Adrian College
[reported by Cindy Bosio]Lakshmi Dalwalla has joined the mathematics department. She received her Ph.D. from Bowling Green State U. [cbosio@adrian.edu]Albion College
[reported by Robert Messer]Paul Anderson is acting chair of the Math/CS Department during Dave Reimann’s sabbatical leave this year. • Dawn Sadir from CMU is a Visiting Assistant Prof. and Howard Whitston from LTU is a Visiting Instructor for the academic year. • The department has a weekly colloquium series (Thursdays at 4:10 p.m.). Visit www.albion.edu/MathCS/archive/0304/Calendar.asp for details. [ram@albion.edu]Alma College
[reported by Mel Nyman]On February 14 Spencer Wideman, a recent mathematics graduate of Alma C, spoke on his work as an actuarial trainee at CAN Insurance. On September 29 Paulus Gerdes, Universidade Pedogogica, Mozambique, spoke on “Symmetries in African Cultural Practices”. On September 26 a panel of three Pi Mu Epsilon members discussed their summer research experiences. On November 7 Sandra Speiser, National Security Agency, will visit classes and give a colloquium talk on her work as a cryptologic mathematician at NSA. Ms. Speiser is a 1989 alumna of Alma with majors in mathematics and computer science. • Tim Sipka and Robert Molina have begun a high school MATH Challenge. Students are invited to submit solutions to monthly problems posed by the organizers. Response has been very good so far. For details contact either Tim (Sipka@alma.edu) or Robert (Molina@alma.edu). • Aklilu Zeleke is on sabbatical leave for the academic year. He is visiting the Probability and Statistics Department at MSU. Jane Thorsen, a long time adjunct faculty member in our department, has retired. [nyman@alma.edu]Alpena Community College
[reported by Dan Rothe]We have started another busy school year at ACC. We are pleased to welcome Mary Ann Carlson as our new Vice President for Academic Affairs. She replaces Curt Davis who retired. • Jim (math/engineering instructor) and Kristin Berles were pleased to welcome their daughter Amelia Kate in August. • Sarah Ewing joins us this year at the Learning Center and as an adjunct math instructor. • We have created two new engineering courses in our department: Dynamics and Strength of Materials. • We look forward to a productive semester. [rothed@alpena.cc.mi.us]Andrews University
[reported by Donald Rhoads]Yun Myung Oh is on leave and is a Visiting Assistant Prof. at MSU. • The NSF awarded Andrews U a three-year grant for interdisciplinary research in mathematical ecology. The principal investigators are Shandelle Henson (mathematics) and James Hayward (biology). The research involves mathematically modeling the spatial and temporal dynamics of marine birds and mammals in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Washington. A curriculum in mathematical modeling, an undergraduate research team, and graduate students form an integral part of the interdisciplinary work. NSF also awarded Andrews a five-year grant to build an interdisciplinary program in neurobiology. The program will have three tracks, with emphases in psychology, biology, and mathematics. [dhr@andrews.edu]Central Michigan University
[reported by Ahmed Assaf]Ans Dias (Math Education) and John Daniels (Statistics) are new Assistant Profs. They are graduates of Indiana U and WMU, respectively. Shana Trzeciak is a new full time instructor. Steve Sepanski (SVSU) is a Visiting Associate Prof. Doug Lapp received tenure, and Azita Manouchehri was promoted to Associate Prof. • Donna Erickson, Sing Ong, and Yury Ionin are on sabbatical this Fall. Ahmed Assaf will be on sabbatical in the spring. • Siviram Narayan will have a research professorship in the spring semester. • Colloquium speakers this semester include Paulus Gerdes (Mozambique) and Ruth Gornet (U of Texas at Arlington). [assaf1am@cmich.edu]Ferris State University
[reported by James Howard]Darrell Allgaier, who was our Chair last year, is now teaching at Grove City C in Pennsylvania. David Frank from the Department of Physical Sciences is acting Chair for this year. Holly Price, Enoch Lee, and Michael Decker have joined the Department as tenure-track faculty. [James_Howard@ferris.edu]Grand Valley State University
