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Fall 2005 Departmental News

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Central College Kirkwood Community College
Coe College Luther College
Cornell College Maharishi University of Management
Drake University Northwestern College
Grinnell College Simpson College
Hawkeye Community College University of Iowa Mathematics Department
Iowa State University Mathematics Department University of Northern Iowa

Central College
Mark Mills
millsm@central.edu

Our department has two new faculty members this year.

Under the leadership of Wendy Weber, our department has spent the last semester and a half doing a detailed review of our mathematics curriculum and mathematics major and minors.  The primary result of our review has been to create two tracks within our major.  The standard mathematics major track is a more flexible version of our previous mathematics major.  The mathematics with secondary education is also more flexible and it contains classes that are necessary for secondary education licensure in Iowa.  If approved, these changes would take effect in 2005-2006.

A few other issues that we have been reviewing include:

Russ Goodman, Al Hibbard, and Tom Linton received a TIPS grant this past summer to develop some materials to better incorporate Mathematica into the calculus sequence.

In conjunction with the other science departments, Mark Johnson and Stephen Fyfe (both computer science) have been leading an effort to design a Computational Science minor within our department.  The minor would seek to show students where and how computational techniques can be used to solve problems in the sciences.  If approved, the minor would be available in 2005-2006.

Russ Goodman has had an article about "FoxTrot" comic strip creator and artist Bill Amend accepted for publication in Math Horizons.  It is titled "FoxTrot Brings Mathematics to the Comics Page" and is expected to appear in the November 2005 issue.

Over the summer, Wendy Weber attended a follow-up Preparing Mathematicians to Educate Teachers (PMET) workshop in New York.

Al Hibbard and Mark Mills participated in grading the Advanced Placement (AP) calculus exam in early June at Colorado State University.  This year, 630 mathematics educators graded over 225,000 exams (6 problems per exam) during the week.

Mark Mills is writing a chapter for a new Handbook of Linear Algebra to be published by CRC Press in 2006.  The editor-in-chief for this publication is Leslie Hogben at Iowa State University.

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Coe College
Cal Van Niewaal
cvanniew@coe.edu

Coe has announced a major renovation of Stuart Hall, the oldest classroom building on campus. When the renovation is completed next year the Department of Mathematical Sciences will relocate into expanded facilities. In addition tonew office, classroom and laboratory spaces, plans call for a student lounge and study area complete with computers and a small library of journals and other print reference materials.

Terry Hostetler, Associate Professor of Computer Science,has beguna three-year term as chair of the department. He succeeds Cal Van Niewaal who is now serving as Director of Coe's First-Year Seminar Program.

Jon White, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, is working with students this fall to revitalize the math club on campus. The club was dormant last year after all of the most active student members graduated in May 2003.

Gavin Cross, Associate Professor of Statistics, and his wife, Lisa Barnett,are expecting their first child in December.

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Cornell College
Jim Freeman
jfreeman@cornellcollege.edu

The Mathematics Department at Cornell is in the middle of getting a major curricular change approved by the Cornell faculty. The major components of the proposed curriculum are reducing the calculus sequence from four courses to two courses; teaching several variable calculus in the second course; adding a slow calculus course and dropping the pre-calculus course; adding a proof course using number theory as the topic; adding discrete mathematics and statistics requirements to the major; dropping numerical analysis for a modeling course; and adding a complex variables course. The department prepared a 62 page document on the new curriculum. If you would like to see this document, contact Jim Freeman.

In May 2004, Cornell College inaugurated its new course: "On The Shoulders of Giants: Great Mathematical Ideas." The idea of the new course is to present larger mathematical themes from a basic perspective in order to introduce liberal arts majors to mathematics as a way of thinking rigorously. The topics for the first course, taught by Steve Bean, were graph theory, surface theory and knot theory. The course attracted students from Art, Music, English, and Philosophy, among other disciplines (students who have already taken calculus are prohibited from taking the course). Most students were more than willing to experiment with the new ideas, and student evaluations indicate that the course was well-received. Topics for the course will vary in future terms. In September, 2004, Jim Freeman taught the course exploring the mathematical ideas from the art of origami.

