Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences

 
The Claremont Colleges Reception at the Joint Mathematics Meetings
 
Date: Thursday, Jan. 10, 2013
 
Time: 7-9 p.m.
 
Location: 

San Diego Marriott Marquis & Marina
Mission Hills Room (lobby level)
333 West Harbor Drive San Diego, CA 92101

The Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences (CCMS) is pleased to announce a research experience program for Claremont students during the summer of 2012 with funding from The Fletcher Jones Foundation. The program dates will be June 11 through August 3, 2012

Sponsored by Harvey Mudd College, Pomona College and CCMS, this workshop will consist of invited talks and an open problems session. Participants include:


   • Pablo Amster (University of Buenos Aires)
   • Alfonso Castro (Harvey Mudd College)
   • Jon Jacobsen (Harvey Mudd College)
   • John M. Neuberger (Arizona State University)
   • Stephen Robinson(Wake Forest University
   • Adolfo Rumbos (Pomona College)

Research Experiences at the Biology-Mathematics Interface (REBMI) and Claremont Center for Mathematical Sciences (CCMS) sponsor a Poster Event for Summer 2011 research. The event will be held from 4:15 to 5:15 Wednesday, September 14, 2011 at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum Courtyard - CMC campus.

The Department of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College will host the twelfth annual Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Conference on Friday & Saturday, February 4–5, 2011.

The theme of this year's conference is Broadening Participation in the Mathematical Sciences.

The conference opens on Friday evening with a public lecture delivered by Dr. Robert Bell '72. Saturday features lectures and a panel discussion with lots of time for discussions and casual interactions.

Prof. Gizem Karaali wrote:

Fletcher Jones Fellowships in Mathematics Summer 2011 CALL FOR PROPOSALS The Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences (CCMS) will host a research experience for Claremont students during the summer of 2011 with funding from The Fletcher Jones Foundation. The Fletcher Jones Foundation will fund nine undergraduate students from the various Claremont Colleges and three graduate students from CGU. These students will work with three faculty members for a period of eight weeks. Each faculty member will direct a research project with a team consisting of three undergraduate and a graduate student. The stipend for faculty is $8,700 (subject to federal and state taxes). CCMS is currently seeking summer research proposals from Claremont mathematics faculty.

Third Annual Women In Mathematics Symposium to be held Saturday, November 20, 2010. Keynote Address given by Asuman Aksoy, Claremont McKenna College. Sponsored by the EDGE Southern California mentoring network in collaboration with the Women in Math group at USC. Organizers: Alissa Crans (LMU), Cymra Haskell (USC), Ami Radunskaya (Claremont Colleges). Please see the attached link: http://pages.pomona.edu/~kjs04747/WIMS/Site/WIMS.html

The 2010 Fall Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America Southern California-Nevada Section will be held Saturday, October 16, 2010 at the University of California - Irvine.  Please pre-register by Tuesday, October 12th, at 5 pm, using the link at the section website:    http://sections.maa.org/socalnv/Meeting2010Fall.html

The meeting will feature exciting talks by invited speakers Colin Adams, Karl Rubin, Erica Flapan (Pomona College), and Roland Minton, as well as a Contributed Paper Session and the popular MAA Book Sale. The deadline for contributed paper proposals is Friday, Oct. 1, 2010.  Please see http://sections.maa.org/socalnv/Meeting2010Fall.html for details.

Invited talk titles are as follows:

Atul Vyas was an outstanding CMC student who was majoring in Mathematics and Physics. He tragically lost his life in a train crash that occurred on September 12, 2008 in Chatsworth, California. The Mathematics Department at CMC fondly remembers Atul as someone who was equally excited by the power of mathematical abstraction and the possibilities for its applications.  In memory of Atul, the CMC mathematics department will host a yearly lecture series, aimed at a general audience, on the Creative Application of Abstract Mathematical Ideas.  Our third lecture in the series will be given by Peter Schröder of Cal Tech.

What happens when nearly two million people encounter high level mathematics on YouTube? "Möbius Transformations Revealed" is a short film which illustrates the beauty of Möbius Transformations and shows how moving to a higher dimension makes them easier to understand. After winning an award from the National Science Foundation and Science Magazine, the video went viral with unexpected and entertaining results. This talk will describe the behind-the-scenes making of the movie, explore the mathematics it illustrates, and show the reactions of YouTube users who discover the visual allure of mathematics. You can view the famed YouTube video by clicking:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JX3VmDgiFnY

GEMS 2010 is ready, set go!!! Please click on the link below for details on our exciting upcoming season. http://ccms.claremont.edu/GEMS

Research Experiences at the Biology-Mathematics Interface (REBMI) and Claremont Center for Mathematical Sciences (CCMS) sponsoring Poster Event for Summer 2010 research. To be held from 4:00 to 5:00 Wednesday, September 15, 2010 at the Marian Miner Cook Athenaeum - CMC campus.

