A brief history: Doug Faires, Fred Rickey (both national mentors), John Michel and Barbara Ashton (past presidents of the section) and probably some others in the Ohio Section have been trying to start a local version for a couple of years. After the banquet at last fall's meeting at Denison, Theresa Bright, Heather Hulett, Kristie Pfabe, and Pam Pierce gave a pep talk to introduce many of the people to the national program and to try to convince them that a local program would help get new people integrated into the sectional activities more quickly. The section came up with some money and the spring program was scheduled for the Thursday evening and Friday morning immediately before the start of the spring Section meeting at Youngstown State.

Theresa organized the session and John Michel contacted the participants. Six new local fellows and 6 national fellows attended a dinner Thursday night, along with the four leaders mentioned above. Before the dinner, Barbara discussed the workings of the local MAA and afterwards we discussed tenure issues. Friday morning we had three sessions. In the first, three national fellows (John Holcomb, Renee Koplon, and Heather Hulett) gave brief descriptions of their research. Fred Rickey gave a presentation during the 2nd hour on how and why we should introduce math history into any course. In the final session, David Flaspohler from Xavier U. talked to us about writing grants and what kind of state and federal money was available. Both of these talks were very well received and prompted good discussions.

The size of the group seemed very good for the first meeting. There were enough people to carry on discussions, yet everyone had a chance to speak and raise personal concerns. The funding provided by the section paid for the participants dinner and the extra lodging on Thursday night and for breakfast the next morning. As always, I found it rejuvenating to talk to Fellows and I also had the opportunity to meet other section members. I believe the Fellows can have a real impact on the local level -- at this first meeting, we made up 10% of the attendence. We plan to have another "pre-meeting" before the fall meeting with the same basic structure.

Thanks go to Fred, David, Barbara, and John for being supportive of the project and to Theresa for putting it together! Thanks also to Bernadette Mullins and John Holcomb for serving as hosts while we were in Youngstown!

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Address comments and suggestions to hern@math.bgsu.edu.