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Drake University
Alexander Kleiner
afkleiner@drake.edu

Luz DeAlba is now serving as Associate Chair of the Department.

Dan Alexander is now the Director of the Center for Digital Technology and Learning.

Bernie Baker has returned from a sabbatical leave.

David Oakland is currently on sabbatical leave.

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Grinnell College
Keri Kornelson
kornelso@math.grinnell.edu

This year, the department has two new members, Keri Kornelson and David Romano. Chuck Jepsen is on leave this fall, and will move to Senior Faculty status in the spring. Marc Chamberland and Ben Gum are on leave for the year, and Royce Wolf continues as chair of the department.

Pam Ferguson, our colleague of more than seven years, passed away last spring after a long battle with cancer. A dedicated teacher, she taught into February, right up to the point where she was physically unable to stand in front of a classroom. She joined our department full time after stepping down from the presidency of Grinnell college in 1996. We will all miss her.

Arnold Adelberg spent the first semester of last year as a visiting professor at the University of Melbourne in Australia. He spent the second semester as a visiting professor at Ohio State University in Columbus. He participated in the International Conference of the Fibonacci Society in Branschweig, Germany in July, as a member of the International Committee. He coauthored a paper with a former student and a colleague at Harvey Mudd entitled "Not so Complex solutions to the Fermat Equation" which is in the October 2004 issue of Math Magazine. His paper "Universal Kummer Congruences mod Prime Powers" will appear soon in the Journal of Number Theory. He has additionally been very active as a referee and as a reviewer for Math Reviews.

Marc Chamberland saw one of his busiest school years at Grinnell. On top of an overload in teaching, Marc kept very active with his research. He saw the publication of four papers: ``Characterizing Two-Dimensional Maps whose Jacobian have Constant Eigenvalues'' in the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin, ``Binary BBP-Formulas for Logarithms and Generalized Gaussian Mersenne Primes'' in the Journal of Integer Sequences, and the two invited papers ``An Update on the $3x+1$ Problem'' (in Catalan) in the Bulletin of the Catalan Mathematical Society and the ``$N$-Number Ducci Game -- Open Problems'' (with Diana Thomas of Montclair State University) in the Journal of Difference Equations and Applications. Talks included ``Unbounded Orbits and Binary Digits'' for the Iowa MAA meeting and a fun student talk entitled "Have your Pi and eat it too!'' (pie was served before the talk). The summer of 2004 saw Marc supervise Grinnell students Christine Oehlert and Jingkan Gu on a project concerning infinite series. A non-mathematical project involved leading six students on a week-long trip to Taize, a spiritual community in France, where the students gained vision for starting a similar service at Grinnell College.

Chris French gave a talk last spring at the Iowa MAA sectional meeting on "Fifth Roots of Fibonacci Fractions," and he has submitted a paper for publication on this topic. His primary work is on extending his thesis, "The Equivariant J-homomorphism", and he is currently preparing a paper on this subject. Chris got married last February to Karen Shuman.

"Visual Linear Algebra", an innovative textbook with Maple and Mathematica tutorials, by Eugene Herman (Grinnell College) and Michael Pepe will be published in early 2005 by John Wiley & Sons.

Charles Jepsen is on leave in fall 2004 and then will move to Senior Faculty Status. He will continue to work with summer research students and on his own research program. In summer 2004 he supervised research with two students, Zelealem Yilma and Garth Spencer. Zed worked on a collection of tiling problems, Garth on a problem in combinatorial geometry. Two papers with previous research students are (it is hoped) wending their way toward publication.

