Draft:Joe Rosenstein

Joseph G. Rosenstein is a teacher, mathematician and author. He is a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Rutgers University.

Rosenstein’s activities initially focused on research in mathematics, particularly in mathematical logic, model theory, and recursion theory, on which he authored and co-authored numerous research articles and a book entitled Linear Orderings in 1982. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton NJ for two semesters in 1976-1977.

Rosenstein’s focus shifted to mathematics education in the mid-1980s, when he initiated and directed a number of programs, founded and served as Director of the New Jersey Mathematics Coalition, and published and co-published a number of articles and four books, New Jersey Mathematics Curriculum Framework, Discrete Mathematics in the Schools, Navigating through Discrete Mathematics K-12 and Problem Solving and Reasoning with Discrete Mathematics. As a result of his work in K-12 mathematics education and in promoting the improvement of K-12 mathematics education, he was the recipient of the Max Sobel Outstanding Mathematics Educator Award from the Association of Mathematics Teachers of New Jersey and the Rutgers Presidential Award for Distinguished Public Service, both in 1997.

Rosenstein has been a student and teacher of Judaica throughout his life, has been involved in the creation of communal organizations, and has authored many articles and published four books, Siddur Eit Ratzon, Machzor Eit Ratzon, Memorable Verses in the Torah, and Reflections on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): Not Just What My Rebbe Taught Me.

Early life and education

Rosenstein was born in London in 1941 during the Blitz bombing, after his parents arrived in England shortly before Hitler invaded Poland; his father's mother and all of his mother's siblings, along with their families, were murdered by the Nazis in the concentration camps, in the forests, and in the machine-gun massacre of nearly 6,000 Jews in Lida, Poland on May 8, 1942. [] In 1948, he moved to the United States with his family, settling in Rochester, New York, where he completed his high school education at Benjamin Franklin High School. He earned a bachelor’s degree in Mathematics in 1961 from Columbia University, where he also took classes at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, followed by a PhD in Mathematics from Cornell University in 1966. He has studied Jewish texts with partners (chevruta) throughout his adult life.

Career

Mathematics

Rosenstein began his academic career as an Instructor in Mathematics at Cornell University in 1966 and Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota from 1966 to 1969. In 1969, he began a 48-year career at Rutgers University as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics and later became Associate Professor in 1972, Professor in 1979, Professor II in 1999, Distinguished Professor in 2013, and has been serving as Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Mathematics since his retirement in 2017.

Rosenstein has also held several administrative appointments at Rutgers University. He was the Vice-Chair and Director of the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics from 1981 to 1985, served as co-Chair of the President’s Special Study Committee on Pre-College Preparation for Admission to Rutgers University in 1982-1983, assumed the role of Associate Director for Education of DIMACS (the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science) from 1990 to about 2007, directed the mathematics component of the Rutgers Academic Challenge (an annual competition for teams of high school students) from 1999 to 2004, and he was the Coordinator of the PhD program in Mathematics Education from 2004 to 2008.

Mathematics education

Rosenstein obtained funding for and directed a number of programs at Rutgers University, including serving as Director of the Precalculus Project from 1987 to 2017, Director of the Institutes for New Teachers of Mathematics and Science from 1987 to 2000 (both funded initially by the New Jersey Department of Higher Education), Director of the Rutgers Young Scholars Program in Discrete Mathematics from 1990 to 2017 (funded for 8 years by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and subsequently by the AT&T Foundation and the National Security Agency and others), Director of the Leadership Program in Discrete Mathematics from 1990 to 2007 (funded by the NSF), and the Director of Mathematics Workshops from 2000 to 2020.

