The annual meeting of the Michigan Section-MAA and MichMATYC (the Michigan Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges) will be held on Friday and Saturday, May 4–5, 2007, at the University of Michigan-Dearborn in Dearborn. This year’s program promises an interesting and exciting mix of talks devoted to mathematics and the teaching of mathematics. These include plenary addresses, local invited sessions, and contributed sessions.

At the Friday luncheon address, Richard Hill, Professor of Mathematics, from Michigan State University will discuss his many interesting experiences with mathematics education issues. These include the Emerging Scholars Program, the development of a capstone course for future high school math teachers, and a study of the transition in math from high school to college (see his article in the December 2006 issue of The American Mathematical Monthly).

The Friday afternoon plenary address will be by Ronald M. Solomon of The Ohio State University, who will speak on the topic of his award winning paper (the 2006 AMS Levi L. Conant Prize for outstanding expository paper), the classification of finite groups. In his talk, “What have we learned from the Classification of the Finite Simple Groups?”, Prof. Solomon will “survey some of the highlights of the journey of discovery” in classifying the finite simple groups.

Following dinner and the Friday evening awards banquet, Joe Gallian (University of Minnesota-Duluth), author of many books and current President of the MAA, will speak on “The Mathematics of Identification Numbers”. He will discuss some of the common bar coding and check digit schemes that are used every day for identifying and error checking consumer products, such as UPC bar codes, credit cards, airline tickets, personal checks, books, and magazines.

Saturday morning will begin with a plenary address by Doris Schattschneider, Professor Emerita of Moravian College and author of several books on M.C. Escher, who will speak on “Escher’s Combinatorial Patterns and their Aftermath”. She will discuss the combinatorial questions asked and answered by Escher and how he “… opened the door to many tantalizing questions that have recently been addressed by mathematicians and computer scientists”.

The meeting concludes with a Saturday luncheon talk by Anna Spagnuolo, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Oakland University. Prof. Spagnuolo has worked with specialists in the medical sciences and will discuss her work on the mathematical modeling of a pathogenic bacterium in the human intestine.

In addition to the plenary talks, we will have 30-minute local invited addresses by David Austin (GVSU, “Circle Packings from Penrose Tilings”), Michael Bolt (Calvin College, “Paint by Number: a Visualization of Complex Functions”), Anthony Crachiola (SVSU, “Locally Nilpotent Derivations and their Applications”), Lisa DeMeyer (CMU, “The Zero Divisor Graph of a Semigroup”), and Daniel Isaksen (WSU, “Computations with Quaternions, Octonions, and Beyond”).

There will also be many 20-minute contributed talks that cover of a variety of topics in mathematics and pedagogical issues. There will also be sessions devoted to talks by undergraduate and graduate students as well as book exhibits from the MAA and other publishers.

Details about the schedule (including abstracts), registration, and accommodations are contained in the Program for the Annual Meeting, which is included with this Newsletter as well as on the Section’s Web site, www.michmaa.org.

Please note that advance reservations for all meals must be made by April 26, and hotel reservations must be made by April 12 for the Hampton Inn and April 24 for the Double Tree, to receive the conference rate. The deadline for submission of abstracts for student talks is March 31.

The program committee for this year consists of co-chairs David Redman (Delta C) and Tom Zerger (SVSU) , along with John Clifford (UM-Dearborn) and Amy Hlavacek (SVSU).

The local arrangements committee from UM-Dearborn, which consists of Margret Höft (chair), John Clifford, John Gillespie, Joan Remski, Jennifer Zhao, Belinda Soliz, and Trisha Schlaff, has done a great job of getting ready for all of us.

See you all at UM-Dearborn on May 4 and 5!

Tom Zerger, Four-Year College Vice Chair

Back to the Spring 2007 Newsletter

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