Michael Starbird

Michael Starbird is a University Distinguished Teaching Professor of Mathematics at The University of Texas at Austin. He has been at UT his whole career except for leaves, including as a Visiting Member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and as a Member of the Technical Staff at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. He is a national leader in Inquiry Based Learning methods of instruction. He has received over twenty teaching awards including the MAA’s 2007 Haimo Award, which is the highest national teaching award in mathematics; the Minnie Stevens Piper Professor award, which is a Texas statewide award given to professors in any subject in any college in the state of Texas; the UT System Regents’ Outstanding Teaching Award in its inaugural year; membership in the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in its inaugural year; member and former chair of UT Austin’s Academy of Distinguished Teachers; and has received most of the UT-wide teaching awards including the Jean Holloway Award for Teaching Excellence, the Dad’s Associate Centennial Teaching Fellowship in its inaugural year, the President’s Associates Teaching Excellence Award, the Chad Oliver Plan II Teaching Award, the Friars Society Centennial Teaching Fellowship, the Eyes of Texas Excellence Award (twice), the Texas 10 Award from the Texas Exes, and others. He is an inaugural year Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. In 2014, he received an honorary Doctor of Science degree from Pomona College. In 2017, he was inducted into the Texas Philosophical Society.

Starbird’s service contributions include work beyond UT Austin. He has served on the national education committees of both the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. He served on the MAA’s Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics and was a member of the Steering Committee for the MAA Curriculum Guide. The Curriculum Guide is produced approximately every ten years to present best practices in mathematics education to the nation. The MAA Curriculum Guide appeared in 2015. He served on the Mathematics for Learning by Inquiry (MLI) Strategic Planning Committee (2017-2020). He has served on the Mathworks Steering Committee since 2015. He became a member of the UT System Academy of Distinguished Teachers in its inaugural year, 2013, and he continues to serve there.

Starbird has actively participated in trying to improve the experience for undergraduate students at UT through administrative work as well as his own teaching. He served as Associate Dean for Academic and Student Affairs and as Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education in the College of Natural Sciences from 1989 to 1997. He served on the Steering Committee of the Academy of Distinguished Teachers most years since 2000 and chaired it for three years. He serves on many other committees on undergraduate education including on the Faculty Advisory Council of the Plan II Program, the Signature Course Advisory Committee, the Provost's Teaching Fellows, the Undergraduate Studies Committee in the Department of Mathematics, and several others. He directed the Inquiry Based Learning Project at UT and is prominent in national work on IBL. 

He garnered grants from the Educational Advancement Foundation and the NSF of approximately $3,600,000 since 2000 to support Inquiry Based Learning Projects. Most of those funds have been used to support graduate students. He has been instrumental in bringing in substantial additional grants in support of the College of Natural Sciences Discovery Learning Project.

He has produced DVD courses for The Teaching Company in the Great Courses Series on calculus, statistics, probability, geometry, and the joy of thinking, which have reached hundreds of thousands of people worldwide. He has co-authored three Inquiry Based Learning textbooks published by the MAA: (with David Marshall and Edward Odell) Number Theory Through Inquiry, (with Brian Katz) Distilling Ideas: An Introduction to Mathematical Thinking in the new Mathematics Through Inquiry subseries of the MAA Textbook Series, and (with Francis Su) Topology Through Inquiry also in the Mathematics Through Inquiry subseries of the MAA. He has written three books with co-author Edward Burger: The Heart of Mathematics: An invitation to effective thinking (in its 4th edition, used in several hundred colleges and universities, and winner of a Robert Hamilton book award); Coincidences, Chaos, and All That Math Jazz: Making Light of Weighty Ideas (which has been translated into eight languages); and The 5 Elements of Effective Thinking (which is published by Princeton University Press, has 19 foreign language editions, and was a 2013 Independent Publisher Book Award Silver Medal winner). His DVD courses and book now total approximately one million copies. 

Since 2000, he has given over 350 invited lectures and presented more than 40 workshops on effective teaching. The National Science Foundation, the MAA, and individual institutions have supported many of the faculty workshops. 

He has created several innovative courses at UT and produced one of UT's first Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs). His MOOC is titled Effective Thinking Through Mathematics. It first ran in 2014 and continues to run periodically to the present time. He produced an innovative online course for UT credit presented through UT Extension also entitled Effective Thinking Through Mathematics. Starting in fall, 2017 and continuing now, he created an innovative course combination to help underprepared students to be successful in calculus, at UT, and in life. The course combination is titled Effective Thinking Calculus. It combines a new version of his 'Elements of Effective Thinking' Signature Course with a section of calculus for underprepared students. The concept is that students whose pre-college preparation suggests they will have significant challenges in mathematics courses at UT do have mathematics issues, but they also have more fundamental issues with how they think and learn. This combination of experiences addresses both issues. Data about the success of students in the first five years of this experiment suggest that it greatly improves the rate of success of this group of diverse students in this course and in subsequent courses. Starbird and collaborators wrote up a description of this project as a chapter in an American Mathematical Society publication about effective calculus projects that appeared in 2023.

Starting in fall, 2020, he returned to his topological roots and has recently written two papers with Fields Medalist Michael Freedman resolving questions that they began thinking about nearly 40 years ago. One paper 'The Geometry of the Bing Involution' has been submitted to the Annals of Mathematics; the other paper 'Shrinking Without Doing Much At All' has been accepted to Algebraic and Geometric Topology. He is now working on a paper with Cameron Gordon with tentative title 'Wild Homeomorphsims of S^3'. 

He has recently (2024) been asked to participate in a large Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project to improve mathematics education nationally. The request for his participation included the following sentence: "We have a new project that we're working on with the Gates Foundation involving undergraduate math courses, and your name came up in a meeting last week - apparently you're Bill Gates' favorite mathematician!"
 

My mathematical research is in the area of geometric topology in dimension 3. Recent mathematical publications are:

(with Michael Freedman), The Geometry of the Bing Involution, 2022, 48 pgs. (submitted to Annals of Mathematics).

(with Michael Freedman), Shrinking Without Doing Much at All, Algebraic and Geometric Topology, 2023, 15 pgs. (accepted).

Currently, I am working with Freedman on the isotopy problem for simple closed curves in S^3 and with Cameron Gordon on Wild Periodic Homeomorphism of S^3. 

My work on education issues continues. I am working with Edward Burger on a book tentatively entitled "Teaching Effective Thinking Through Mathematics (Or Any Other Subject). I am also serving on the Advisory Board of a large Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation project to improve mathematics education nationally.