Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences

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.

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.

"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. ..."