Rosenstein has served important professional roles on the state level as well. He founded and served as Director of the New Jersey Mathematics Coalition from 1991 to 2007; the Coalition brought together all stakeholders to work together to improve mathematics education in the state, including K-12 teachers and administrators, college faculty, corporate representatives, members of the public, and government officials. The Coalition soon after its founding obtained a grant, in conjunction with the New Jersey Department of Education, from the United States Department of Education, to produce mathematics standards for the state and to develop a document, the New Jersey Mathematics Curriculum Framework, to assist teachers in implementing the standards. This was completed in 1996, when the New Jersey Board of Education adopted the standards and when the Framework was published. He served as Director of these efforts, together with a representative of the NJ Department of Education. He was also Director of the revision of the standards in 2002 (adopted by the state), and the endeavor to further revise the standards five years later. The Coalition also obtained funding from the National Science Foundation for an effort to educate parents on the new state standards; he co-directed this initiative with Warren Crown. The FANS (Families Achieving the New Standards in Mathematics, Science, and Technology) Project conducted over 1400 workshops for parents throughout the state from 1997 to 2000.

Rosenstein also worked to improve mathematics education at the national level. Coalitions similar to the New Jersey Mathematics Coalition were organized in almost all states, and the state coalitions formed a national group. He served on the Board of Directors of the National Alliance of State Science and Mathematics Coalitions (NASSMC) from 1997 to 2005 and served as its Vice-President from 2001 to 2002.

In 2003, Rosenstein served as the Founding Director of MetroMath: Center for Mathematics in America’s Cities, an NSF Center for Learning and Teaching, until 2005, and later served as a member of the U.S. National Commission for Math Instruction at the National Academy of Sciences from 2006 to 2010.

Judaica

Rosenstein was among the founders of the Highland Park (NJ) Minyan, an independent prayer and social action Jewish community, in 1973 and was among the founders in 1979 of the National Havurah Committee (NHC) and its summer institute, both of which he served as chair. Both organizations are still active in 2024. Over the years, he has led guided meditations that focused on Jewish prayers and taught courses in Judaism at the NHC institutes and retreats, and has lectured and taught courses (both in person and virtually) at many congregations and Jewish study centers throughout the US. He also conducted a virtual book tour and offers virtual courses based on his most recent publications.

Works

Rosenstein has made significant contributions to three primary fields: mathematics, mathematics education, and Judaica. Within mathematics, his focus has been on mathematical logic, within mathematics education he has focused on K-12 teaching and learning, and within Judaica, he has published prayerbooks and explored Jewish ethics, meditation, liturgy, and texts.

Mathematical research

Rosenstein conducted research in two areas of mathematical logic, model theory and recursion theory. In model theory, he explored structures whose theories were ℵ0-categorical, that is, had only one countable model (up to isomorphism). He published articles on the ℵ0-categoricity of linear orderings, groups, and rings, in collaboration with Gregory Cherlin and Angus Macintyre. For example, in these articles it was determined exactly which countable orderings and which countable rings without nonzero nilpotent elements were ℵ0-categorical. In recursion theory, he explored recursive models (for example, in “Recursive Linear Orderings”) and recursive versions of combinatorial theorems. Collaborating with Alfred B. Manaster, he investigated the recursive version of Philip Hall’s classical “Marriage Theorem” and showed, for example, that there is a recursive society, in which each person knows exactly two other people, whose marriage problem is solvable but is not recursively solvable. In a later paper, they generalized this conclusion and deduced that there exist recursive 2(k−1)-regular graphs with chromatic number k, yet which are not recursively k-chromatic. They also investigated two-dimensional partial orderings from the perspective of recursive model theory and from the perspective of undecidability, and showed for example that the theory of two-dimensional partial orderings is undecidable, like the theory of partial orderings, and in contrast to the theory of linear orderings (i.e., one-dimensional partial orderings) which was known to be decidable.[16] These investigations would now be subsumed under “theoretical computer science” rather than “mathematical logic,” but they were undertaken prior to the emergence of computer science as a separate discipline.

Since much of his research involved linear orderings, Rosenstein then embarked on a project to compile all that was known about the subject, and that effort resulted in the publication in 1982 of his 487-page book Linear Orderings.

