Hill and Montgomery to be Honored
Professors Richard O. Hill (MSU) and Hugh L. Montgomery (UMAnn Arbor) will be honored at this spring's meeting as recipients, respectively, of the Section's Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching and its Distinguished Service Award.
Professor Hill has had a distinguished 33-year career as a teacher, author, scholar, and lecturer. He received the J. Sutherland Frame award from his home institution, and he has been the Director of the Emerging Scholars Program since its inception at MSU. He is also the author of a linear algebra textbook and a series of three textbooks on algebra and trigonometry.
Dr. Hill will be the official Michigan Section candidate for the MAA's Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Awards for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. There will be at most three national awardees, each of whom will be honored at the January 1998 MAA Meeting in Baltimore and receive a $1,000 check and a certificate.
Professor Montgomery has had a distinguished career as a scholar, author, and teacher. He has served the Michigan Section as Chair, Vice-Chair, and Governor. He provided the leadership for our drive to raise funds and name the Michigan Section Room at the MAA Headquarters building in Washington, D. C.
Dan Frohardt (WSU), whose Erdös number is 3, tells about his encounter with Paul Erdös some twenty years ago. He asked what I did, and I told him finite groups. He said that he felt that it was interesting that every group of order n is cyclic if and only if n and phi(n) are relatively prime. I hadn't been aware of this observation before. I still find it amusing because it seems to be a coincidence: For n and phi(n) to have a common factor, the prime factorization of n must satisfy one of two conditions. These conditions correspond to the two types of minimal non-cyclic groups.