[reported by Paul Fishback]The Department of Mathematics hosted a NSF REU site in the summer of 2003. Eight students worked with four faculty members on research problems in wavelets, Lie algebras, orthogonal polynomials, and the Hausdorff metric geometry. In addition, two students worked with department faculty as part of the GVSU student summer scholars program. Eight of the students gave talks at the MAA Student Paper Session at MathFest. Of the 53 student speakers at the conference, two students who conducted research at GVSU received awards for their presentations. The first student was Christopher Bay, who worked with Steve Schlicker and gave a talk titled “When Lines Go Bad: The Geometry of the Hausdorff Metric”. The second student, Kristina Lund, is a junior mathematics major at GVSU who studied spherical geometry with Will Dickinson and gave a talk titled “The Generalized Area Principle.” Students interested in participating in the 2004 REU are invited to obtain further program information at www.gvsu.edu/mathreu. • Matt Boelkins was named the recipient of the GVSU Science and Mathematics Division Pew Excellence in Teaching Award. Don VanderJagt was named recipient of the GVSU Distinguished Service Award for his many years of service to the university. In particular, Don has served for several years as the institutional NCAA representative. Charlene Beckmann has been elected president of the MCTM. • Ernie Palmer has retired. Alverna Champion has resigned. The department welcomes three new members: Filiz Dogru, Assistant Prof., (Ph.D. Penn State U), Paul Yu, Assistant Prof. (Ph.D. Illinois State U), and Nathan Wodarz, Visiting Assistant Prof. (Ph.D. U of Minnesota). In addition, Karen Heidenreich (Ph.D. Notre Dame), who served as a postdoctoral teaching fellow for three years, has joined the department as an Assistant Prof. John Golden, Jane Mays, and Clark Wells all received tenure. John and Clark have been promoted to the rank of Associate Prof. Sabbatical leaves during the 2003–04 academic year have been granted to John Golden, Clark Wells, Carl Arendsen, and David Austin. • Jonathan Hodge and Reva Kasman have been named Project NExT Fellows. [fishbacp@gvsu.edu]Hope College
[reported by Todd Swanson]We have three new faculty this year. Airat Bekmetjev (Ph.D. Arizona State U) joins us as an Assistant Prof. from Gettysburg C, where he held a visiting position last year. Mike Catalano (Ph.D. U of Minnesota) is on sabbatical from South Dakota Wesleyan U and comes to Hope as an NSF/AIRE Fellow this year. Mark Pearson (Ph.D. Northwestern U) joins us as an Assistant Prof. after recently completing his graduate work. • Dyana Harrelson is on a one-year leave of absence this year. [swansont@hope.edu]Kalamazoo College
[reported by John Fink]John Fink is spending the semester at Universidad San Francisco de Quito on a Fulbright Lectureship. [johnf@mail.usfq.edu.ec]Lake Superior State University
[reported by Brian Snyder]Lorraine Gregory (Ed.D. Duquesne U, 2001, Mathematics Education) has joined the faculty. Scott Lewis has returned to Utah Valley State C. Tom Mickewich has been named Prof. Emeritus. [bsnyder@lssu.edu]Lawrence Technological University
[reported by M. Merscher]The department is happy to welcome Chris Cartwright, our new faculty member. We are hosting a visiting professor, Wenhua Deng, from Wenzhou U in China, who will be with us through the spring semester. The LTU Open House on April 26–27 will include the 34th Annual LTU Mathematics Competition for High School Students, headed up by Mike Merscher, and Robofest 2003, led by Chan-Jin Chung. [merscher@ltu.edu]Michigan Technological University