Gizem Karaali (Mathematics) has received a Young Investigator Award of $29,756 from the National Security Agency. She will use the award to continue her research on Yang-Baxter equations, super quantum groups, and Hopf algebras.

Erica Flapan, Pomona Math, has been awarded the Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching by the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America. Erica will be presented with this award at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans on Friday, January 7, 2011 at 4:25 PM.

The letter from the MAA says: "The Haimo Award is given to teachers who have been widely recognized as extraordinarily successful, and whose teaching effectiveness has been shown to have had influence beyond their own institutions. Erica robustly meets these requirements."

For all of you who will be attending the conference in New Orleans, please come to the award ceremony and to the celebration reception that follows.

For distinguished contributions to the mathematical sciences or education, Ami Radunskaya (Mathematics) was named the 15th Falconer Lecturer by the Association for Women in Mathematics and the Mathematical Association of America. She delivered her lecture, “Mathematical Challenges in the Treatment of Cancer,” at MathFest 2010 in Pittsburgh on 6 August. In addition, with colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and the University of Otago, she received a $124,472 award from the National Science Foundation for “Predicting the Release Kinetics of Matrix Tablets,” a project aimed at developing a mathematical model to aid in the design of time-release tablets.

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) gave a talk, "Complex Symmetric Operators: An Overview," in Prague on 31 August as part of a European Science Foundation exploratory workshop, Mathematical Aspects of the Physics with Non-Self-Adjoint Operators.

The work that Will Feldman did last summer (Summer 2009) while he got a CCMS summer research stipend will be presented at a conference and published in their proceedings:

W. Feldman, E. Cumberbatch, H. Abebe , "Improved Compact Model of Quantum Sub-band Energy Levels for MOSFET Device Application" Nanotechnology Conference, June 21-25, 2010 Anaheim, CA. (Accepted)

Erica Flapan (Pomona Mathematics) gave the keynote address, “When Topology Meets Chemistry,” at the Southern California Undergraduate Mathematics Conference held at the University of California, San Diego, on May 1, 2010.

Please visit the link below for a recapitulation of events in early May 2010:

http://www.hmc.edu/academicsclinicresearch/clinicprogram1/projectsday.ht...

Stephan Ramon Garcia (Mathematics) received a $164,890 grant from the National Science Foundation for his project “Complex Symmetric Operators – Theory and Applications.” and gave a talk, “Rationals, Irrationals, and Quotients of Primes,” at the Fullerton College Math Colloquium on May 4, 2010.

2nd Annual Women in Mathematics Symposium, Saturday, February 20, 2010. Keynote Address by Susan Montgomery, University of Southern California 

• Learn about the research of other women in Southern California
• Present your work in a supportive environment
• Network with other Southern Californian women mathematicians 
• Explore issues surrounding being a woman in mathematics

January 23, 2010 PLEASE NOTE: THIS MONTH, THE GEMS EVENT WILL BE HELD IN THE WILLIAM KECK SCIENCE CENTER, BURNS LECTURE HALL. The title is: Boom Ba Ba Boom, Boom Ba Ba Boom, Boom Ba Ba Boom presented by Dr. Adam Landsberg, Professor of Physics, Claremont McKenna College, Keck Science Center. Abstract: In this introduction to oscillation theory and Fourier analysis, we'll see how repetitive patterns/motions can be surprisingly interesting, and discover the fascinating mathematics used to describe them. Hands-on examples will include experiments with sound, music, and electrical impulses from the human heart. *** PLEASE NOTE MEETING PLACE TODAY  ONLY  will be in the William Keck Science Center, Burns Lecture Hall.

The conference will begin on Friday evening January 29, 2010 and continues through Saturday, January 30th with a panel discussion featuring representatives from the colleges and the Claremont community working on issues of sustainability. On Saturday, there will be four speakers from a variety of disciplines posing problems of interest to mathematicians and scientists. Please visit the site for details: http://www.math.hmc.edu/conferences/2010

Harvey Mudd College hosts the Fall 2009 Nelson Distinguished Speakers Series.

Through wide-ranging presentations by experts in the field of mathematics with follow-up discussions and analysis by students and faculty, the Nelson Series will celebrate and explore the impact that mathematics has had upon the world -- as a tool to develop public policy and solve societal issues, as a driver of innovation and creativity in media and entertainment, and as a unique and beautiful, stand-alone art form.

