Amendment to the Bylaws of the
Florida Section of the MAA

In March, at the Annual business Meeting, members of the Florida Section of the MAA will be voting on an amendment to the bylaws. This amendment would reflect the creation of a new position on the Executive Committee of the Section with a three year, non-renewable term: Coordinator of Student Activities.

The duties of this Section officer would be as follows:

The Coordinator of Student Activities shall be responsible for arranging the involvement of students in the Annual Meeting and encouraging the formation and continuation of Student Chapters of the Mathematical Association of America at the various institutions of higher learning throughout the Florida Section.

This would involve some coordination with the program chair as stated in the following paragraph:

The Annual Meeting shall be planned by the Program Committee in coordination with the Local Arrangements Committee, the Secretary-Treasurer and others. The Executive Committee shall make suggestions for speakers and it may also suggest topics of interest. The Coordinator of Student Activities shall work with the Program Committee to provide an opportunity for student participation in the Annual Meeting. The Program Committee shall consider suggestions from the national office concerning program organization and the membership shall be solicited for program suggestions as well as contributed papers.

MAA Florida Section Annual Meeting
March 3 - 4, 2000
University of South Florida

The program for the March 3 - 4 Florida Section MAA meeting at USF in Tampa is pretty well complete. By mid February we should have a preliminary schedule of the talks and abstracts available for these talks.

Conference Web Page: Information can be accessed by first going to www.math.fsu.edu and then to the meeting home page.

Plenary Speakers: We have two excellent plenary speakers scheduled:

Colin Adams of Williams College

Professor Adams is serving as one of the two MAA Polya lecturers this year and we are fortunate that this year in our section’s turn. Professor Adams has told me that he will give a talk in the character of Mel Slugate, sleazy real estate agent, called Real Estate in Hyperbolic Space: Investment Opportunities for the Next Millennium.

Fred Richman of Florida Atlantic University

Professor Richman will give a talk in the area of Constructive Mathematics. Indeed, the title of his book is What is Constructive Mathematics? He will illustrate the ideas of constructive mathematics by considering two theorems that are familiar: (1) There is a digit that appears infinitely often in the decimal expansion of pi, and (2) the intermediate value theorem.  Imagine, for example, doing mathematics without the law of the excluded middle. Also, constructive mathematics is very appealing in this age of the computer.

After Dinner Speaker: Monica Hurdal, of Florida State University

ALL meeting attendees are cordially invited to attend the after dinner address at the students’ banquet Friday evening. Monical Hurdal will give an address entitled, Mapping the Human Brain with Mathematics.

Student Program: See announcement on next page.

Contributed Paper Session, 2:00-4:30
Evening Banquet with Invited Speaker

Workshops: Workshops are planned for Friday morning.

Maple (Computer Algebra System)
Environmental Mathematics

Articulation Session: We are scheduling an articulation session for Friday afternoon. One topic to be discussed is the common course numbering system and leveling.

Contributed Paper Sessions: As in the past, the 20 and 50 minute talks will cover a wide range of topics, including original/new mathematics and pedagogy.

Speakers, please email Phil, novinger@math.fsu.edu, so that he can be sure that no submissions have slipped through the cracks. You only need say that you have submitted something for the meeting.

Student Program at USF
on
Friday, 3 March 2000

Central Florida Regional Meeting

The Central Florida Region is holding a Miniconference at Seminole Community College in Sanford, Florida, on Friday, February 25, from 1:30pm - 5:00pm. Registration is free (of course) and is being held from 1:30-3:00pm in the hallway outside room J100. ALL persons interested in the teaching of mathematicians, from high school through university level, are invited to attend.

The Opening Session (in room J100) features UCF’s Dr. Larry Andrews, who will give an exciting talk What Can Mathematicians do Other than Teach?. He will, in his talk, highlight the impact the laser has had on modern society and how mathematicians are helping to solve many of the complex problems associated with the use of lasers. He will explore ways that mathematics programs can better prepare mathematicians for work in some of the new areas in industry and government laboratories.

After the opening sessions, the program features several panel discussions of interest: One on Distance Learning, one on Academic Systems, and one on Quality versus FTE. Panel members will be from Central Florida community colleges, private colleges and universities. There are 12 other sessions on a wide variety of topics, such as: the software package Converge, Complex Numbers in Calculus and PreCalculus, Supplemental Instruction, What’s new in the UCF Graduate Program in Mathematics, Remediation Reduction: A Solution, and UCF Honors Calculus. All of these sessions and the panel discussions will be held in the newly renovated Science Building (S).

There should be something of interest for everyone and REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED.

For further information, please contact Eunice F. Everett at (407) 328-2243, or everette@mail.seminole.cc.fl.us A flyer will be sent to the various mathematics departments of the Central Florida region early in February.

University of Florida

The Mathematics Department is in its second year under the leadership of Chair Krishnaswami Alladi.

During 1998-99 we launched a visitors program which brought several leading researchers to our department on stays that ranged from one week to two months.

The Erdos and Ulam Colloquium talks launched this year were a great success. The first Ulam Colloquium was given on January 11, by Professor James Keener of Utah who spoke on The mathematics of sudden cardiac death. The lecture attracted faculty from various departments, especially from the medical school.

The first Erdos Colliquium was delivered on March 15, by Professor Ronald Graham of AT&T Research and UCSD. Professor Graham described the life and contributions of Paul Erdos and the impact it had on research in the past few decades.

On April 1, Professor Ingrid Daubechies of Princeton University, a world authority on the theory of wavelets, delivered the Women in Science mathematics lecture. The title of her talk was Wavelets for the future.

Professors Shlomo Sternberg (Harvard) and Bert Kostant (MIT) gave several lectures in late February early March on various aspects of mathematics influencing current problems in physics.