Keri Kornelson joins the department after completing a VIGRE postdoctoral fellowship at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. While there, she worked with David Larson in the area of wavelets and frames. Her research involves existence and characterization of classes of Hilbert space frames. She received her Ph.D. in 2001 from the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Shonda Kuiper is in her second year at Grinnell College. Last year was a little busy with changing jobs, moving, raising two toddlers and building a new home. In addition to giving two conference talks and a poster session, her first paper with a Biology student "Temporal Patterns in use of an Iowa Woodlot During the Autumn Bird Migration" was accepted for publication in the American Midland Naturalist. A second paper based on her consulting work with a bio-chemist has also been submitted.

Tom Moore spent 2003 and 2004 as a visiting scholar at Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges. He worked on scholarly projects, including statistical analysis of infant-handling behavior in female baboons through permutation methods, and gave several talks.

Emily Moore spent the academic year 2003-04 as a Visiting Scholar at Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges. She gave talks on graph coloring at Carleton, St. Olaf, Gustavus, and the South East Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory, and Computing, and worked with Joan Hutchinson on graph color extensions. (paper in progress)

David Romano received his doctorate from the University of California at Berkeley in 2000, spent the 2000-2001 academic year in a postdoctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, and has since taught at Carleton College and Colby College. His research deals with the classification of polynomials over a local field based on properties of the corresponding Galois groups over that field.

Karen Shuman coauthored a paper with Joe Rosenblatt (UIUC), ``Cyclic functions in Lp(R), 1 ≤ p ≤ ∞, which appeared in the May/June 2003 volume of the Journal of Fourier Analysis and its Applications. Karen presented this paper at the Iowa State analysis seminar in November 2003. She will be presenting ``The Sinusoidal Garden: a writing and art project for Calculus II students'' at the AMS/MAA Joint Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia in January 2005. Karen completed her year as a 2003-2004 Project NExT fellow at the MAA MathFest in Providence in August. She encourages other young faculty to apply to this program!

Karen married Chris French in February 2004 in a small ceremony at her parents' home in Georgia. The wedding service bulletins were beautifully typeset in LaTeX. Karen and Chris honeymooned in Oxford, Bath, and Salisbury over spring break.

John Stone has recently converted the department's local-area network to Debian GNU/Linux, started to revise the department's Web site to make it more accessible to persons with disabilities and to make better use of Cascading Style Sheets, and written a short introduction to recursive function theory and computability, which he is using in our course on the theory of computation.

Henry Walker continues as a member of the MAA Committee on the Profession. He was reelected to a three-year term as Chair of the Special Interest Group (SIG) on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), and he serves as Secretary of the Executive Committee of the ACM SIG Governing Board. As SIGCSE Chair, he was worked to facilitate the establishment of a SIGCSE Committee on the Implementation of a Discrete Mathematics Course. In other areas, his book, "The Tao of Computing: A Down-to-earth Approach to Computer Fluency", was published by Jones and Bartlett in September 2004; his paper (with Science Librarian Kevin Engel) on "Research Exercises: A sequenced approach to just-in-time information literacy instruction" appeared in the journal of Research Strategies in July; and he continues to write a column on "Classroom Issues" for the SIGCSE Bulletin inroads (a section of the most recent column was inspired by interactions at an MAA Prep Workshop a year ago). He continues to support software for the submission and review of papers for SIGCSE conferences, to consult with colleges and universities in the external review of math/cs departments, to grade AP exams in computer science, and to encourage various collaborative efforts among faculty in computer science and the mathematical sciences.

Royce Wolf is in his second (and last!) year as chair. Having given two recitals last year to show that the chair-ship will not take time away from the piano, he is showing this year that, on the other hand, it can. Last summer, results were found with Grinnell students Arjun Guha and Sam Eckstut regarding the word problem in cycle free groups and there is hope for a great deal more on this problem next summer.

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Hawkeye Community College
Karen Ernst
KErnst@hawkeyecollege.edu

We lost one full-time faculty member (Latricia Hylton) to a position as math/science director for Upward Bound. Her replacement is John Neely, who came to us from the University of Northern Iowa.

