Mathematician Calls on Children
to Look for Joy in Numbers

This week on WOL AM, Kimberly Weems, a postdoctoral research associate in the Department of Statistics at North Carolina State University, told an interviewer how she became interested in science and mathematics as an elementary school child.

"I just had this constant exposure, you know, from elementary school through high school, just by having this contact with my mom after school," said Weems, whose mother taught math and science to high school students. "She had several insect collections and I studied the wing patterns on the insects. And then I remember she would, typically do some type of seed germination."

To produce Delta SEE Connection, a weekly radio program, AAAS has joined forces with the nation's largest African American sorority, Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., and the Delta Research and Educational Foundation (DREF).

"This initiative is opening for us a whole new medium for providing a window into the world of science for the African American community," says Shirley Malcom, director of the AAAS Directorate for Education and Human Resources and a commentator on the show. "In their stories, the scientists explain the importance of science in their lives, but also in the lives of everyday Americans."

WOL, 1450 AM, the Radio One station in Washington, DC, with the largest African American audience in the area, has become the first station to broadcast the interviews compiled for the project known as Delta SEE, for "Science and Everyday Experiences." The program can be heard every Saturday, from 5 to 6 p.m., through 18 October. In the coming weeks, the series will be distributed to Radio One stations nationwide, as well as to other radio stations in African American markets and to radio stations operated on the campuses of historically-black colleges and universities.

Listen to a clip from the most recent radio program, which was broadcast on Saturday, 21 June, from 5 to 6 p.m., or listen to the entire program in MP3 format (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4) or RealAudio (part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4).

See also all past Delta SEE radio programs.

—Coimbra Sirica

25 June 2003