I was in attendance at this year's Fall Mathematics Association of America Southern California meeting held at the beautiful Scripps College and enjoyed the program very much.

The first talk from Stacy Brown of Cal Poly was about Inquiry Based learning and Equity-Oriented Instruction. It was illustrating how mathematics education can reflect our society and not welcome people who have been 'othered'. Her talk had ideas from Edward Said's concept of Other as explained in his book Orientalism . Specifically, she gave examples of underrepresented students feeling 'othered' in the process of experiencing the Inquiry Based approach to teaching mathematics.

The second talk from Carol Schumacher of Kenyon College touched on ideas from perturbation theory and population dynamics to show graphically opposing-time-scale affects to solutions of systems of differential equations. In such a system, the length of the vectors in the vector field of solutions indicated whether the time scale was a slow or fast process.

The third speaker was Edray Goins from Pomona College. He was in some sense selling to the mathematics community present at the meeting to expend efforts on the subject of monodromy. His talk touched on ideas from schwarz's list of hypergeometric functions with finite monodromy to finding solutions to the quintic.

Dr. Schumacher described Dr. Brown's talk as magical, but that is what I feel about all three speakers' talks. Their talks all feed into my imagination. That is why I enjoy mathematics so much. So I left the meeting feeling a little rejuvinated to study math again.

The last part of the meeting was a contributed-papers session of mathematicians giving short talks of their work. I sat down on a few to get a sense of the kind of mathematics the community is currently expendingt efforts. I was able to hear old and new ideas from graph theory, integer partitions, neural codes, and gröebner bases.