Anne Aghion, an Emmy Award winning documentary filmmaker, spent four months in Antarctica last fall documenting what that extraordinary place does to the people who live and study there. "Some people feel obliterated by it. Others feel enlarged."

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This provocative question has become the standard opening gambit in my math teaching. Students’ responses include: climate change, terrorism, HIV/AIDS, Asian flu, energy dependence, over population, animal extinctions and pollution. I go on to explain that a major goal of our math course will be to see how mathematics can be used to address these important societal issues. All to often, mathematics courses focus exclusively on the mathematical content without making linkages to such larger issues.

In 1998, voters in a focus group were asked to close their eyes and imagine what a governor should look like. "They automatically pictured a man," says Barbara Lee, whose foundation promoting women's political advancement sponsored the survey. "The kind you see in those portraits hanging in statehouse hallways."

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