Designed for the 21st century classroom, this textbook poses, refines, and analyzes questions of sustainability in a quantitative environment. Building mathematical knowledge in the context of issues relevant to every global citizen today, this text takes an approach that empowers students of all disciplines to understand and reason with quantitative information. Whatever conclusions may be reached on a given topic, this book will prepare the reader to think critically about their own and other people’s arguments and to support them with careful, mathematical reasoning. Topics are grouped in themes of measurement, flow, connectivity, change, risk, and decision-making. Mathematical thinking is at the fore throughout, as students learn to model sustainability on local, regional, and global scales. Exercises emphasize concepts, while projects build and challenge communication skills. With no prerequisites beyond high school algebra, instructors will find this book a rich resource for engaging all majors in the mathematics classroom. From the Foreword No longer will you be just a spectator when people give you quantitative information—you will become an active participant who can engage and contribute new insights to any discussion.[...] There are many math books that will feed you knowledge, but it is rare to see a book like this one that will help you cultivate wisdom.[...] As the authors illustrate, mathematics that pays attention to human considerations can help you look at the world with a new lens, help you frame important questions, and help you make wise decisions. Francis Edward Su, Harvey Mudd College

This reference offers both a basic introduction and advanced technical details of available mathematical and computing methods for modeling sustainable development, closing an exisiting gap in this field, as well as illustrating their use through case studies and examples. The methods and case studies presented here are targetted at sustainable development, although they have a wide range of other applications, including economics, medicine and control systems.

Mathematics for Social Justice offers a collection of resources for mathematics faculty interested in incorporating questions of social justice into their classrooms. The book begins with a series of essays from instructors experienced in integrating social justice themes into their pedagogy; these essays contain political and pedagogical motivations as well as nuts-and-bolts teaching advice. The heart of the book is a collection of fourteen classroom-tested modules featuring ready-to-use activities and investigations for the college mathematics classroom. The mathematical tools and techniques used are relevant to a wide variety of courses including college algebra, math for the liberal arts, calculus, differential equations, discrete mathematics, geometry, financial mathematics, and combinatorics. The social justice themes include human trafficking, income inequality, environmental justice, gerrymandering, voting methods, and access to education. The volume editors are leaders of the national movement to include social justice material into mathematics teaching. Gizem Karaali is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College. She is one of the founding editors of The Journal of Humanistic Mathematics, and an associate editor for The Mathematical Intelligencer and Numeracy ; she also serves on the editorial board of the MAA's Carus Mathematical Monographs. Lily Khadjavi is Associate Professor of Mathematics at Loyola Marymount University and is a past co-chair of the Infinite Possibilities Conference. She has served on the boards of Building Diversity in Science, the Barbara Jordan-Bayard Rustin Coalition, and the Harvard Gender and Sexuality Caucus.

Mathematics for the Environment shows how to employ simple mathematical tools, such as arithmetic, to uncover fundamental conflicts between the logic of human civilization and the logic of Nature. These tools can then be used to understand and effectively deal with economic, environmental, and social issues. With elementary mathematics, the book se

This book contains some contributions presented at the Applied Mathematics for Environmental Problems minisymposium during the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) held July 15-19, 2019 in Valencia, Spain. The first paper addresses a simplified physical wildfire spread model, based on partial differential equations solved with finite element methods and integrated into a GIS to provide a useful and efficient tool. The second paper focuses on one of the causes of the unpredictable behavior of wildfire, fire-spotting, through a statistical approach. The third paper addresses low -level wind shear which represents one of the most relevant hazards during aircraft takeoff and landing. It presents an experimental wind shear alert system that is based on predicting wind velocities obtained from the Harmonie-Arome model. The last paper addresses the environmental impact of oil reservoirs. It presents high-order hybridizable discontinuous Galerkin formulation combined with high-order diagonally implicit Runge-Kutta schemes to solve one-phase and two-phase flow problems through porous media. All the contributions collected in this volume are interesting examples of how mathematics and numerical modelling are effective tools in the field of environmental problems.

Mathematics and Climate is a timely textbook aimed at students and researchers in mathematics and statistics who are interested in current issues of climate science, as well as at climate scientists who wish to become familiar with qualitative and quantitative methods of mathematics and statistics. The authors emphasize conceptual models that capture important aspects of Earth's climate system and present the mathematical and statistical techniques that can be applied to their analysis. Topics from climate science include the Earth?s energy balance, temperature distribution, ocean circulation patterns such as El Ni?o?Southern Oscillation, ice caps and glaciation periods, the carbon cycle, and the biological pump. Among the mathematical and statistical techniques presented in the text are dynamical systems and bifurcation theory, Fourier analysis, conservation laws, regression analysis, and extreme value theory. The following features make Mathematics and Climate a valuable teaching resource: issues of current interest in climate science and sustainability are used to introduce the student to the methods of mathematics and statistics; the mathematical sophistication increases as the book progresses and topics can thus be selected according to interest and level of knowledge; each chapter ends with a set of exercises that reinforce or enhance the material presented in the chapter and stimulate critical thinking and communication skills; and the book contains an extensive list of references to the literature, a glossary of terms for the nontechnical reader, and a detailed index.

This edited volume focuses on how we can protect our environment and enhance environmental sustainability when faced with changes and pressures imposed by our expansive needs. The volume unites multiple subject areas within sustainability, enabling the techniques and philosophy in the chapters to be applied to research areas in environmental science, plant sciences, energy, biodiversity and conservation. The chapters from expert contributors cover topics such as mathematical modelling tools used to monitor diversity of plant species, and the stability of ecosystem services such as biogeochemical cycling. Empirical research presented here also brings together mathematical developments in the important fields of robotics including kinematics, dynamics, path planning, control, vision, and swarmanoids. Through this book readers will also discover about rainfall-runoff modelling which will give them a better idea of the effects of climate change on the sustainability of water resources at the watershed scale. Modelling approaches will also be examined that maximize readers insights into the global problem of energy transition, i.e. the switch to an energy production system using renewable resources only. Collective and discrete insights are made to assist with synergy which should progress well beyond this book. Insight is also given to assist policy formations, development and implementations. The book has a strong multi-disciplinary nature at its core, and will appeal to both generalist readers and specialists in information technology, mathematics, biology, physics, chemistry and environmental sciences.

This book uses mathematics of uncertainty to examine how well countries are achieving the 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) set by the members of the United Nations, with a focus on climate change, human trafficking and modern slavery. Although this approach has never been used before, mathematics of uncertainty is well suited to exploring these topics due to the lack of accurate data available. The authors place several scientific studies in a mathematical setting to pave the way for future research on issues of sustainability, climate change, human trafficking and modern slavery to using a wide range of mathematical techniques. Moreover, the book ranks countries in terms of their achievement of not only the SDGs, but in particular those SDGs pertinent to climate change, human trafficking, and modern slavery, and highlights the deficiencies in the foster care system that lead to human trafficking. As such it is an excellent reference resource for advanced undergraduate and graduate students in mathematics and the social sciences, as well as for researchers and teachers.

The purpose of this handbook is to help launch institutional transformations in mathematics departments to improve student success. We report findings from the Student Engagement in Mathematics through an Institutional Network for Active Learning (SEMINAL) study. SEMINAL's purpose is to help change agents, those looking to (or currently attempting to) enact change within mathematics departments and beyond--trying to reform the instruction of their lower division mathematics courses in order to promote high achievement for all students. SEMINAL specifically studies the change mechanisms that al.