Claremont Center for the Mathematical Sciences

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.

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”.

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.

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).

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.

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!

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.

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.