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Iowa State University Mathematics Department
Stephen J. Willson
willson@math.iastate.edu

  1. Professor Leslie Hogben directed a very successful NSF sponsored REU this past summer at Iowa State University.
  2. Professor A.M. Fink has written a history of the Mathematics Department at ISU, which is currently being typed. The report is titled "The Mathematics Department at Iowa State University from 1868 to 2004: An Audacious Biased Account."
  3. Professor Cliff Bergman has been named one of five LAS Master Teachers for 2004-05. Professor Dan Ashlock received an LAS Mid-Career Award for Excellence in Research. Janice Nyhus, long-time head secretary/administrative assistant to the department, won an LAS P&S Award for excellence.
  4. Professors Raj Dahiya, Domenico D'Alessandro, and L. Steven Hou are on Faculty Professional Development Assignments (formerly known as "sabbaticals") this semester.
  5. Professor Dan Ashlock is currently on leave without pay at the University of Guelph, Canada, while Professor Xiaoming Wang is on leave without pay at Florida State University.
  6. Professor Jennifer Davidson from the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at ISU has joined the Mathematics Department.
  7. Professors A.M. Fink and Dick Tondra have retired, effective last spring.

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Kirkwood Community College
Philip Koopman
PKOOPMA@kirkwood.edu

At Kirkwood Community College, we hired 2 new full-time faculty members for our Iowa City campus. They are Matthew Stoeckel and Doug Gustafson. We now have fifteen full-time faculty at Kirkwood:  nine at the Cedar Rapids campus and six at the Iowa City campus.

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Luther College
Ruth Berger
bergerr@luther.edu

Joyce Becker was elected to a second term as Vice-President Post-Secondary of the Iowa Council of Teachers of Mathematics. She was a guest speaker at the ICTM Meeting in Ames last February, speaking on the topic "Paradoxes in the World of Mathematics". She is serving as Program Co-Chair for the February 2005 conference lining up 75 speakers.

Joyce won a $1,000 Grant from the Iowa Coalition of Math and Science jointly with Catherine Miller at UNI and Robert Keller of Loras College to continue work with changing Iowa certification rules for Secondary Math Licensure. They met in Des Moines in May with the Board Of Educational Examiners to successfully present their proposal for Secondary Teaching Licensure. 

Ruth Berger wrote a  book review for "Oval Track and other permutation puzzles" by J. Kiltinen in the MAA Online book review column (see  http://maa.org/reviews/ovaltrack.html) . This book was also the focus of her talk "Fun and Games with Permutation Groups" at the Iowa MAA meeting this past Spring.

Reginald Laursen was on sabbatical leave Spring '04 and composed a manuscript entitled "Lean and Lively Integrated Precalculus"  for the beginning of Luther's integrated Precalculus/Calculus courses.  It was class tested this Fall and is currently in revision.  He also created the Maize Maze design used by Country Heritage Community at Elgin, IA.

Eric Westlund will be teaching a new course in Chaotic Dynamical Systems this coming Spring semester.

The department is proud of our student team that took first place in the 2004 Iowa Collegiate Mathematics Competition. We had two teams compete in the Math Modeling Competition last Spring.  One team received "Meritorious" designation. 

We continue to have a healthy number of majors. This year we graduated 3 math/statistics majors, 21 math majors and 25 computer science majors of which 5 were joint.

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Maharishi University of Management
Cathy Gorini
cgorini@mum.edu

The mathematics major has been replace by a mathematical sciences major, which requires two computer science courses and allows students a wider range of elective courses from computer science, physics, and biology.

David Streid has been appointed Chief Administrative Officer.

Cathy Gorini is Acting Dean of Faculty for the year 2004. Her book Facts on File Geometry Handbook will be published in a paperback edition in January 2005.

Anne Dow has been developing a series of activities based on greenhouse production for college algebra courses.

Eric Hart  is a member of "Every Student Counts", the new mathematics initiative from the Iowa State Department of Education to implement NCTM Standards-based mathematics instruction in Iowa Schools. He and Hal Schoen from the University of Iowa are leaders of the high school component of the project. He is also chair of "The Content Network", a Department of Education project to review research on effective instructional practices in K-12 mathematics.