The flow of visitors reached a peak during Spring Break when we hosted a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, which brought over 400 mathematicians from all over the world to campus.

GANG BAO gave a Colliquium in January at Cal Tech on Recent Developments in the Mathematical Modeling of Diffractive Optics.

LOUIS BLOCK spent the academic year as the Van Vleck Visiting Professor of Mathematics at Wesleyan University while on sabbatical. During the year, he gave seminar talks at Boston University and Tufts University as well as at Wesleyan. He also gave a talk at the AMS meeting at UF during March and looks forward to his return to Gainesville in June.

Three of our faculty participated in the regional meeting of the AMS in Winston-Salem during October, 1998. PHIL BOYLAND spoke in a Special Session on the topic of Isotopy Stable Dynamics Relative to Compact Invariant Sets. SCOTT MCCULLOUGH spoke on Commuttant Lifting on a Two Holed Domain in a Special Session on Operator Theory and Holomorphic Spaces. CHRIS STARK spoke in a Special Session on Topogrophy in Dynamics on Blowup and Fixed Points.

DOUGLAS CENZER along with JEFF REMMEL of UCSD published two article with a combined length of 332 pages in the Handbook of Recursive Mathematics, Elsevier Press. They wrote on the topics Pi-0-1 Classes in Mathematics and Complexity Theoretic Model Theory and Algebra. Cenzar was also guest editor of a special volume of the Annals of Pure and Applied Logic containing the Proceedings of the 1996 Orlando AMS Special Session on Computibility. In March, Cenzer spoke in a Special Session in Computability at the annual meeting of the Association for Symbolic Logic in San Diego on the topic of Initial Segments of the Lattice of Pi-0-1 Classes.

ALEXANDER DRANISHNIKOV visited the Universities of Uppsala and Linkoping in Sweden during the fall and lectured on The Novikov Conjecture.

PAUL EHRLICH participated in the 10^th University of Alabama/Georgia Institute of Technology Conference on Differential Equations and Mathematical Physics during March 16-20, 1999, lecturing on Volume Comparison on Psuedo-Riemannian Manifolds, in a Special Session on General Relativity.

JONATHON KING visited the University of Lille in France during November and spoke on the topic De Bruijn’s Harmonic Brick Condition is Computable.

WILLIAM MITCHELL delivered an Invited Hour Address at the Association for Symbolic Logic winter meeting on the topic of Club Sets and Large Cardinals.

STEPHEN SUMMERS has been invited to deliver an hour address at the Wichmann Symposium on Mathematical Physics and Quantum Field Theory at Berkeley in June and also to participate in an international conference in Lund in August on Analysis and Mathematical Physics in honor of the 80^th birthday of Lars Garding.

ANDREW VINCE will be on sabbatical next year in Turkey, on a Fullbright Fellowship.

NEIL WHITE traveled to the University of Manchester, England, during the early spring, to continue his collaboration with Professor A. Borovik on Coxeter matroids.

University of South Florida

On November 12, high school students and teachers from Hillsborough, Manatee, Pasco, Pinellas and Sarasota counties participated in our third annual Mathematics Field Day. We invite high schools to send four or five juniors, and some teachers, and treat them to talks by professors and lunch and a tour of the campus. This year the talks were on Fractal Geometry by Ralph Oberste-Vorth and Life in Many Dimensions bye Boris Shektman. In addition, this year we had a competition between teams from different schools.

The XXIVth meeting of the Suncoast Region of the Florida Section of the MAA met on Friday, December 3, here at USF

This year there were nineteen speakers who gave talks on a variety of subjects from distance learning to using a Rubik’s cube as a teaching device in abstract algebra courses, to using calculators in the classroom, to wavelets, knots, and magic squares. The speakers included eight students, a secondary teacher, an independent researcher, and college and university professors, including three from USF. The main speaker was STEVEN KARL, of the USF Department of Biology, who gave a talk on some of the examples of the role that mathematics plays in biological research. The conference had about eighty attendees.

In July, NATASHA JONOSKA gave invited lectures at the Ongoing Workshop on DNA computing at the Center for Natural Computing. She also gave invited talks on DNA and biomolecular computing in Minnesota and the AMS Special Session of the AMS.

ATHANASSIOS KARTSATOS gave several invited talks during a trip to the Orient, largely on his joint work with IGOR V. SKRYPNIK of the Ukranian Academay of Sciences, on nonlinear operators in Banach spaces.

ED SAFF is the editor of a new journal called Foundations of Computational Mathematics, to be published by Springer. The first issue is expected in January, 2001. The journal will focus on topics that show relationships between mathematical theories from analysis, topology, geometry and algebra together with computational processes. He was also named an Ersine Fellow at the University of Christ Church, New Zealand, and while traveling the Orient, he gave several invited talks on Distributing Points on a Sphere. He also edited an anthology Computational Methods and Function Theory (with N. Papamichael and St. Ruscheweyh), which was published by World Scientific.

VILMOS TOTIK gave three talks for the Frontier Lecture Series at Texas A & M.

The Florida Section of the MAA will meet this year on March 3-4 at USF in the Business Building. For program information, consult the FSU mathematics web-page at http://www.math.fsu.edu/. For details of local arrangements, consult the USF mathematics web-page at http://www.math.usf.edu/.

The Nagle Lecture Series will continue this year with a talk by Jerold Marsden, Professor of Control and Dynamical Systems at the California Institute of Technology. On Thursday, March 9, 2000, he will give a talk on Dynamical Systems and Space Mission Design. The talk, which is free and open to the public, will be at 7:30 pm in Cooper Hall. For details, consult our website at http://www.math.usf.edu/.