[reported by Lynn Murphy]Fernanda Pambianco and Stefano Marcugini, from the U of Perugia (Italy), gave a joint colloquium entitled “Classification and Construction Algorithms for Arcs, Codes and Caps” on August 29. Stoyan N. Kapralov, from the Technical U of Gabrovo, Bulgaria, gave a colloquium entitled “Error-Correcting Codes: Bounds, Constructions and Enumeration” on September 4. Walter Wallis, from Southern Illinois U, gave a colloquium entitled “Triple Arrays” on September 12. Jeremy M. G. Taylor, from the Department of Biostatistics, UM-AA, gave a colloquium entitled “Multiple Imputation in Survival Analysis” on September 16. Wolfgang Ch. Schmid, from U of Salzburg, Austria, gave a colloquium entitled “On the Analysis and Testing of Linear (t,m,s)-Nets” on September 19. • Mangalam Gopal retired August. Jianping Dong, was promoted to Full Prof. Kathleen Feigl and Franz Tanner were promoted from Associate to Full Prof. with tenure. • Vladimir Tonchev was the recipient of the MTU Research Award. [murph@mtu.edu]Oakland University
[reported by Jerry Grossman]Ravi Khattree has been elected a Fellow of the American Statistical Association, an honor given annually to at most one third of one percent of ASA members. He was cited for promoting statistics by writing for diverse audiences, for editorial work, and for innovative contributions to statistical education. Bo-nan Jiang has received an NSF grant for his research on the least squares finite element method. • On October 1 the Department and the Honors College put on a two-hour AP Calculus Workshop to give tips to students taking AP calculus this year. Jerrold Grossman, student Dan Steffy, and a local high school teacher shared their ideas with students from Detroit area high schools. A follow-up is planned for March. • The ninth annual Summer Mathematics Institute will be held next summer. Thanks to the generosity of an anonymous donor, there is no cost to the students for this six-week program, in which 36 bright high school students come to campus daily to take two special college-level courses (such as Number Theory or Operations Research) and work on challenging math problems. There is usually a significant overlap between participants in this program and the Top 100 on the MMPC. Further details and application information are available on the Department site, www.math.oakland.edu. • The Department hosted the Fifth Annual Midwest Optimization Seminar on October 4, a gathering of two dozen researchers from Michigan, Ohio, and Ontario in various fields of continuous optimization and control theory. We are excited about hosting the Section Spring meeting on May 7–8. A highlight will be the setting for the Friday banquet: historic Meadow Brook Hall. • László Lipták has joined the faculty as Assistant Prof.; he works in combinatorics and discrete optimization and was most recently a post-doc at Waterloo. Mark Werner (Ph.D. U of Colorado) is a visiting Assistant Prof. In addition to statistics, his interests include long-distance running. Ananda Sen has begun a two-year leave of absence to work at the Center for Statistical Consulting and Research (UM-AA). Alan Park will do the same at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study, starting in January. Steve Wright, Rob Kushler, Ravi Khattree, Baruch Cahlon, and Eddie Cheng are taking sabbatical leaves for all or part of this academic year. [grossman@oakland.edu]Saginaw Valley State University
[reported by Thomas Zerger]John Mooningham received the Faculty Association award for service to the university and community. Steve Sepanski received the Faculty Association Award for Research. Patrick Pan received the SVSU Earl L. Warrick Excellence in Research Award. • The department welcomes new department members Assistant Prof. Nancy Colwell, Algebraic Number Theory (LSU, 1996) and Lecturer Jennifer Beecher (MA, Indiana U, 2003). Bing Liu was promoted to Associate Prof. and granted tenure. Rose Novey and Tim Weier have retired from the department. Steve Sepanski is on sabbatical leave at CMU. • SVSU High School Math Olympics Competition will be held on March 26, 2004. [Zerger@svsu.edu]Siena Heights University
[reported by Toni Carroll]Bette Warren, EMU, spoke to student groups, Pi Mu Epsilon, and Women and Mathematics about “Day of Reckoning”. The main question was “Why is it so hard to count?” • Brian Gimalski, president of PME, received the Miriam Schaeffer award for prospective teachers of mathematics at the elementary and secondary level. [toni@sienahts.edu]University of Detroit Mercy
[reported by John O’Neill]Ron Mosier has changed from full-time to part-time teacher. Nancy Dwyer has moved with her family to Oregon. Jeff Boats has been promoted to Associate Prof. Katy Snyder received tenure. Lazaros Kikas, Betty Cousey-Lee, and Ruth Miller have joined our department as Instructors. • Together with other sciences in the school we run a number of Science-Awareness programs for students in grades 4–12. Among them are: Technology Day on October 17, Dapceps on Saturdays until November15, and the First Lego League on November 22 and December 6. For information on these programs contact Dan Maggio (maggiodd@udmercy.edu). [oneilljd@udmercy.edu]University of Michigan-Dearborn
[reported by F. J. Papp]The mathematics department welcomes a new faculty member, Rama Chidambaram, who received her Ph.D. at Arizona State U in 2003. Her research interests are in modeling supply chains in manufacturing processes with genetic algorithms. John Gillespie will be on sabbatical in the winter term of 2004. Joan Remski was promoted to Associate Prof. with tenure. Associate Prof. Rheta Rubenstein was awarded tenure. Mathematics faculty won three campus-wide awards during the academic year 2002–03: Terri Faitel won the distinguished teaching award, John Gillespie won the distinguished service award, and Jennifer Zhao won the distinguished research award. • In March of this year McGraw-Hill published the seventh edition of Complex Variables and Applications in the well-known series of texts by the authors J. W. Brown and R. V. Churchill. [fjpapp@umd.umich.edu]University of Michigan-Flint
[reported by Steven C. Althoen]The 37th annual Math Field Day, a competition for high school students from throughout Michigan, will be held on March 2. Thirty-two teams participated in 2003; the team from Grosse Pointe North won the championship. For more information, visit the event’s site, www.flint.umich.edu/Departments/math/Field_Day. [salthoen@umflint.edu]Wayne State University
[reported by Daniel Frohardt]The department hosted an NSF-CBMS Regional Conference in Mathematical Sciences on Free Boundary Problems in Partial Differential Equations and Applications, May 18–22, 2003. The conference was partially supported by the IMA. • The department is concluding its periodic seven-year review. In connection with this, external reviewers Avner Friedman and Wendell Fleming visited campus in October. • The Mathematics Pipeline continues to grow under the direction of Steve Kahn. It incorporates the Uri Treisman-inspired Emerging Scholars Program as well as the Math Corps Summer Camp, and Super Saturdays for students in the Detroit Public Schools. • This Fall, the department will be working with the University Preparatory Academy and University Preparatory High School, which are charter schools founded by Doug Ross. • Lowell Hansen is in the fourth and final year of his term as department chair. • Leon Brown has retired. A “Brownfest” was held last spring to celebrate his career. Sarah Ferguson has resigned. The personnel committee is now working to fill one opening for next year at the Assistant Prof. level. Former department chair Bert Eisenstadt passed away in February. There was a memorial dinner in his honor in March. • New Assistant Profs.: Daniel Isaksen (Ph.D. U of Chicago), post-doc at U of Notre Dame, algebraic topology; Catherine Lebiedzik (Ph.D. U of Virginia), post-doc at Universitaire Leonar de Vinci, France, applied mathematics. • Visitors this year: Fon-Che Liu, National Taiwan U and Academia Sinica, analysis; Caitlin Wang, U of California, San Diego, non-linear partial differential equations and geometry; Suk Jong Lee, Chungbuk U, Korea, topology; Bong-shin Baik, Woosuk U, Korea, topology. • Robert Berman is on a leave of absence to work in the provost’s office. Robert Bruner and Guozhen Lu are on sabbatical this semester. George Yin will be on sabbatical leave in Winter, 2004. Rafail Khasminskii has been elected to the WSU Academy of Scholars. John Klein and Peter Malcolmson have been promoted to Full Prof. [danf@math.wayne.edu]
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