Contributions to mathematics education

Rosenstein’s contributions to mathematics education include the development of instructional materials for current and prospective teachers of K-12 mathematics, advocacy for including discrete mathematics at all grade levels, and research on mathematics education.

For the development of instructional materials, Rosenstein organized a large number of New Jersey teachers of mathematics to participate in the development of the New Jersey Mathematics Curriculum Framework (which he edited, with the assistance of Warren Crown and Janet Caldwell), which was created to support teachers in implementing the New Jersey Mathematics Standards adopted by the New Jersey State Board of Education in 1996. He collaborated with Valerie DeBellis, Eric Hart, and Margaret Kenney on two volumes titled Navigating through Discrete Mathematics K-12, published in 2008 and 2009, one addressed to K-5 teachers and the other to 6-12 teachers, as part of a series by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) intended to help K-12 teachers to navigate their way through the NCTM standards. Additionally, with DeBellis, he co-authored Making Math Engaging: Discrete Mathematics for K-8 Teachers, which was used as a textbook for prospective K-8 teachers of mathematics. He subsequently expanded, revised, and refocused this book into Problem Solving and Reasoning with Discrete Mathematics which was also intended to be used as a textbook for high school and college students. Referring to this book, Michael Goldberg stated, “I believe Rosenstein’s book comes close to offering a vast range of students a tempting invitation to reconsider math as something enjoyable, beautiful, and perhaps most importantly, understandable.”

With respect to advocacy for including discrete mathematics at all grade levels, Rosenstein served as an Editor of Discrete Mathematics in the Schools (with Fred Roberts and Deborah Franzblau), a collection of original articles that demonstrated how discrete mathematics could be and was being introduced in schools. He wrote articles that presented an overview of the impact, necessity, and advocacy efforts surrounding discrete mathematics education in American schools, outlining the benefits of integrating discrete mathematics into school curricula, offering problem-solving examples, and proposing a year-by-year model for its inclusion. In response to the question of where discrete mathematics would fit in an already crowded math curriculum, he argued that a course in precalculus was only useful to students who would be taking calculus; those who were not calculus-bound would benefit more from taking a course in discrete mathematics. He testified to that effect to the New Jersey Legislature’s Joint Committee on Education, and was successful in convincing the state not to require all students to take a precalculus course.

With respect to research in mathematics education, he conducted two studies (the second with Anoop Ahluwalia) on the effects on first-year students at Rutgers of having taken an Advanced Placement (AP) Calculus course in high school. The two key findings of these studies are that, first, a very small percentage of those who are accelerated throughout high school maintain that acceleration through their first year at college, so that the AP Calculus course generally fails to meet its original and primary objective of providing advanced placement, and, second, that there is no evidence that encouraging more students to take AP Calculus will expand the STEM pipeline. They showed that fewer than 10% of the students who had taken AP Calculus actually used that course for “advanced placement,” that is, took the second and third semester calculus courses in their first year in college; many more used it either to improve their chances for admission to Rutgers or to avoid taking calculus in college, or both. Moreover, according to him, although it is important to provide access to the STEM pipeline to disadvantaged students, a significant problem with the STEM pipeline is that it is leaky; too many of the students who could prepare for STEM careers choose not to do so.

In a study with Edward Liu, Aubrie Swan and Deena Khalil, conducted as part of MetroMath, Rosenstein examined challenges faced by urban district administrators in recruiting and retaining high-quality math teachers, emphasizing complexities arising from limited candidate pools, high demand, competition, policy, organizational factors, and administrators' views on teaching qualities.

Contributions to Judaica

Rosenstein's initial work focused on Jewish meditation and liturgy. In 1996, he published an audio tape that contained 30-minute guided meditations on Psalm 23 (“Restoring My Soul”) and Psalm 27 (“Gathering Me In”).

In 2003, Rosenstein authored Siddur Eit Ratzon, a Jewish prayerbook initially designed for Shabbat morning services and later expanded into a full Shabbat prayerbook in 2006, followed by the publication of a similarly structured prayerbook for the services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, called Machzor Eit Ratzon in 2011.Subsequently, he published a weekday edition of Siddur Eit Ratzon. His prayerbooks are both traditional and nonconventional, offering a four-column format and presenting traditional Hebrew text (with modifications), complete transliteration, and a new translation. They also include commentary to assist readers in navigating the prayers and overcoming any obstacles in reciting the prayers and participating in the prayer service.

On Siddur Eit Ratzon, author Rabbi Harold Kushner commented, “Rosenstein, who is a professor of mathematics and not a rabbi, has succeeded in prying open the familiar prayers of the daily and Shabbat service and exposing the kernel of relevance at its core…Professor Rosenstein is to be congratulated for this superb guide to honest worship.” On Machzor Eit Ratzon, writer Abigail Pogrebin remarked, “I need to mention this volume because it becomes my lifeboat throughout the morning…The structure of this book provides a running explanation of why each prayer is there and how it connects to Torah or to the liturgy as a whole. Looking up the author’s name after the service, I am surprised to learn the book was compiled by a non-rabbi who was simply captivated by liturgy and eager to open it up for others…I am certain that if every bored Jew held this prayer book, they would never be bored again.”

Later, in 2018, Rosenstein published Memorable Verses in the Torah which consists of about 150 key Torah verses with commentary and questions, suitable for all, allowing readers both to discuss the verses individually or to perform a comprehensive review of the Torah by reading the verses consecutively. His 2022 work, Reflections on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): Not Just What My Rebbe Taught Me, offered commentary on each mishnah individually while also providing a broader perspective, discussing major themes found in Pirkei Avot both within the presentation of each mishnah and in separate “theme chapters.” A second edition was published in 2023. undefined

Awards and honors


 * 1976-1977 – Member, Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton NJ


 * 1997 – Max Sobel Outstanding Mathematics Educator Award, Association of Math Teachers of New Jersey


 * 1997 – Rutgers Presidential Award for Distinguished Public Service, Rutgers University

Bibliography

Books on mathematics


 * Linear Orderings (1982) ISBN 978-0125976800

Books on mathematics education


 * New Jersey Mathematics Curriculum Framework (with Warren Crown and Janet Caldwell) (1996)


 * Discrete Mathematics in the Schools (with Fred Roberts and Deborah Franzblau) (1997) ISBN 978-0821811375


 * Making Math Engaging: Discrete Mathematics for K-8 Teachers (with Valerie DeBellis) (2009)


 * Navigating through Discrete Mathematics K-12 (with Valerie DeBellis, Eric Hart, and Margaret Kenney) (2008) ISBN 978-0873535861


 * Problem Solving and Reasoning with Discrete Mathematics (2014) ISBN 978-0974772486

Books on Judaism


 * Siddur Eit Ratzon (2006) ISBN 978-0974772417


 * Machzor Eit Ratzon: A Prayerbook for Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur (2011) ISBN 978-0974772431


 * Memorable Verses in the Torah (2018) ISBN 978-0974772448


 * Reflections on Pirkei Avot (Ethics of the Fathers): Not Just What My Rebbe Taught Me (2022) ISBN 978-0974772424

Selected articles in mathematics


 * Rosenstein, J.G. (1969). ℵ0-categoricity of linear orderings. Fundamenta Mathematicae LXIV, 1-5.


 * Manaster, A. B., & Rosenstein, J. G. (1972). Effective matchmaking (recursion theoretic aspects of a theorem of Philip Hall). Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society, 3(4), 615-654.


 * Cherlin G., & Rosenstein, J. G. (1973). ℵ0-categoricity of groups. Journal of algebra, 25(3), 435-467.


 * Macintyre, A., & Rosenstein, J. G. (1976). ℵ0-categoricity for rings without nilpotent elements and for Boolean structures. Journal of Algebra, 43(1), 129-154.


