2019
Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics Tom Edgar, Pacific Lutheran University

Citation: Jessica Sklar
Tom is one of those mathematics teachers who makes it look easy. He exudes an enthusiasm for mathematics that inspires students (and colleagues); our hall regularly echoes with the sounds of a passionate conversation Tom is having with a student about combinatorics or group theory, punctuated by his laugh.
semester Tom's natural charisma as a teacher is complemented by the careful thought he puts into designing his courses: he thinks about, reads about, discusses, and attends workshops on pedagogy. Every semester, Tom's teaching evaluation scores are among the highest in the department, and he is in extremely high demand as a capstone project advisor, carrying far more than his share of projects year after year. In addition to being a dynamic lecturer, Tom is a devotee of inquiry-based learning. He has created and taught an upper-level IBL course on enumerative combinatorics, crafting a textbook for the course that others can use; more recently he designed and taught an IBL course called "Providing the Words for Proofs without Words," which culminated in a book jointly authored by his students.
Tom is a rock star when it comes to engaging students in research. He has obtained funding from numerous sources to lead summer undergraduate research projects, and spent the summers of 2016 and 2017 as a mentor for the NSF-funded SUMmER (the Seattle University Mathematics Early Research) program. He has co-authored published papers with twelve undergraduates so far, and has papers with six more undergraduates currently in preparation. Tom's prolificacy, not to mention his energy, is outstanding.
Finally, Tom is an innovator when it comes to engaging students in the use of technology. He leads departmental seminars on LaTeX, and has his students use SAGE and post on class blogs in several of his courses. Thus, he engages his students both within and outside of the classroom.
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