¹ meeting on December \(30-31\text{,}\) \(1926\text{,}\) provide a summary of proceedings that took place during the latter part of \(1926\text{:}\)

We do not know if the petition sent to MAA² headquarters, then located in Columbus, Ohio, is extant, so the identity of the \(13\) members who signed it cannot be known with certainty. However, the official report from the most important event in the section’s history, the organizational meeting held on Saturday, November \(27\text{,}\) \(1926\text{,}\) just two days after Thanksgiving, contains details of the proceedings and so provides clues to the identity of the signatories. On that date Howard H. Mitchell of the University of Pennsylvania, and Albert A. Bennett and Joseph B. Reynolds of Lehigh University, arranged a program of talks appropriate for college mathematics teachers at Lehigh. In so doing, these three mathematicians became the founding members of the section. Their profiles are given at the end of the chapter and their continued participation in sectional activities is chronicled in subsequent chapters.

Members of the section today will recognize the format from the \(1926\) meeting, except for the fact that it was held on the Saturday following Thanksgiving, a tradition that was continued until \(1963\text{.}\) (Recall from Chapter 1 that the AMS³ held its organizational meeting on Thanksgiving Day \(75\) years earlier.) The initial gathering featured five lectures about mathematics and the teaching of mathematics. It was followed by a break for lunch and a business meeting. In \(1926\) lunch preceded the business meeting, the reverse of today’s order. Besides, the spouses of the local members were present during lunch. But on this historic date, November \(27\text{,}\) \(1926\text{,}\) there was vital business to conduct, and it was important for the three founders to discuss their major initiative over lunch before proceeding with business. Once the meal was finished, a vote was taken. It was agreed unanimously to request permission of the Trustees of the MAA⁴ for the organization of a new section to be known as the Philadelphia Section.

Although the proposed section still had to be approved by the MAA⁵, the \(20\) persons in attendance moved to set up a governing structure for future meetings. They decided initially to elect two officials to one-year terms. The results of the election reinforce our elliptical model, with officers coming from the two foci, chairman Howard Mitchell from Penn and vice-chairman and secretary-treasurer Albert Bennett from Lehigh.

There followed two other items of business. The first was a vote to approve the section’s by-laws. Although the gathering deferred official adoption of the by-laws until the next meeting the following November in Philadelphia, minutes from the 1927 meeting do not mention the by-laws at all. It is safe to assume they were approved without dissent. The second item of business in 1926 was an expression of appreciation by everyone in attendance for the courtesies extended by Lehigh University. Then the session adjourned. Unlike today, no mathematics followed lunch.

Detailed information about the five lectures will be presented in the next chapter. Here we note that, appropriately enough, the founder Joseph Reynolds of Lehigh presented the first lecture, on evolutes of certain plane curves. The next three talks were also on mathematical topics: Howard Mitchell of Penn spoke on ideals of quadratic forms, Lloyd Smail of Lehigh described Dedekind’s theory of irrationals, and William M. Smith of Lafayette discussed differential equations.

The 20 persons who were able to commute to Bethlehem for the meeting included 14 members of the MAA⁶, six of whom were on the faculty at Lehigh. These \(14\) therefore became the charter members of the section

Six of the \(14\) charter members were eventually elected chairmen so their profiles will appear in later chapters (Bennett, Mitchell, Reynolds, Smail, Smith, and Wilson). We glimpsed Lamson above. Among the others, Knedler and Weida participated actively enough to warrant biographical sketches at their times of maximal service. Here we sketch four of the remaining five charter members.

Although we were unable to locate personal items about the remaining charter member, some of the professional activities of John Albert Foberg are worth noting because they link the section to current developments in mathematics education. J. A. Foberg graduated from the University of Illinois and taught at Crane Junior College in Chicago when he became a charter member of the MAA⁸ upon its founding in 1915. One year later he was selected to be the representative from the Central Association of Science and Mathematics Teachers to the National Committee on Mathematical Requirements. This committee was formed by the MAA⁹ “to give national expression to the movement for reform in the teaching of mathematics in secondary schools and colleges.” Foberg and J. W. Young (Dartmouth) received funds to devote the entire year 1919-1920 to writing reports for the committee. Foberg’s report, “Junior High School Mathematics”, appeared at the end of the year. Three years earlier he had been one of the organizers of the Illinois Section of the MAA¹⁰. A 1972 MAA¹¹ publication reported, “It is worth noting, in this day of expansion of the junior college concept, that the first chairman of the Section was J. A. Foberg of Crane Junior College.” When the NCTM was founded in the early part of 1920 Foberg was elected its first secretary-treasurer. He also became the business manager for the NCTM’s official journal, The Mathematics Teacher. During this time he moved to Pennsylvania to become the State Director of Science and Mathematics, the position he held when the Philadelphia Section was founded in 1926. The preceding year he published the book General High School Mathematics with D. E. Smith and W. D. Reeve from Columbia Teachers College. Foberg later completed his Ph.D. at the University of Pittsburgh. He then left the Department of Public Instruction to become the head of the mathematics department at California State College. He appears to have lived in Camp Hill during his entire stay in the state. He was last listed in MAA¹² membership rolls for the academic year 1937-1938.

This brief glimpse of those MAA¹³ members who attended the organizational meeting shows a solid core of mathematicians with a wide array of interests and abilities. Most of the 14 MAA¹⁴ members were associated with colleges and universities in the area, and most were involved with undergraduate programs entirely. Not all were pure mathematicians, however, as the initial meeting attracted a mathematical physicist and a mathematical astronomer.