 * Manaster, A.B., & Rosenstein, J.G. (1980). Two-dimensional partial orderings: Undecidability. The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 45(1), 133-143.

Selected articles in mathematics education


 * DeBellis, V. A., & Rosenstein, J. G. (2004). Discrete mathematics in primary and secondary schools in the United States. ZDM, 36, 46-55.


 * Liu, E., Rosenstein, J. G., Swan, A. E., & Khalil, D. (2008). When districts encounter teacher shortages: The challenges of recruiting and retaining mathematics teachers in urban districts. Leadership and Policy in Schools, 7(3), 296-323.


 * Ahluwalia, A., & Rosenstein, J.G. (2017). Putting Brakes on the Rush to AP Calculus. In The Role of Calculus in the Transition from High School to College Mathematics (edited by David Bressoud, published by the Mathematical Association of America and the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics)


 * Rosenstein, J.G., (2018). The Absence of Discrete Mathematics in Primary and Secondary Education in the United States .. and Why That is Counterproductive. In Teaching and Learning Discrete Mathematics Worldwide: Curriculum and Research (edited by Eric Hart and James Sandefur, published by Springer)


 * Rosenstein, J. G. (2020). Discrete mathematics in 21st century education: An opportunity to retreat from the rush to calculus. In Foundations for the future in mathematics education (pp. 211-223). Routledge.

Selected newspaper articles in mathematics education


 * “Standards-based education”. Star-Ledger. July 24, 1993.


 * “How the business community can help New Jersey implement the content standards”. Star-Ledger. September 1996.


 * “Algebra II + all high schoolers = overkill”. Star-Ledger. April 29, 2008.

References


 * 1) ^ Jump up to:a b "Joseph Rosenstein".


 * 1) ^ Jump up to:a b "Max Sobel Award".


 * 1) ^ Jump up to:a b "Faculty Honors".


 * 1) ^ "Cornell Mathematics Doctorates, 1960-1969".


 * 1) ^ "DIMACS Members".


 * 1) ^ "Professional Development Programs for Grade K-12 Teachers of Mathematics".


 * 1) ^ "Document Resume" (PDF).


 * 1) ^ "Rutgers–Department of Mathematics" (PDF).


 * 1) ^ "National Havurah Committee".


 * 1) ^ Jump up to:a b "(22F4) Rewards & Punishments in Pirkei Avot".


 * 1) ^ "ℵ0-Categoricity for rings without nilpotent elements and for boolean structures".


 * 1) ^ "On ℵ0-categorical Abelian by finite groups".


 * 1) ^ "Effective Matchmaking (Recursion Theoretic Aspects of a Theorem of Philip Hall)".


 * 1) ^ "Effective matchmaking and k-chromatic graphs".


 * 1) ^ "Two-dimensional partial orderings: Recursive model theory".


 * 1) ^ "Two-dimensional partial orderings: Undecidability".


 * 1) ^ "Review: Problem Solving and Reasoning With Discrete Mathematics".


 * 1) ^ "Discrete mathematics in primary and secondary schools in the United States".


 * 1) ^ "The Absence of Discrete Mathematics in Primary and Secondary Education in the United States… and Why that Is Counterproductive".


 * 1) ^ "N.J. likely to subtract Algebra II requirement".


 * 1) ^ "The Rush to Calculus" (PDF).


 * 1) ^ "Putting Brakes on the Rush to AP10 Calculus" (PDF).


 * 1) ^ "The Role of Calculus in the Transition from High School to College Mathematics" (PDF).


 * 1) ^ "When Districts Encounter Teacher Shortages: The Challenges of Recruiting and Retaining Mathematics Teachers in Urban Districts".


 * 1) ^ "Rutgers math professor pens High Holy Days prayer book".


 * 1) ^ "My Jewish year: 18 holidays, one wondering Jew".