Paul Corazza, formerly of the Mathematics Department, has joined the Computer Science Department. Paul has also taught at Boise State University in Idaho and has many years experience as a systems analyst and Java engineer and system designer.

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Northwestern College
Kim Jongerius
kimj@nwciowa.edu

As far as curriculum, the biggest change in Northwestern's math department has been the addition of an Actuarial Science major.

For non-curricular news, last summer, for the first time, we sent a student to an REU (at Tennessee). Michael Holm, who had been considering actuarial science but after his summer experience is thinking more seriously about going on to graduate school in mathematics, will be presenting his work in Numerical Analysis at the undergraduate poster session in Atlanta this January.

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Simpson College
Murphy Waggoner
waggoner@simpson.edu

The Undergraduate Mathematics Symposium help at Simpson on March 27, 2004, was a great success with 60 participants representing 8 educational institutions and a variety of other organizations.  There were 9 presentations by undergraduates and 2 faculty presentations.  The presentation topics included solutions to problems from the Mathematical and Interdisciplinary Contests in Modeling, an application of differential equations to physical chemistry, reports on REUs and an undergraduate-built supercomputer.   

The plenary talks were given by Dr. Tim Pennings, professor of mathematics at Hope College, and Elvis, a Welsh Corgi who can solve certain minimization problems.  A panel consisting of an actuary, two college professors and a computer engineer discussed career and graduate opportunities for mathematics majors.  Pictures and abstracts of the 2004 symposium can be seen at www.simpson.edu/~waggoner/HUMS.htm

We plan to hold the Second Annual Midwest Undergraduate Symposium in Mathematics next spring.  The plenary speaker will be Deanna Haunsperger, professor of mathematics at Carleton College.  Dr. Haunsperger is a past editor of Math Horizons and one of the directors of Carleton and St. Olaf Colleges' Summer Mathematics Program for Women.  Her mathematical interests include statistical decision procedures and applied systems analysis, voting theory and nonparametric statistics.  The tentative date of the symposium is April 9, 2005. 

Rick Spellerberg continues to serve as our department chair.  Rick's research interest is in game theory and he has been very active as a director of undergraduate research.  Last spring, three students presented the results of the work they did on the marriage problem and this fall 3 first-year students are working on game theory applications to evolution.  As part of our current senior seminar, there are 3 senior students working on research in game theory with Rick.  Together with members of the biology department, Rick will be writing a grant proposal to expand the opportunities for our students to do research in the summer on interdisciplinary research in mathematics and biology. 

To support our undergraduates in their research in game theory, we have invited Dr. Van Kolpin, the chair of the economics department at the University of Oregon, to visit Simpson.  Dr. Kolpin received his undergraduate degree from Coe College and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Iowa.  His talk will be "The Evolution of Strategy:  A Force for Business, Society, Science and Life" and will be give in the Jordan Lecture Hall of the Carver Science Building at Simpson on November 4, 2004, at 7 pm.  The talk is open to everyone. 

Murphy Waggoner attended MathFest in Providence this past August and presented 2 papers:  "Creating and Using Effective Writing Prompts in a Calculus Sequence" and "Mathematics With and Without Words:  A project to student visual and verbal representations of mathematical ideas."  Murphy will be presenting again at the Joint Meetings in Atlanta in January.  The talk will be a report of her work with writing-to-learn mathematics and is titled "Do Students Value Writing in Mathematics Courses?" 

Bill Dunning is also supervising 3 senior research projects this semester.  Bill's students are working in number theory.  These students are completing research as part of our senior seminar program.  Last year, 9 seniors completed research projects before graduating as mathematics majors, and this year we will have 12 graduates in mathematics.

Bruce Sloan was selected to present the Harold Watson Lecture this fall at Simpson. The title of his talk is "Two Mathematical Revolutions" and will be about mathematics in the early Greek period and in the seventeenth century. 

