This week’s recommendation comes from:
Laurie Speranzo
IFL Mathematics Fellow
Laurie says, “Recently I was back on the University of Pittsburgh’s campus for IFL meetings, and I was again awestruck by the grandeur of the Cathedral of Learning. It is a building at Pitt that houses classrooms but also rooms representing nationalities all over the world. The rooms are beautiful and educative. They also honor the students who leave their homelands, their families, their language, their communities to come to Pittsburgh for a university education. Many of the students in our partner districts also live this experience as their families immigrate and make their homes in the United States. They bring to us their identities and their lived backgrounds, and for some, that means being able to share with their classmates ways of doing math that is fostered in other countries.”
Cathedral of Learning
University of Pittsburgh
“The Nationality Rooms are both at the heart of the University and at the center of community life of the city of Pittsburgh. The story of the Rooms is the story of the communities that are the heartbeat of Pittsburgh.”
Built in 1921, the Cathedral of Learning is a 42-story building that functions as the centerpiece of the University of Pittsburgh’s main campus in the Oakland neighborhood of Pittsburgh. Take a virtual tour of the nationality rooms at the Cathedral of Learning and learn more about this beautiful building here: Welcome to the Nationality Rooms | Nationality Rooms (pitt.edu). Explore this comparison of mathematical notation to see how some of our Latin students note their math versus what they see in the United States: Microsoft Word – OPERATION DESCRIPTION2.doc (todos-math.org).