Bruce Cooperstein

University of California, Santa Cruz

MDTP Workgroup Co-Chair

Bruce Cooperstein is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where he has been employed since 1975.  He received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1975 and received the Myers Award for the best dissertation by a mathematics graduate student that year.  He is the author of over fifty papers that have appeared in referred journals of conference proceedings. He is also the author of several textbooks, including an e-book on elementary linear algebra, an e-book on abstract algebra, and a hardcover text in advanced linear algebra. He has been the recipient of two national awards:  A W.K. Kellogg Fellowship (1982-85) and a Pew National Fellowship for Carnegie Scholars (1999-2000). 

Bruce has been involved in efforts to improve mathematics education at all levels since the early 1990s.  In 1994, he took the reins of the UC Santa Cruz site of Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project as director.  That year, he also assumed leadership of the Monterey Bay Area Mathematics Project (a site of the California Mathematics Project) and for many years participated in its summer workshops, offering professional development to K-12 teachers of mathematics.  He is author of the online course portfolio “Learning to Think Mathematically”. This was posted at the Gallery of the Scholarship of Teaching at the Knowledge Media Laboratory of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching and Learning, which makes public his efforts to create a novel college level course in problem solving.  Bruce has been a member of the Mathematics Diagnostic Testing Project Workgroup since 1999 and is currently the co-chair.