Winter 2008 Newsletter

From the Chair	A Call for Papers
The Governor's Corner	Hey Students!
From the Vice-Chair	Don Bennett Receives Meritorious Service Award
The Annual KYMAA Meeting	KYMAA Section NExT !!!
The Invited Talks - including abstracts

From the Chair

The Big Picture.

In September, I had the opportunity to spend three weeks of my sabbatical at the National University of Ireland at Galway. I was sitting in my office one day when a window cleaner, squeegie and bucket in hand, entered. She drew back the vertical blinds and cleaned the glass with fervor and zeal. She soaped the windows, not missing an inch, with a speed and precision which could only come from much practice, and then she dried them, wielding her squeegie the way Zorro would wield a sword. As the window cleaner moved on eagerly to her next job, my windows sparkled like new. However, in her fervor for the windows, much of the dirty water had run down the white wall and the vertical blinds were splattered, with the net effect of a noticeable decline in the appearance of the room. While this lady had an excellent outcome with the windows, she had missed the big picture.

The MAA is a big picture organization with interests in all aspects of mathematics addressed in the collegiate setting. At the KYMAA meetings, one is likely to find presentations on research, history, exposition, and pedagogy. Mark your calendars and make your plans to attend the 2008 meeting at WKU on March 28-29. Chair-Elect Will Harris has lined up some excellent invited speakers. I encourage you and your students to consider giving a presentation at the meeting. Meeting colleagues from across the state and enjoying the diverse array of ideas at our section meetings are great ways to keep sight of the big picture.

The Governor's Corner

My last Joint Meetings as Governor were in San Diego this January. It rained 7 inches and the locals acted the way our Cincinnati area natives do during snow, they stocked up on bottled water and food, locked the children and animals in the basement and loaded their shotguns. Of course in Cincinnati you don't usually see surfers with their boards skateboarding to the beaches!

It was great to see many current (and former) KYMAA folks there. Our Project NExT crew, both national and sectional, were out in force.

The MAA is in good shape financially. In summary we have around $10.5 million in operating budget, $7.5 million in endowments and investments, $17 million in building and $7 million in grants. The renovated Carriage House behind MAA HQ is already heavily used both for MAA activities as well as outside activities. The latter provides revenue for the organization.

Membership is solid, around 23,000, but attention is being paid to convincing younger mathematicians of the value of being members. Your ideas for recruiting are welcome.

Mathfest this summer will be in Madison, Wisconsin, July 31-August 2. I hope this is close enough that I will see many KYMAA members there. The next joint meetings will be in Washington, DC, January 5-8, 2009.

The MAA has helped sponsor the development of a film, "Hard Problems. The road to the World's Toughest Math Contest." It is about the students who took part in the Mathematical Olympiads. MAA members can get a copy for $20 from http://www.hardproblemsmovie.com/.

Be sure to check out MAA Online, and also all the excellent publications from MAA.

The MAA will be 100 years old in 2015. Plans are underway for a big celebration in Washington, DC. Our section is one of the oldest, two years younger than the MAA, I believe, so we should also be thinking of a celebration in 2017. Some sections are writing section histories, ours among them. There is an idea to pull them together into a history of the MAA. This task has tentatively been delegated to HOMSIGMAA, the MAA special interest group in the History of Mathematics (of which I was just reelected as Chair.)

Be sure to look for opportunities to share your interests and ability, either by serving the KYMAA, or the national MAA.

From the Vice-Chair

The deadline is just about here!! Spread the work to your students!! We are holding our first annual t-shirt design contest for undergraduates in the mathematical sciences. The winning design will be placed on t-shirts to be given to all undergraduate attendees to this year's KYMAA spring meeting to held at Western Kentucky University. The winner will be awarded a prize during the meeting. This contest is sponsored by Humana Inc of Louisville. Faculty, please encourage your students to enter and to attend the spring meeting. The entry deadline is February 8, 2008, and rules and submission requirements may be found on the KYMAA website www.maa.org/Kentucky.

Also a reminder: the origami display by Duk Lee of Asbury College at last year's spring meeting was well received. So, this year I would like to invite faculty to continue this practice. Should you wish to display your mathematically inspiring curios and designs at the KYMAA spring meeting, please contact me at dillerys@lindsey.edu.

Scott Dillery at dillerys@lindsey.edu
KYMAA Vice-Chair

The Annual KYMAA Meeting

Our 2008 KYMAA Annual Meeting is scheduled for March 28 - 29, 2008, at Western Kentucky University, Bowling Green, Kentucky. This should be an outstanding meeting and we strongly encourage you to join the fun. Perhaps you can give a talk, or just come and listen to what your fellow mathematicians are up to these days.

More information is provided below, including a description of the invited talks, a call for papers, and information for students. Information to facilitate your attendance of the meeting, including various forms for registration and talks and lodging information, can be found on our 2008 Annual Meeting and 2008 Meeting Program webpages. Complete program details will appear in the next newsletter on March 10, 2008. Please note the following important dates for the KYMAA Annual Meeting:

• February 27 : Deadline for submitting abstracts for talks at the meeting.
• March 10 : Publication date of meeting program on this website.
• MARCH 14 : Registration Deadline. You Must register by this date if you would like to join us for meals at the meeting since the caterer needs a headcount by this date. At the very least e-mail our section secretary Leanne Faulkner at LeanneF@kwc.edu . Payment for meals should be in regular mail by this date.
• March 28 - 29 : a grand celebration of Kentucky mathematics at WKU!

• Presentation Abstract Form
• Registration Form

Finally, our schedule of hosts for future section meetings is:

March 27-28, 2009	Kentucky State University
March 26-27, 2010	University of Kentucky
2011	Any volunteers?

Please contact any officer of KYMAA if you would interested in hosting a future meeting; we're always on the look out for a good meeting site!

The Invited Talks

Friday evening:

The Truth of Proofs, David Bressoud, Macalester College.

Abstract: Mathematicians often delude themselves into thinking that we create proofs in order to establish truth. In fact, that which is "proven" is often not true, and mathematical results are often known with certainty to be true long before a proof is found. I will use some illustrations from the history of mathematics to make this point and to show that proof is more about making connections than establishing truth.

Bio: David Bressoud is DeWitt Wallace Professor of Mathematics at Macalester College and President-Elect of the MAA. He has received the MAA Distinguished Teaching Award (Allegheny Mountain Section), the MAA Beckenbach Book Award for Proofs and Confirmations, and has been a Polya Lecturer for the MAA. He has published over fifty research articles in number theory, combinatorics, and special functions. His other books include Factorization and Primality Testing, Second Year Calculus from Celestial Mechanics to Special Relativity, A Radical Approach to Real Analysis (now in 2nd edition), and, with Stan Wagon, A Course in Computational Number Theory. His latest book, A Radical Approach to Lebesgue's Theory of Integration, has just been published by the MAA.

Saturday morning:

The Evolution of the Cryptologic Bombe, Chris Christensen, Northern Kentucky University

Abstract: Early successes by the German military in the blitzkrieg attack in Europe and the Battle of the Atlantic were in part due to the ability of the German military to quickly transmit secure tactical messages. One of the machines used to secure German messages was Enigma. Part of the Allied defeat of Germany can be attributed to the Allies' breaking of Enigma. One of the devices used to break Enigma was called the bombe. We will consider an initial version of the bombe that was constructed by the Polish mathematician Marian Rejewski during the 1930s, a second generation bombe that was developed by the British mathematician Alan Turing and improved by the algebraic geometer Gordon Welchman, and the US Navy's cryptologic bombe that was built by Joseph Desch, an engineer at National Cash Register in Dayton, Ohio.

Bio: Chris Christensen is in his twenty-fifth year of teaching mathematics at Northern Kentucky University. His mathematical genealogy is a sequence of algebraic geometers. More than a decade ago, he read Robert Harris' Enigma and thought "that's interesting" and "it's fifty years later, a lot of mathematics has been developed in the meantime, this would probably be easy today." It's not. Today, he still finds cryptology interesting, and he has developed a great deal of respect for the mathematicians (and other codebreakers) at Bletchley Park and for the cryptographers and cryptanalysts who preceded them and followed them.

Mathematics as a Mechanism for Cohesion in Biology, Louis J. Gross, Departments of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics, University of Tennessee, Knoxville

Abstract: Biology is a tremendously diverse field covering systems operating at vastly different scales, with differing levels of interaction between these. Perhaps one of the greatest challenges in biology is that of representativeness: how representative are observations and methods we develop for one biological system applicable to other systems, at different locations, in different organisms, or at different levels of organization in the hierarchy of biology? This inherently theoretical question underpins much of the past effort in mathematical biology, driven typically by the desire to develop the general principles by which biological systems are organized and operate. Yet at the same time there are demands for answers to quite specific questions to better manage natural systems, to enhance human health, and to plan for the future impacts of human actions. Some argue that we have not been tremendously successful to date in moving from theory to practice. I will give a variety of examples of projects in mathematical ecology that lie at this interface between theory and practice, providing some indication of the utility of quantitative methods to elucidate general patterns of natural systems and how these have proven useful in application. I'll conclude this positivist view of mathematical biology with some suggestions as to how we might best develop collaborative endeavors to build a more cohesive theory in biology.

Bio: Louis J. Gross is Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and Mathematics and Director of The Institute for Environmental Modeling at The University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He completed a B.S. degree in Mathematics at Drexel University and a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics at Cornell University, and has been a faculty member at UTK since 1979.

He has led the effort at UT to develop an across trophic level modeling framework to assess the biotic impacts of alternative water planning for the Everglades of Florida. He has co-directed several courses and workshops in Mathematical Ecology at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy, has edited or co-edited four books, served as Chair of the Theoretical Ecology Section of the Ecological Society of America, as President of the Society for Mathematical Biology and as Chair of the National Research Council Committee on Education in Biocomplexity Research. He is the 2006 Distinguished Scientist awardee of the American Institute of Biological Sciences.

A Call for Papers

Each year at our annual meeting we have the opportunity to listen to contributed talks from faculty and students, both graduate and undergraduate, from across the state (and occasionally beyond). I invite you to be one of those who are heard! Whether you wish to present recent research, the solution to an interesting problem, or share some pedagogical insight, your submission is welcome. We are also always very glad to hear from undergraduates about work they have done in summer research projects, in competitions, or on honors projects. We plan on having a panel presentation/discussion on the Carol Martin Gatton Academy of Mathematics and Science in Kentucky, located in Bowling Green; please let us know if you have an idea for another panel.

For both faculty and students, if you wish to make a presentation, fill out the Presentation Abstract Form and submit it by February 27, 2008. A copy of the form can be obtained here: Presentation Abstract Form. In general, the time for individual presentations will be 15 minutes, including time for questions. Special presentations can be allocated more time if necessary. Please note any special needs and a time preference on the form, and please submit (e-mail strongly preferred) to:

Will Harris
Department of Mathematics
Georgetown College
400 E. College St. #234
Georgetown, KY 40324
e-mail: wharris@georgetowncollege.edu

Phone: 502-863-7921
Fax: 502-868-7744

Hey, Students!

I hope your fall term went well. Seniors who are planning to go to graduate school are busy applying to graduate programs - and working hard to finish their undergraduate studies strong! If you will still be an undergraduate in the Fall Semester of 2008, then you should consider participating in a summer REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Check out http://www.maa.org/students/undergrad/research.html for more information. Faculty members can help you determine which REUs you would like best, and they can help you apply. Depending on the REU, the application deadline may be any time from the end of January through late March.

Don't forget the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) and the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM). These are four day competitions that start at 8pm on Thursday, February 14, and end at 8pm on Monday, February 18. This competition is for three-student teams. Your institution may have more than one team, but a student may be on only one team and each team works on only one problem. More information is available from http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/. The registration deadline is 2pm on Thursday, February 14.

April is Mathematics Awareness Month. This year's theme is Mathematics and Voting. For information concerning activities and to download a poster, check out http://www.mathaware.org/. Encourage your mathematics and computer science clubs to organize activities during the month of April. You can also kick off the 2008 Mathematics Awareness Month celebration by organizing a trip to attend the Annual KYMAA Section Meeting, March 28-29, 2008, at Western Kentucky University.

The KYMAA Section Meeting is a great opportunity for students to give a talk to a friendly audience. Fifteen undergraduate students presented papers at the 2007 meeting. Start thinking about a presentation, discuss it with a professor at your institution and get ready. Here are some ideas: Discuss your team's work in the MCM or ICM. If there is a mathematics or computer science topic you would like to investigate, do the work, then share what you learned at the section meeting. This activity makes your resume more attractive. Student presenters will have a choice of a free one-year membership in the Mathematical Association of America, which includes a monthly publication of the student's choice, or a book.

When you register for the meeting, register for the Friday evening banquet, too. Meals for students will again be at a discounted price. Students who have attended the banquet in the past have truly enjoyed it. Don't miss it! I will be writing a newsletter to be included with the registration packet at the section meeting, and I need your help providing highlights of your activities. Please have one of your club members send a brief summary to m.dobranski@moreheadstate.edu. Your responses are highly appreciated.

If you have any questions about the information above, please feel free to contact me.

Mike Dobranski at m.dobranski@moreheadstate.edu
KYMAA Student Chapters Coordinator

Congratulations to Don Bennett!

I am surprised, thrilled, and honored to receive a Meritorious Service Award. The MAA is a valuable organization for collegiate mathematics, and I am proud to have been a member for many years. Due to the organizational structure of the MAA, there are ample opportunities for individuals to become involved in their section and at the national level. Through these many service opportunities, I have enjoyed working with my professional colleagues in the Kentucky Section, at the national level, and interacting with the officers and staff of the MAA. Being involved in promoting and supporting mathematics and mathematics education has been and will continue to be an educational and personally rewarding experience.

KYMAA Section NExT

The KYMAA is soliciting applications for the third installment of the wildly successful KYNExT program!

Modeled after the National Project NExT, the mission of the Kentucky Section NExT (New Experiences in Teaching), is to support soon-to-be, newly-minted, and recent-but-untenured Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences (including all areas of mathematics, statistics, operations research, and mathematics education) in their role as mathematics faculty. In particular, the goal of KYNExT is to foster and enhance all aspects of an academic career: high-quality teaching and learning of mathematics, productive research and scholarship, and meaningful professional activities.

The KYNExT program will immediately precede the annual KYMAA spring meeting, beginning the evening before and ending just as the KYMAA meeting commences. This year's program includes inspiring presentations by award winning faculty from Kentucky and beyond, as well as panel discussions on discovering one's teaching style and on earning tenure.

To these ends, KYNExT seeks applications from any and all untenured mathematics faculty and mathematics graduate students who anticipate graduating with a Ph.D. by Fall 2009. KYNExT is intended to be a two-year program, so selection will favor applicants who are able to demonstrate a two-year commitment.

Please submit applications to Anne Collins at collins@centre.edu by February 22nd. We anticipate that review of applications will be completed no later than February 29th. A complete application will include: