Dynamist Blog

The Math Major

Harriet Miers was a math major at SMU. What does that mean? I checked the SMU catalogue for her era.

To major in math, students had to take one semester of Advanced Calculus (the catalogue lists no non-Advanced Calculus, so I take this to be what was known at Princeton as "freshman calculus"), Differential Equations, Introduction to Linear Algebra, and "nine additional semester-hours of advanced work in the department or in physics." The math department's advanced courses included a second semester of calculus, several actuarial and finance-oriented courses, College Geometry ("modern synthetica plane geometry...a continuation of classical high school geometry"), probability and statistics, the Teaching of Mathematics, Introduction to Modern Algebra ("an introduction to the principal modern algebraic systems; integral domains; groups, rings, and fields"), and a directed readings option. The department also offered a number of high-school-level algebra, geometry, and trig courses, though presumably majors took a more demanding curriculum. Grad courses were also open to seniors.

UPDATE: Here's a PDF file of SMU's math curriculum when Miers was an undergrad.

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