The Future of College Mathematics

The Conference/Workshop of which these are the proceedings was held frcm 28 June to 1 July, 1982 at Williams College, Williamstown, MA. The meeting was funded in its entirety by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The conference program and the list of participants follow this introduction. The purpose of the conference was to discuss the re-structuring of the first two years of college mathematics to provide some balance between the traditional ca1cu1us linear algebra sequence and discrete mathematics. The remainder of this volume contains arguments both for and against such a change and some ideas as to what a new curriculum might look like. A too brief summary of the deliberations at Williams is that, while there were - and are - inevitable differences of opinion on details and nuance, at least the attendees at this conference had no doubt that change in the lower division mathematics curriculum is desirable and is coming.