In Memoriam

Professor James Kaput, Mathematics Educator

by George Collison

July 30, 2005 brought news of the death of James Kaput, Chancellor Professor of Mathematics at the University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth. He was killed while jogging near his home in Dartmouth. Jim was a valued colleague and friend of many at the Concord Consortium. He shared our commitment to creating materials and technology that embody powerful mathematical ideas in dynamic ways to inspire both teachers and students. Jim was a member of the Advisory Board of the Seeing Math Project, and expert commentator on two of the case studies. Seeing Math video cases and software owe a great intellectual debt to Jim’s counsel and vision. His commentaries were deep, insightful, and inspiring. One teacher said that initially Jim’s comments went right over her head. After the third viewing of the video she realized she had to change the way she thought about and taught equations and equality. She was amazed that she had the capacity to learn something new and surprising about herself and about her teaching. Jim had a way of surprising all of us.

Jim shared a powerful vision: “democratizing access to the mathematics of change.” He believed that it was a moral responsibility as well as a social and political necessity to make mathematics accessible to all. At conferences, and in his papers, emails and personal contacts, Jim forged an ongoing virtual symposium, inspiring and connecting ideas and people, often through his puckish sense of humor. He was deeply committed to the toughest problem—how most effectively to teach all students the core ideas of algebra. The central project in Jim’s work was SimCalc, an approach, aided by computer-based graphs and animations as well as symbols and tables, that made mathematical rates of change and accumulation—the centerpieces of calculus—conceptually available to elementary and middle school students.

His death is a tragic loss to family, friends, and indeed to all in the mathematics education community. Jim helped people, from the under-prepared students at UMass Dartmouth to colleagues fortunate enough to work with him, including many at the Concord Consortium. We grieve for Jim while working to continue a common vision of democratic access to big ideas in mathematics.

George Collison (george@concord.org) is Senior Curriculum Author for the Seeing Math project.