Professor Ami Radunskaya has been selected as the 2010 Etta Z. Falconer Lecturer to be held August 5-7, 2010 at MathFest in Pittsburgh. Her selection by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM )was recently announced by Georgia Benkart, President of the AWM. The Falconer Lecture is jointly sponsored by the AWM and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Dr. Benkart said, "The Falconer Lecture is presented each summer to recognize women who have made distinguished and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences or mathematics education. Sincere thanks for being such an inspiration, and congratulations from the AWM on this honor! Dr. Falconer worked tirelessly to encourage women and minorities to study and have careers in mathematics and science.

The recent research of Professors Ami Radunskaya (Pomona) and Lisette de Pillis (HMC) is highlighted in the October 2009 SIAM News Mathematics Meets Oncology and Immunology. Professors Rad and de Pillis began their collaborative research about 10 years ago by working with a group of physicians, an almost unheard of collaboration. This groundbreaking interdisciplinary research has spawned numerous talks and papers. Congratulations Dr.s Rad and de Pillis !!!

http://www.math.pomona.edu/SIAM.Rad.pdf

The grant supports special fellowships for graduate and undergraduate students in mathematics to study and conduct research during eight-week intensive summer sessions that could possibly be extended into senior, year-long theses. It will enable the center to pursue its important mission of promoting excellence in research and teaching in mathematics in the Claremont Colleges and in area secondary schools. “The announcement of the generous grant awarded to the Claremont Center for the mathematical Sciences by the Fletcher Jones Foundation was a special moment for an impressive group of mathematics teachers and researchers in the Claremont Colleges,” said CGU Interim President Joseph C. Hough.

The goal of SUMS is to engage in a discussion and exploration of issues surrounding gender inequity and underrepresentation both here in Claremont and in the larger national context. What is underrepresentation? What is gender inequity? Why should we work against them? What is the current state of underrepresentation in mathematics? Are there programs that have met with any degree of success in working toward diversity in mathematics? What can be done locally? This may be of interest not only to mathematicians and mathematics faculty, but also to students, faculty in other scientific disciplines, and also those interested in the relationship between science and society, in gender/race/class issues in society, and in the history of science.

This is to inform you that Kyle Kinneberg presented a research poster entitled "Widths of Sets in Metric Trees" to the AMS - Joint Mathematics Meeting 2009 held in Washington DC, January 5-8, 2009 and won a prize. The research was conducted during Summer 2008. Kyle and co member George Dekermenjian (CGU 09) were part of a research team sponsored by CCMS (CGU BLAIS Foundation). Faculty Advisors were Asuman Guven Aksoy (CMC) and Henry Shellhorn (CGU).

The Gateway to Exploring Mathematical Sciences program (GEMS) is a once monthly, Saturday morning workshop founded at the Claremont Colleges in the Fall 2008. GEMS is designed to reach seventh, eighth and ninth grade students who may have an interest in mathematics or science. The workshops present mathematics and science applications in an exciting way that catches these young students’ interest early. Included in the 2008-2009 GEMS program are the Pomona, Claremont and Upland Unified School Districts as well as selected private schools upon request. The students are selected by principals or teachers with the sole prerequisite that the young student shows enough interest to get up on a Saturday morning and come to the workshops.

The 2008 HMC Mathematics Conference took place on Friday Oct 24 and Saturday Oct 25, 2008. The Conference consisted of an evening lecture on Oct 24, five one-hour talks on Oct 25, and a poster session.

The evening lecture was delivered by Robert Borrelli and Courtney Coleman. They are the authors of the differential equations textbook used at HMC, and they will be available for book signing. Their talk will explore the transformation of the role of differential equations in the HMC curriculum over the last 40 years. The five talks on Saturday Oct 25 are by experts in Nonlinear Functional Analysis (which, according to S. Banach, is the marriage of Linear Algebra and Topology to solve nonlinear differential equations).

This poster session was hosted by Research Experiences of the Biological-Mathematical Interface (REBMI), and the Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences (CCMS). The event took place at the Claremont McKenna College - Anthenaeum on Wednesday, September 17, 2008 at 4 - 5 PM.

This invitation-only workshop was organized by Dr. Thomas Deisboeck, Harvard-MIT (HST) Athinoula A. Martinos Center for Biological Imaging and the Massachusetts General Hospital. The workshop website is http://ec.europa.eu/information_society/events/ict_bio/2008/ta-cancer-wk....

Professor DePillis, lead PI on the NSF/RUI grant entitled “Mathematical Modeling of the Chemotherapy, Immunotherapy and Vaccine Therapy of Cancer” (click here) spoke on “Mathematical Approaches to Modeling Immune-Cancer Dynamics”.

The results of the 2008 International Mathematical Modeling Contest were announced recently and HMC reached another stellar performance with three teams earning the top honor of Outstanding (given to only 12 teams out of 1542 entries worldwide).

