Event

Get ready for a lively, interactive Science Café with Penn math professor Robin Pemantle and Penn physics senior lecturer Bill Ashmanskas, both members of Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Innovation’s active learning seminar! 

Join us for an engaging, interactive conversation about Pemantle’s new book, There Is No One Way to Teach Math, in which he and his co-author, veteran high-school teacher Henri Picciotto, share their collaborative insights. This resource is packed with creative, student-centered ideas for engaging learners and inspiring teachers, blending research and classroom experience in a way that’s practical, yet flexible. Instead of a step-by-step manual, the book encourages you to think critically, reflect, and spark discussions, just like you would in the teachers’ lounge or at a fun conference gathering. Come with your questions, ideas, and curiosity, and be ready to explore how to bring this book’s concepts to life in your own classroom.

Featured Speaker

Robin Pemantle, Merriam Term Professor of Mathematics 
Robin Pemantle works in the field of probability theory and combinatorics. He was a Putnam Exam top five winner (1981), with fellowships from Sloan (1993 for research), Lilly (1993 for teaching), the Institute for Mathematical Statistics (2001, honorific) and the American Mathematical Society (2012, honorific, inaugural class), among others. He was elected in 2024 to the National Academy of Sciences. In the classroom, he specializes in active learning, developing numerous courses among several categories: math for pre-service teachers, first-year calculus, and applied probability modeling. Before getting his undergraduate degree, he taught math enrichment to grades 5 through 8 at Black Pine Circle Day School in Berkeley. His recent books include Analytic Combinatorics in Several Variables, 2nd Edition (Cambridge, 2024), There Is No One Way to Teach Math (Routledge, September 2024), and I Wish They Had Taught Me That! (under contract with A.K. Peters/CRC Press). 

Moderator

Bill Ashmanskas, Senior Lecturer, Physics and Astronomy 
Bill Ashmanskas teaches and develops undergraduate physics courses at Penn. He also works on readout electronics, instrumentation, and data acquisition for High Energy Physics and for Positron Emission Tomography. He currently works as a member of the Physics department’s HEP Instrumentation Group and of the Radiology department’s Physics and Instrumentation Group. 

Register Here

This event is free and open to the public. 

The Penn Science Café is generously funded by the Adolf and Felicia Leon Fund, which supports Penn Arts & Sciences programming and lecture series.