Keys to effective thinking on tap in Sampson Lecture

Michael Starbird, a mathematician from the University of Texas at Austin who has given hundreds of lectures and dozens of workshops on effective teaching and effective thinking, offers a lecture at Bates titled The Five Elements of Effective Thinking at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 30, in the Edmund S. Muskie Archives, 70 Campus Ave.

Sponsored by the Bates mathematics department, the annual Richard W. Sampson Lecture is open to the public at no cost. A reception follows. For more information, please call 207-755-5978.

Starbird is the University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics at Austin. He has received more than 15 teaching awards including the Mathematical Association of America’s 2007 national teaching award, the Minnie Stevens Piper Professor statewide award, the UT Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award and most of the UT-wide teaching awards.

Starbird co-authored, with Edward Burger, the textbook The Heart of Mathematics: An Invitation to Effective Thinking (Key College, 1999); and, for mainstream readers, The Five Elements of Effective Thinking (Princeton University Press, 2012).

He has produced DVD courses for The Teaching Company in the Great Courses Series on calculus, statistics, probability, geometry and the joy of thinking. He also produced an edX Massive Open Online Course titled Effective Thinking Through Mathematics.

The annual Sampson Lecture honors the late Professor Richard W. Sampson, who taught math at Bates for 38 years.