No other college or university had more than one team earning Outstanding recognition. One of the winning teams was further distinguished with the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Award—an award for distinguished writing. Other Outstanding teams included Harvard, Duke, Beijing University, University of Buffalo, and the University of Delaware.

Claremont Graduate University's doctoral student, Imad Muhi El-Ddin, was awarded ITNG's 2008 Best Student Paper. The International Conference on Information Technology - New Generations (ITNG) is an annual event focusing on state of the art technologies pertaining to digital information and communications. The applications of advanced information technology to such domains as astronomy, biology, education, geosciences, security and health care are among topics of relevance to ITNG. Visionary ideas, theoretical and experimental results, as well as prototypes, designs, and tools that help the information readily flow to the user are of special interest. High Performance Computing, Computing Architectures, and Innovative Methods of Computing are examples of the related topics.

HMC Professor Robert Keller reports that David Buchfuhrer (HMC class of 2006, Math-CS Joint Major) has received an extraordinary academic honor. His paper "The Complexity of Boolean Formula Minimization" with his graduate adviser, Prof. Chris Umans, received the Best Paper Award at ICALP (International Colloquium on Automata, Languages, and Programming) last week in Reykjavik, Iceland. ICALP is the very prestigious conference running for 35 years; Buchfuhrer and Umans's paper resolves a famous open problem that has been open for roughly 30 years!

The Mathematics Departments of Claremont McKenna College (CMC), Harvey Mudd College (HMC), Pitzer, Pomona, and Scripps Colleges were awarded a 3-year REU NSF grant in 2008. The principal investigators (PI) of the grant are Professors Chris Towse (Scripps) and Jo Hardin (Pomona). [more...]

Pomona College, one of the Claremont Consortium of Liberal Arts Colleges, continues its tradition of promoting mathematics among females by once again hosting a national program designed to increase the number of women at top levels in the field of mathematics. Fourteen women, headed for graduate schools across the US this fall, spent the four weeks of June 5, through July 3, 2008 on the Pomona College campus reviewing and advancing their knowledge of mathematics in a program known as EDGE. This unique program, Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE), is structured to provide an academic bridge from undergraduate to graduate school and to prepare students for the distinctively different culture awaiting the small number of women who choose to study mathematics.

Every year in the January issue of the American Library Association, in the print and online formats, Choice publishes a list of American Library Association's Outstanding Academic Titles that were reviewed during the previous calendar year. This prestigious list reflects the best in scholarly titles reviewed by Choice and brings with it the extraordinary recognition of the academic library community.

Professor Vin de Silva and his research partner Robert Ghrist, were honored by Scientific American. Their research was highlighted as one of the fifty most important scientific developments in the year 2007 (see attached pdf file in particular pages 44 and 55 for details). Click here for an article from Claremont Courier about the honor by Scientific American.

Professor Francis Su recently received a research grant of $114,468 from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for the support of the project entitled “Combinatorial Fixed-Point Theorems, Polytopes, and Preference Sets”.

The grant lasts for three years beginning August 1, 2007. Su's research continues the line of work begun in his prior NSF grant from 2003–2007, in which methods from combinatorics, topology and geometry are used to study problems in mathematical economics and the social sciences; in particular, problems related to voting and fair allocation.

The Department of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College will host the 9th annual Harvey Mudd College Mathematics Conference (previously known as the Mt. Baldy Mathematics Conference) on Friday-Saturday, September 28-29, 2007. The topic this year is public sector operations research. Keynote speakers will discuss applications of operations research models in the public sector and future directions for such research. Speakers will make the first portion of their talks accessible to a general mathematical audience. We encourage anyone who wishes to learn more about research in this area to attend.

The conference is sponsored by the Department of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. The organizer is Susan Martonosi. [ read more ]

Professor Darryl Yong and Emeritus Professor Robert Borrelli awarded NSF grant of $499,792 to support the project entitled “Online Resources to Improve the Teaching and Learning of Differential Equations: Encouraging the Wide-Spread Use of Modeling and Computing.”

The aim of this project is to improve the teaching and learning of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) by facilitating the development, dissemination and wide-spread adoption of modeling projects and computer experiments. By encouraging the wide-spread adoption of innovations in the teaching and learning of ODEs, Yong and Borrelli seek to affect the training of a great number of future scientists, not just mathematicians. Every student at HMC must take the equivalent of a full-semester course in ordinary differential equations, regardless of their major.

Professor Alpan Raval has published a ground-breaking work entitled “Molecular Clock on a Neutral Network” in the prestigious Physical Review Letters.  Biologists and Scientific Historians use the number of mutations in the genes of a species to put dates on evolutionary history.  This “molecular clock” is now known to deviate from previously held theories, leading to larger-than-expected errors.  Raval’s paper provides an explanation for these clock errors and places precise mathematical estimates on their variation.  More information, along with some peer comments, may be found at the Physical Review Focus site or in CGU's press release.

