The Seventy-Fifth Anniversary Celebration

Abstract

The record [1] shows that 104 men and women, meeting on December 30 and 31, 1915, in room 101 of Page Hall on the campus of Ohio State University, formed a new organization which they named the Mathematical Association of America. They elected officers as follows: President, E. R. Hedrick of the University of Missouri; Vice-Presidents, E. V. Huntington and G. A. Miller of Harvard and Illinois; and Secretary-Treasurer, W. D. Cairns of Oberlin. They also elected an Executive Council whose twelve members were widely representative of important centers for the study of mathematics from the East Coast to the West Coast. This first Executive Council included J. W. Young, R. C. Archibald, Oswald Veblen, E. H. Moore, Florian Cajori, D. N. Lehmer, and other leaders of American mathematics. Finally, the Executive Council appointed a Committee on Publications consisting of H. E. Slaught, R. D. Carmichael, and W. H. Bussey, with Slaught as the Managing Editor of The American Mathematical Monthly. Today we salute these pioneers whose vision and wisdom established the Mathematical Association of America; today we celebrate the seventy-fifth anniversary of the organization which they bequeathed to us. But there was an earlier beginning which must be recognized; let me first describe the setting for this event. In northwest Missouri, about 75 miles north of Kansas City and 35 miles east of Saint Joseph, there is in the county of Caldwell a small town named Kidder. It is a little town: in 1900 its population was 357, and in 1910 it was only 306. Kidder is shown on the map of Missouri in the Rand McNally Road Atlas today, but without help it is difficult to locate: it is so small that it is not included in the index of towns and cities. The neighborhood of Kidder today is a pleasant and prosperous agricultural region, but before, during, and after the Civil War it suffered much violence and terrorism [7]. But peace and stability came eventually, and in 1884 the Congregational Church revived an earlier school in Kidder and called it Kidder Institute [5, pp. 294-296], [6, pp. 553-558]. In 1892 Benjamin Franklin Finkel [81, [9] joined the faculty of Kidder Institute as a mathematics teacher. Finkel was born in Ohio in 1865, he received a B.S. degree from Ohio Northern University in 1888, and, before he arrived in Kidder, he had been a teacher, a mathematics instructor, a principal, and a superintendent in schools and academies in Ohio and Tennessee. His experiences as a teacher had created in him a desire which he described as follows: