Join us for the STEAM Café this month! May’s STEAM talk, “The Conic Sections Rebellion: College Mathematics Textbook Cremations in 19th Century America”, will be presented by Dr. Travis Kowalski, head of the South Dakota Mines Department of Mathematics. 

In 1825 and 1830, students at Yale University protested changes in their mathematics curriculum by refusing to take their geometry exams; 43 students would be expelled. In the aftermath of the so-called Conic Sections Rebellion, students at Yale began the annual tradition of a clandestine midnight funeral for their mathematical education, culminating with the burning and burial of their geometry textbook. The tradition spread over the next 70 years across American colleges and evolved into increasingly elaborate theatrical funerary performances with sermons, eulogies, hymns, marches, and a growing cast of mathematical characters – before disappearing almost overnight at the start of the new century. Dr. Travis Kowalski, head of the South Dakota Mines Department of Mathematics, will reflect on what this meant to students then and what we might learn today from this strange bit of mathematical history.