"The Joy of Mathematics" is a course of 24 video lectures with Course Guidebooks. Professor Benjamin shows how everything in mathematics is connected and how the beautiful and often imposing discipline that has given us algebra, geometry, calculus, probability, and so much else is based on nothing more than just fooling around with numbers. [ read more... ]

Professor Jo Hardin of Pomona College receives American Statistical Association Waller Education Award in 2007 [more..]

Professor Andrew Bernoff (HMC) has been awarded an NSF grant for $405,372 for collaboration with an experimental physics group at Kent State University and with chemical engineers and mathematicians at Case Western Reserve University.

The joint theoretical–experimental–numerical project, entitled “Dynamics of Interfacial Domains”, delves into the basic physical behavior of lipid layers at the micron scale; one classical example being the lipid bilayer that forms the exterior wall of most biological cells. Bernoff's expertise in fluid mechanics and numerical methods has allowed precise simulations that almost exactly reproduce the experiments at Kent State.

CLAREMONT, Calif., Dec. 18, 2006 - A professor's research on the deceptively simple act of balancing a stick has yielded important insights into how the  brain controls expert motor skills, research that may prove essential as the population ages.

Dr. John G. Milton, M.D., Ph. D, Fellow, Royal College of Physicians of Canada, Fellow, American Physical Society and the William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of Computational Neuroscience at The Claremont Colleges, has received a $319,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to support his research on the motor skills associated with stick balancing.

Professor Arthur Benjamin is the MAA's sixteenth George Pólya Lecturer.

The award, named for renowned teacher and writer George Pólya (1887–1985), a Hungarian-born mathematician, is meant to encourage “the high quality of exposition which the Mathematical Association of America seeks to encourage”. It pays recipients' expenses for giving talks at MAA regional section meetings.

More details are available in the MAA Online article or the HMC article.

Professor John Milton (Kenan Professor of Computational Neuroscience at the Claremont Colleges) is the PI for a five-year NSF grant of $449,878 for "Research Experiences at the Biological-Mathematical Interface (REBMI)."  Our experience indicates that there are two barriers which severely limit undergraduate students when they come to work on real world problems at the interface between biology and mathematics: 1) limited computer programming skills; and 2) limited mathematical background in topics such as numerical analysis, stochastic processes, delay and partial differential equations, and data mining. These common concerns motivated the formation of the REBMI initiative. With the Co-PIs, Professors Lisette De Pillis (HMC, Math), Greg Dewey (KGI, Systems Biology), Art Lee (CMC, Math/Computer Science), Mario Martelli (CGU, Math), this project will prepare undergraduate students to work on interdisciplinary teams that tackle “translational”, real-life challenges at the crux of biology and mathematics.  The effectiveness of such teams depends not only on the individual expertise of the team members, but also on how well members develop skills related to critical thinking, problem-solving, project management, and effective communication (written and verbal).   In order to expose students to the questions and problems regularly confronted by practicing scientists, our institutional level program takes advantage of two industry sponsored capstone initiatives at The Claremont Colleges, the Mathematics Clinics at CGU and HMC, and the Team Masters Projects (TMP) at KGI. As such, student evaluation criteria will be based primarily on performance, and, in particular, on the performance of student teams to obtain implementable solutions to novel problems. In this way we will be able to identify and train those students who have the ability and desire to become the future leaders of bio-technology in this country.

GRANT TITLE: DMS 0638789, Complex symmetric operators and function theory

ABSTRACT: The P.I. will study complex symmetric operators, a class of Hilbert space operators that,
while encompassing many of the well-known and useful classes, has not been adequately studied in
generality until recently. Loosely put, a Hilbert space operator is called complex symmetric if it has a
symmetric matrix representation (over the complex field) with respect to some orthonormal basis. This
surprisingly large class includes all normal operators, compressed Toeplitz operators (including Jordan
model operators and finite Toeplitz matrices), Hankel operators, and many non-normal integral and
differential operators (including the classical Volterra operator and certain auxiliary operators produced by the complex scaling method for Schrodinger operators).

The School of Mathematical Sciences at CGU (www.cgu.edu/math) is pleased to announce the availability of fellowships (full tuition and stipend for one year) in the 2007-08 academic year for three fulltime graduate students to participate in our NSF-sponsored CGU-Boeing clinic projects. Eligible students must be citizens, nationals, or permanent resident aliens of the United States as of the date of the award (06/01/06).

Professor Lesley Ward has been named a 2006 recipient of the Mathematical Association of America's Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching.

The Southern California-Nevada Section of the Mathematical Association of America has selected Asuman Aksoy as the recipient of its 2006 Distinguished College or University Teaching Award. Aksoy, a professor of mathematics, was honored at the Association’s spring section meeting at California State University, San Bernardino, on Saturday, April 8, 2006.

The annual award is given to a mathematics professor selected by a committee of five members representing the different constituencies of the section: University of California, California State University, Private Colleges, and Community Colleges. The secretary-treasurer of the Association is a member ex-officio of the committee.

"Providence, RI--The American Mathematical Society (AMS) presents its first Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department to Harvey Mudd College in Claremont, California. The Mathematics Department at Harvey Mudd College excels in numerous dimensions. Its exciting programs have led to a doubling of the number of math majors over the last decade. Currently more than one out of every six graduating seniors at Harvey Mudd College majors in mathematics or in new joint majors of mathematics with computer science or mathematical biology. Furthermore, about 60% of these math majors continue their education at the graduate level. ..."

Professor Arthur Benjamin and coauthor Jenny Quinn received the Mathematical Association of America's Beckenbach Book Prize for their book Proofs that Really Count: The Art of Combinatorial Proof. The Beckenbach Prize is awarded to “distinguished, innovative MAA books” that are “truly outstanding”. The winning book is an introduction to combinatorial proofs and counting arguments. “Few mathematicians are immune to the limpid charms of a clever counting argument,” says the citation, noting that such charms are in abundant display in the book by Benjamin and Quinn. The award was presented at the National Joint Meeting of the AMS and MAA in January, 2006.

Karl Mahlburg '01 (now a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin) has proved a sixty-year old conjecture in number theory, first posted by Freeman Dyson in the 1940's, and building on the work of George Andrews and Ken Ono. The New Scientist has a detailed article; Malhburg is also collecting press reports.

Pathways is a Los Angeles area mathematics outreach program based in the Department of Mathematics at Harvey Mudd College. All volunteers are professional mathematicians who are eager to share their love of mathematics with elementary, junior high, and high school students. [ read more ]

The Mathematics Departments of CMC, HMC, Pitzer, Pomona, and Scripps Colleges were awarded a 3-year REU NSF grant in 2005. The principal investigator of the grant is Prof. Jim Hoste (Pitzer) and the Co-PI is Mario Martelli (CMC). [more...]

Click here to see the entire list of NSF REU sites.

Professor Francis Su (HMC) is the first recipient of the MAA's Henry L. Alder Award for Distinguished Teaching. This award honors beginning college or university faculty whose teaching has been extraordinarily successful and whose effectiveness in teaching undergraduate mathematics is shown to have influence beyond their own classrooms. Professor Su received his award in Providence, Rhode Island, at the MAA MathFest, August 12–14, 2004.

The 3-year NSF/RUI grant of $328,283 is headquartered at HMC with lead PI, Professor De Pillis and Co-PIs, Professors Gu and Fister. This project, entitled "RUI: Mathematical Modeling of the Chemotherapy, Immunotherapy, and Vaccine Therapy of Cancer", draws on the on the expertise from the three PIs in the areas of computation, differential geometry, and optimal control to develop mathematical modeling and analysis tools applied to the creation and testing of new combination cancer chemoimmunotherapies. These mathematical tools have the potential to provide clinical guidance in the structuring of patient-specific treatment protocols. The intellectual merit of the proposed activity rests in the development of population models governing cancer growth with combination vaccine and chemotherapy treatments, application of optimal control to guide the investigation of new combination therapies, and the study of differential geometry to understand the effect of volume reduction of vascularized tumors responding to chemotherapy and immunotherapy. Through simulations, geometric visualization, and optimal control techniques, an array of virtual experiments can be performed quickly with no risk to living persons. This is the first time that these three areas of mathematical expertise will be combined to explore the development of new optimally integrated chemo-immunotherapy cancer treatments.

Ariel E. Barton '04 was awarded honorable mention for the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Woman, awarded by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) at the AMS-MAA Winter Meetings in Phoenix, Arizona, in January, 2004.

The criteria for selection include, but are not limited to, the quality of the nominees' performance in mathematics courses and special programs, an exhibition of real interest in mathematics, the ability to do independent work, and, if applicable, performance in mathematical competitions.

Book Title: "Differential Equations: A Modeling Perspective"

The central themes of this text are the modeling of dynamically changing systems and the visualization of solutions of differential systems. The text uses qualitative, analytical and graphical approaches in the study of differential equations. Acompanying this text is a CD-ROM with the numerical differential equations solver ODE Architect which runs under Windows. [ read more ]

Senior mathematics major Eric Malm took first prize at the National Problem-Solving Competition, sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America, held at MathFest in Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday, August 14. Eric was the first student (among 25 participants, representing twenty institutions) to correctly solve seven challenging math problems on topics including geometry, number theory, combinatorics, probability, and differential equations. Richard Neal, director of the competition, said that Eric “finished the exam in record time”.

The results of the 2004 International Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) have just been announced, and HMC had another stellar performance, with three HMC teams earning top honors of “outstanding” and one team earning “meritorious”.

Twenty-one HMC students participated in this year's competition. The contest gives each team of three students 96 consecutive hours to develop a mathematical model and write a formal paper describing their work.

HMC Math student Joshua Greene '02 was awarded the 2002 AMS-MAA-SIAM The Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student at the Joint Math Meetings in Baltimore on January 16, 2003.

The City College of New York hosted a conference on March 1–2, 2002, in honor of one of its alumni, Mel Henriksen, professor emeritus of mathematics at HMC. Professor Henriksen is well known in the mathematics community for his work on the study of rings of continuous functions, which involves the interplay of algebra and topology. The conference was entitled “Melvin Henriksen at 75: His Research and Coworkers”, and featured talks by Leonard Gillman, Ed Beckenstein, Arkady Kitover, Ralph Kopperman, Ken Magill, John Mack, Prabudh Misra, Larry Narici, and Scott Williams.

Francis Su, assistant professor of mathematics, received the Merten M. Hasse Prize on August 3, 2001, at the Summer MathFest in Madison, Wisconsin.

Su received the award in recognition for his article “Rental Harmony: Sperner's Lemma in Fair Division”, which appeared in the American Mathematical Monthly, in December, 1999.

The idea for a Center for Quantitative Life Sciences emerged from discussions among the Biology and mathematics faculty at HMC. In 2000, Professor Michael Moody, then the Chair of the HMC Math Department, submitted a proposal to the Keck Foundation seeking funding to establish the Center. The Foundation awarded a 5-year grant of $500,000 to Harvey Mudd College to establish the Center for Qualitative Life Sciences (QLS) in 2001.  Michael Moody was the first Director of the Center, and Professors Lisette DePillis (Mathematics) and Stephen Adolph (Biology) became co-Directors in 2002. The Center was formally approved by the college in late 2002. The first Center visitors came in 2002, and the first sponsored research projects began in 2003.

History

The idea for a Center for Quantitative Life Sciences emerged from discussions among the Mathematics and Biology faculty at Harvey Mudd. In 2000, Michael Moody, then the chair of the Math Department, wrote a proposal to the Keck Foundation seeking funding to establish a Center. The proposal was funded in early 2001, and Lisette de Pillis and Steve Adolph became co-directors of the Center. The Center was formally approved by the College in late 2002. The first Center visitors came in 2002, and the first sponsored research projects began in 2003.

Click here for more information.

In Professor Flapan's monograph entitled "When Topology meets Chemistry: A Topological Look at Molecular Chirality" readers learn about knot theory, 3-dimensional manifolds, and the topology of embedded graphs in order to understand their role in molecular structures. The topics in the monograph are motivated by questions asked by chemists and molecular biologists.

Mario Martelli, Southern California Section

Citation

Professor Mario Martelli came from a professorship at his native University of Florence, Italy, to the United States in 1980 and became a member of the Southern California Section of the MAA in 1987, when he was appointed to a position as Professor at California State University at Fullerton. He served the Section as Program Vice-Chair in 1993-94 and Program Chair in 1994-95, and in those positions was instrumental in obtaining outstanding speakers and programs. From 1996 through 1999, he served as Secretary-Treasurer of the Section, and he was an enabling force and organizer that kept everything running smoothly.

Professor Flapan is the Principal Investigator of the three-year grant NSF/CCLI grant of $238,911 entitled "Enhancing the Mathematical Understanding of Students in Chemistry". The co-PIs are Professors Adolfo Rumbos, Fred Grieman, Daniel O'Leary, and Shahriar Shahriari. The goal of the project is to increase chemistry students' knowledge of mathematics and its role in chemistry in order to enable students to use the tools and language of mathematics to solve scientific problems. Click here for more about the grant (http://www.math.pomona.edu/flapan_nsf/index.htm).

Nineteen-year-old prodigy one of only 32 in United States to receive honor

Elisha Peterson, a senior mathematics major at Harvey Mudd College, has received the 1999 Rhodes Scholarship for two to three years of study at Oxford University in England. He was one of only 32 to receive the honor, out of the 935 American students who applied for the scholarship.

The annual Wig Distinguished Professorship Awards, awarded mainly on the basis of student votes, were bestowed at the end of spring upon five faculty members: Martha Andresen (English), Eleanor Brown (Economics), Paul Hurley (Philosophy), John Seery (Politics), and Shahriar Shahriari (Math). It is the most prestigious award which Pomona College confers on faculty members and consists of a $5000 stipend. [more...]

