American Institute of Mathematics

What it reported doing in 2024

Directed grants: the following directed grants were active during the year:1. Collaborative research: aim & icerm research experience for undergraduate faculty (reuf)enabling more americans to earn undergraduate degrees in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) is important to improving american innovation capabilities. Participating in research as undergraduates improves retention in stem majors and encourages students to pursue graduate degrees. Faculty at colleges and universities that focus on undergraduate education are critical to this mission, yet in many cases such faculty receive little support to do research with the students they teach or continue their own research, and doctoral programs often fail to train their graduates to mentor undergraduate research. To address this need, the american institute of mathematics and the institute for computational and experimental research in mathematics conducted a series of four annual research experiences for undergraduate faculty (reuf) workshops during the summers of 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024. Progress continued through the year by the pi.2. Collaborative research: utmost: undergraduate teaching in mathematics with open software and textbooksutmost 3.0 will address challenges in the undergraduate stem curriculum, particularly the need to promote student learning and the development of mathematical and computational skills. Specifically, this project focuses on open source mathematics text books that are available in free online versions. It seeks to understand two interrelated questions: "how do instructors and students use textbooks? And how can we develop textbooks that better support teaching and learning." to answer these questions, the project will complete a comprehensive educational research study that includes gathering data from multiple classrooms in a variety of settings, and subsequent analysis of that data. The development portion of the project will focus on pretext, a publishing system designed to encourage the creation of free, open source textbooks. The project will examine the use of existing books created with pretext, and from these observations further develop the pretext platform, so that open source textbooks can have increased effectiveness. The integration of research and development activities is designed to createa continuous cycle of innovation between te research and development activities. The education research component of this project will study 49 courses taught at two-year colleges, and four-year colleges and universities. These courses include first-year calculus, second-year calculus, second-year linnear algebra, and upper-division abstract algebra. The research study will investigate the work of instructors in planning and teaching lessons drawn from an online textbook and the work of students as they use the same textbooks to learn the material. In addition, the study will contrast such work with the work that instructors and students do when using less dynamic resources, e.g. A pdf or bound copy of the same material. Pretext is a new authoring platform that enables authors to easily fashion a textbook for both print (static) and online (dynamic) formats, including both computational and interactive components in the online version. The project will continue the development of pretext and the technical underpinnings to create high quality online versions of textbooks, while only requiring authors to concentrate on their content. The accessibility features for readers with disabilities will be further improved. The inherent technical structure of online pretext books will allow automated collection of student textbook usage data, organized by individual reader, with resolution to the minute and at the level of individual components, such as viewing a video. This interplay between research and development activities will produce large amounts of high-quality data about students' use of their textbooks. The open textbook

Financial Efficiency

• Mission deployment rate: 78.1%; rating input score 78
• Program expense ratio: 73.1%; rating input score 73
• Fundraising efficiency: Limited

Transparency & Controls

• Consistency checks: 100%; rating input score 100; 63rd percentile among comparable filings
• Pay-setting controls: 3 of 6 controls in place; rating input score 50
  • Compensation committee: Pass
  • Independent consultant: Missing
  • Other Form 990s reviewed: Missing
  • Written employment contract: Missing
  • Compensation survey or study: Pass
  • Board or committee approval: Pass
• Foreign activity oversight: Limited
• Grant itemization coverage: Limited
• Major donor itemization: Yes; rating input score 100
• Related-party transparency: Limited

Accountability

• Independent voting board: 100%; rating input score 100; 63rd percentile among comparable filings
• Governance controls: 8 of 8 controls in place; rating input score 100
  • Conflict-of-interest policy: Pass
  • Whistleblower policy: Pass
  • Document-retention policy: Pass
  • CEO compensation review process: NotApplicable
  • Other executive compensation review process: Pass
  • Form 990 shared with the board: Pass
  • Board meeting minutes documented: Pass
  • Audit committee oversight: Pass
  • Independent financial-statement audit: Pass

Sustainability

• Operating margin: -6.6%; rating input score 18; 18th percentile among comparable filings
• Total-asset coverage ratio: 0.52; rating input score 18; 18th percentile among comparable filings
• Liabilities to assets ratio: 0.11; rating input score 57; 57th percentile among comparable filings
• Officer compensation ratio: 19.6%; rating input score 13; 13th percentile among comparable filings

Growth

• Program expense growth: 4.2% per year; rating input score 100; 35th percentile among comparable filings
• Revenue growth: 3.4% per year; rating input score 100; 30th percentile among comparable filings
• Asset growth: 12.3% per year; rating input score 100; 67th percentile among comparable filings