Zalman Usiskin

Zalman Usiskin is a professor emeritus of education at the University of Chicago, where he was a faculty member from 1969 through 2007.  He remains the overall director of the University of Chicago School Mathematics Project (UCSMP), a position he has held since 1987.  His research has focussed on the teaching and learning of arithmetic, algebra, and geometry, with particular attention to applications of mathematics at all levels and the use of transformations and related concepts in geometry.

He is the author or co-author of over 150 articles and other papers on mathematics and mathematics education, dozens of books and book-length research monographs, including textbooks for each of grades 6 through 12. In developing these books, he has taught mathematics in nine different secondary schools. He is a co-author of Mathematics for High School Teachers: An Advanced Perspective (Prentice Hall, 2003), a text for advanced undergraduate and graduate students interested in knowing more about the mathematics taught in high schools.

Since 2005 he has been working on the 3rd edition of the UCSMP secondary school curriculum, a curriculum that utilizes and assumes students have access to computer algebra systems, dynamic algebra and geometry, spreadsheets, and other technology.

He has served terms on the Mathematical Sciences Education Board of the National Research Council and the Board of Directors of NCTM.  He was for ten years a member of the steering and test development committees for mathematics of the National Assessment of Educational Progress.  He was chair of the United States National Commission on Mathematics Instruction from 1998 to 2001.  He has just finished a term on the advisory board of the Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers (COMET) of the Mathematical Association of America.

He received a distinguished career achievement award from the National Council of Supervisors of Mathematics in 1994 and a Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics in 2001.

He is well-known for his talks.  He has presented in every state of the union and 20 foreign countries, at a total of approximately 800 venues.  Twice he has been the banquet speaker at NCTM annual meetings, with presentations combining mathematics and music.  He has been the closing speaker at two USA-CAS conferences.  He first spoke at an Exeter conference in June 1969, on the subject of transformations, matrices, and groups in high school mathematics.  In June, 1985, he gave the keynote address at the first Exeter conference on computing in secondary mathematics.