New Math-Stats Minors Coming Fall ’26
In the February faculty meeting, the Mathematics and Statistics department successfully voted to approve two new minors. The new Math minor and Stats minor will be an option to declare starting next semester, and the requirements will be:
Math minor: Total five units. Five MATH courses numbered 112 or higher, at least two of which are numbered 300 or higher. None of the units applied to the minor may be cross-listed with your major program.
Stat minor: Total 5 units. STAT 141, STAT 243, a STAT unit numbered 200 or higher, and a STAT unit numbered 300 or higher, and one of CSCI 121, 122, or 221.
Also note the renamed STAT classes: STAT 241 (Data Science), STAT 291 (Probability), STAT 343 (Statistics Practicum), STAT 346 (Bayesian Statistics), STAT 392 (Mathematical Statistics), and STAT 394 (Causal Inference)
I met with Math-Stats Department Chair Kyle Ormsby, Statistics Program Chair Michael Pearce, and Math professor Alexander Moll to discuss their motivations behind the changes. In a joint statement, they described how “minors provide a way to formally recognize student work and achievement in a discipline without going as far as an interdisciplinary or double major.” They hope that the possibility of official recognition will encourage students with interest in the fields of mathematics and statistics to feel able to invest time and energy in these subjects.
In addition, they hope the changes will allow a broader base of people to be exposed to key concepts in statistics. For example, the course Probability (previously MATH 391) was redesigned to have two out of five of its prerequisites cut and made to a 200-level class. The hope is that more non-stats math students (and others) might be able to learn about this key intersection of mathematics and statistics earlier without needing to be fully committed to the subject.
In terms of the relabeling of stats courses from MATH to STAT, they said the goal is “to more accurately reflect the discipline of each course, who teaches it, etc.” and to aid in the differentiation of courses in the new minors. Additionally, the faculty noted some complaints from graduated students on how post-grad statistics programs were confused that their applications only listed MATH courses. These changes hope to alleviate these difficulties.
The changes were made only now for two main reasons. First, is that the Reed Math-Stats department recently completed a two-year long decennial department review. With feedback from outside reviewers, the faculty collectively noted the student desire for these programs. Once this desire had been formulated into a set of requirements for each of the minors, Ormsby also noted that some college-wide policies regarding minors had been changed in the December faculty meeting, which reduced the bureaucratic difficulties in getting the minors implemented. The faculty I met with were excited for the changes, and hopeful that students interested in math now feel able to take the classes. They described how:
“In a math minor, you will develop your capacity for abstract reasoning, theorem proving, and problem solving, deepening your mathematical maturity and your ability to think precisely about complex structures and ideas.
In a statistics minor you will, among other things, learn how to wrangle, model, and visualize data, explore the underpinnings of machine learning and AI, use computation for large-scale analyses, and communicate accurately about uncertainty.”