Our teams did well in the Mathematical and Interdisciplinary Contests in Modeling again this past spring.  We are extremely please to report that, of the 6 Simpson teams competing in the contests, 2 teams received a ranking of Meritorious and 1 received an Honorable Mention.

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University of Iowa Mathematics Department
David Manderscheid
mander@math.uiowa.edu

The administration of the Department continues as last year: David Manderscheid is Chair, Yi Li is Associate Chair for the Graduate Program, Dan Anderson is Associate Chair for the Undergraduate Program, and Herb Hethcote is Director of the Program in Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences. We hired one new postdoc this year: Jian Deng. He was a student of Jones at Brown and has been at Cal Tech the last two years.  His research is in Partial Differential Equations.  Hal Schoen retired this past year as did two staff members, Joanne Horeowsky and Sandra Stockman.  

The Department of Mathematics undergraduate program continues to grow. We now have 185 majors.  Our undergraduate research program is thriving, with fifteen students working on projects with faculty in areas such as operator theory, number theory, and assessment.  Interest in our "Program C" major remains strong.  This major is designed to meet the needs of students who want a degree in mathematics with a clear specialization in some area of application. The key is that certain courses in the area of specialization are counted towards the Mathematics degree.  Students can focus on areas for which programs have been approved, such as Optimal Business Decision Making, Economics, Physics, Biomathematics and others, or they can propose new ones. This Fall we introduced a new required course for all elementary education majors. Walter Seaman designed this course in consultation with the faculty of the College of Education.  

Our graduate programs also continue to grow also with 115 students currently studying for MS and Ph.D. degrees. Over 30 of these students are in the Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences Ph.D. program. Students in this interdisciplinary program build a strong foundation in theoretical and applied mathematics but also do work in other areas. Some of the recent graduates of the program wrote dissertations in the areas of stochastic optimization in finance, atmospheric chemical models, and image compression.  Our graduate students come from Iowa and surrounding states but also from California, Louisiana, and New York among others.  Our foreign graduate students come from around the world with the most students from Latin America, Korea, Romania and China. Currently 55% of our PhD students are US citizens, 44 % are women and over 20% are underrepresented US minorities.  This year we started our new graduate curriculum. This curriculum makes our exam structure simpler and less burdensome and allows students to get into research much more quickly.  We continue to use senior TAs to run problem sessions for first year graduate courses and also to use senior TAs to run Ph.D. qualifying exam preparation seminars during the summer.  Most of our Ph.D.s last year took jobs teaching at four year colleges or institutions that offer M.S. degrees. A number of our Ph.D.s took postdoctoral positions at schools including Ohio State University and Rutgers University. 

For more information about what is going at Iowa, including our seminar schedule and information on our distinguished visitor series, please see our web page: http://www.math.uiowa.edu/  We invite you to visit campus or join us at our reception for alumni and friends of the Department at the Winter meetings in Atlanta.

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University of Northern Iowa
Joel Haack
joel.haack@uni.edu

We are delighted to introduce a new faculty member, Jihwa Noh, who completed her Ph.D. at Western Michigan last summer.  Her specialty is Secondary Mathematics Education. 

On leave this year are Todd Eisworth (Ohio University) and Jason Aubrey (University of Missouri). 

Several UNI faculty received awards recognizing their professional activities last year.

The Wright Challenge is up and running for its fifth year. This puzzle contest is open to all Iowa and Illinois high school students. It can be found at http://www.math.uni.edu and clicking on The Wright Challenge.  Doug Shaw and Adrienne Stanley organize this activity.

During the Spring 2004 semester, the Mathematics Colloquium scheduled talks in different areas of mathematics and mathematics education.  Mikhail Yakubson (Herzen (Russia) University) and Chong-Kyu Han (Seoul National University) were invited to make presentations while visiting our department.  In addition, two candidates for a position in our department, Katrina Piatek-Jimenez (University of Arizona) and Jihwa Noh (Western Michigan University) gave talks in mathematics education as part of their job interviews.  The list of speakers also included several professors in our department: Todd Eisworth, Vera Rayevskaya, and Jason Aubrey.

Dr. Underwood Dudley, a very well-known figure in MAA circles, delivered an interesting speech, "Why Mathematics?" as this year's Hari Shankar Lecturer.

The UNI Middle Grades Mathematics MA program, grades 4-8, has now graduated over 100 teachers during the past 10 years. It continues to be a program that has successfully helped teachers become more effective in the classroom. Throughout the 2-year program, teachers try new materials and new approaches in their classroom. And with the help of their cohort and the faculty, they find ways change their classroom to get better achievement and more satisfaction. UNI will again be starting a cohort group in June 2005. For more information, contact Ed Rathmell (edward.rathmell@uni.edu).

The first cohort group of secondary mathematics teachers began a similar program for teachers in grades 9-12 this past June. They will graduate from the Secondary Mathematics MA program in the summer of 2006. A new cohort group for this secondary program will also start in June 2005. For more information, contact Doug Mupasiri (douglas.mupasir@uni.edu).

Every Student Counts, an Iowa Department of Education program for middle school mathematics has involved about 30 schools over the past five years. Professors Ed Rathmell and Larry Leutzinger have planned and conducted the mathematics components of that professional development model. Achievement gains on tests like the Iowa Test of Basic Skills and the New Standards Exam have been recorded.  This fall, AEA teams are participating as well, helping schools implement the program across the state, from preK-12, beginning next school year. This is the first comprehensive state-wide mathematics initiative designed to meet the Iowa Professional Development Model. It has the potential to influence both the mathematics that is being taught and the way in which it is being taught throughout the state. For additional information, contact Judith Spitzli, Mathematics Consultant, Iowa Department of Education (Judith.Spitzli@ed.state.ia.us).

Syed Kirmani traveled to France, and Jason Aubrey and Michael Prophet traveled to St. Petersburg this year, with reciprocal visits by French and Russian professors.

Greg Dotseth and Joel Haack participated in the MAA Study Tour of England last May.  Photographs are available at http://www.maa.org/england/.

In grant activity, Diane Thiessen, Sandy Ubben and Suzanne Riehl received a PMET (Preparing Mathematicians to Educate Teachers) grant for $5,000 to develop pilot sections of 800:023 (Mathematics in Decision Making) specially designed for elementary education majors.  Mark Ecker, Syed Kirmani, and Jerry Ridenhour obtained a CGS (Council of Graduate Schools)/Sloan Foundation grant for $5,000 to study the feasibility of our developing a PSM (Professional Science Master's) degree program in Industrial Mathematics.  A Department of Defense grant ($1,000,000) to provide in-service instruction to teachers on U.S. military bases throughout the world has been renewed and is now guaranteed to continue through the summer of 2005. Jack Wilkinson, who has directed the project for more than ten years, has turned the directorship over to Catherine Miller.

Student activity at UNI the past year included the second year of the Integration Bee.  Around 50 students from UNI and Hawkeye Community College competed and were in high spirits. Adrienne Stanley once again organized the Bee, Doug Shaw served as emcee, and Suzanne Riehl, Jason Ribando and Marius Somodi served as authoritative judges.  The Math Club sponsored Pi Day: students and faculty dropped by for a slice of pie and a piece of π (meaning a digit in the decimal expansion, which went on a strip of colored paper that then became part of a stapled-together chain). The Math Club also organized a cutthroat faculty competition, appropriately called Iron Math Teacher. There were six inspired faculty presentations on a theme that necessarily incorporated a hula hoop, some soap bubbles, and some marshmallow ducks. Catherine Miller was judged as the winner by an objective panel of Math Club members.

Kappa Mu Epsilon was also active with Cindee Calton and Mark Ecker attending the KME regional convention where Cindee, the current president of KME, presented a paper.

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This page was last revised on November 11, 2004.