The purpose of this textbook is to present the fundamental ideas on discrete dynamical systems and chaos to undergraduates who have completed the standard calculus sequence including functions of several variables and linear algebra.

Arthur Benjamin, associate professor of mathematics, has received the 2000 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, from the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). The award is given each year to a currently active college or university professor of mathematics for exemplary teaching in an institution of higher education. Benjamin was one of only three professors in the United States to receive the award this year.

The Haimo Awards will be presented on January 20, 2000, at the annual meeting of the MAA in Washington, DC.

Lisette dePillis, associate professor of mathematics, has recently been named the Year 2000 Maria Goeppert-Mayer (MGM) Argonne Distinguished Scholar. She will be conducting research in parallel computational mathematics for the Mathematics and Computer Science Division at the Argonne National Laboratory in Illinois during 1999–2000.

The Maria Goeppert-Mayer award recognizes outstanding achievements by women scientists and engineers and provides them with opportunities to conduct research at the Argonne National Laboratory. DePillis is only the second MGM scholar to be selected to study in the mathematics and computer science division and the first in four years.

Other MGM scholars have come from Cornell University; UC Berkeley; Duke University; Rutgers; the Russian Academy of Sciences; and the Boris Kidric Institute of Nuclear Science, Belgrade, Yugoslavia. DePillis is the first researcher to come from an undergraduate institution.

HMC Math student Aaron Archer '98 was awarded second place for the 1998 Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize. This nationwide award is given to an undergraduate with outstanding research accomplishments in the mathematical sciences. The prize is offered by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the American Mathematical Society, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Archer's award was based on the strength of research papers he wrote while a student at HMC. He is currently a Ph.D. student at Cornell University.

The ODE Architect CD-ROM has been named one of “The Nine Best Digital Projects on the Planet” by NewMedia magazine in its December, 1998, issue. ODE Architect was one of 1,080 entries in 40 categories submitted to the New Media INVISION '98 Awards and one of only nine given an Award of Excellence. ODE Architect also won a gold medal in the category of Higher Education.

The project was headquatered at HMC by the co-PI's Professors Robert Borrelli and Courtney Coleman with support from the National Science Foundation, John Wiley & Sons, and INTELLIPRO, Inc..

The Mathematical Association of America's Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for the Mathematics Magazine article ``Variations on an Irrational Theme-Geometry, Dynamics, Algebra'', 70 (1997), 93-104, co-authored with Dan Kalman, and Robert Mena.

Prof. Adolfo Rumbos (Pomona College) awards WIG Teaching Award in 1998.

The most prestigious award that Pomona College confers on members of the faculty is the Wig Distinguished Professorship Award. It is very important and valuable to faculty who are chosen.

This award was established in 1955 through an endowment generously provided by the late R. J. Wig, a long-time Trustee of Pomona College and former Chairman of the Board, and the late Anna Wig. Each spring the Wig Fund for Teaching Committee makes recommendations to the Board of Trustees, normally for up to six professors, each of whom receives an award of $7,500. The selected professors are announced at Commencement.

The nationally recognized mathematics program at Harvey Mudd College will be further enhanced by new funds from the National Science Foundation. A $60,000 grant will be used to promote interdisciplinary learning, introduce students to exciting new mathematical fields, and provide more opportunities to apply math to open-ended projects, providing what the NSF describes as a national model for better integrating the mathematical sciences.

Judith V. Grabiner received the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award on August 9, 1996 at the Summer Mathfest in Seattle. Established in 1976, the Carl B. Allendoerfer Awards, consisting of a citation and cash prize, are presented by the Mathematical Association of America for articles of expository excellence published in Mathematics Magazine. [more...]

Judith V. Grabiner receives the Lester R. Ford Award in 1995. The Lester R. Ford Awards were established in 1964 to recognize authors of articles of expository excellence published in The American Mathematical Monthly or Mathematics Magazine. Beginning in 1976, a separate award (the Allendoerfer Award) was created for Mathematics Magazine. The awards are named for Lester R. Ford, Sr., a distinguished mathematician, editor of the American Mathematical Monthly, 1942-1946, and President of the Mathematical Association of America, 1947-1948. This is an award of $500. Up to five of these awards are given annually at the Summer Meeting of the Association. All awards given from 1976 on are for articles that appeared in The American Mathematical Monthly.

Prof. Shahriar Shahriari of Pomona College received a WIG Teaching Award, Pomona College in May 1993. 

Click here for more information about the WIG Award.

This workbook was designed for use with differential equation software on all machines, by Robert Borrelli and Courtney Coleman of Harvey Mudd College, and William Boyce of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. The workbook was one of the recipients of the 1993 EDUCOM Higher Education Software and Curriculum Innovation Awards.

For more information, click HERE.