SPRING 2019
NEWSLETTER
Section Website: http://sections.maa.org/rockymt

Spring 2019 Newsletter in PDF Format for Printing

Click on the following link for PDF document that is formatted for printing.

http://sections.maa.org/rockymt/newsletters/spring2019/spring2019news.pdf

Table of Contents


2019 Distinguished Teaching Award Call for Nominations

Each year since 1992, the section recognizes one outstanding teacher of collegiate mathematics with an award named in honor of Burton W. Jones, a lifelong advocate of excellence in teaching at all levels. In addition to an honorarium, a certificate and an invitation to deliver the opening lecture at the next Section Meeting, the recipient is eligible to be the section's nominee for the MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Awards for Distinguished College for University Teaching of Mathematics These national awardees (at most three) are honored at the MAA winter meeting with a certificate and $100*e; check. All nominators also receive a certificate of in recognition of their efforts to support the section mission of promoting excellence in teaching; nominators and nominees both receive free meeting registration at the next section meeting.

To begin the nomination process for an outstanding teacher that you know, simply submit the one-page nomination form (available at our website: http://sections.maa.org/rockymt/2020_BWJones.php and in this newsletter) by 15 December 2019. Complete nomination materials (described on the website) are due 15 January 2020.

2019 Early Career Teaching Award Call for Nominations

The Rocky Mountain Section of the MAA approved in 2015 a new teaching award for faculty early in their career. The award was inspired by the Henry Adler Award, which has been active at the national level since 2004. We hope to use this section program as an opportunity for recognition for faculty members that are early in their career and this program makes a wonderful companion to the section Distinguished Teaching Award. To be eligible the candidate must:

Nominees should be recognized for excellence in teaching at the undergraduate level and have a demonstrated influence outside their own classrooms. The award includes a small cash prize and a plaque, plus the person will also be recognized at the next section meeting. This is an excellent opportunity for you to get recognition for the excellent teachers in your department and also for the mathematics community to recognize the teaching contributions people can make early in their career.

Complete nomination guidelines and the one-page nomination form are included in this newsletter. To begin the nomination process for an outstanding teacher that you know, simply submit the one-page nomination form (available at our website: http://sections.maa.org/rockymt and in this newsletter) by 15 December 2019 . December 2018. Complete nomination materials (described on the website) are due 15 January 2020.


Chair's Corner

Dear Section,

Let me start with belated best wishes for the New Year.

Deep in Winter (well, this being Colorado there are still students walking around in shorts), thoughts turn to our spring meeting, which will happen April 5/6 in Durango, chaired by Laura Scull and Veronica Furst. With Durango being far from many places (or, as Laura prefers: many places being far from Durango) we are looking at a slightly shifted schedule that will allow many of us to travel on Friday after daybreak, and still make it for the meeting's opening. I am looking forward to seeing many of you there. As usual, you will find more about the spring meeting later in this newsletter.

Speaking of travel times reminds me of the large geographic extent of our section. The Executive Committee (EC) is certainly aware of this, and we try to offer equal opportunities to all section members, but we cannot change geography or invent faster modes of travel, nor can we conjure events out of thin air. I would like to encourage you to propose section meetings (we still are looking for a venue for our 2020 sectional meeting), or other section-sponsored activities: We have an activity grant program with proposals due annually on November 1, and we would love to see more proposals. Chances of funding have been excellent in the past years. If you are interested, but would like advice, contact me by email, or talk to me at the sectional meeting!

I also would like to encourage all of you to consider serving in one of our many officer roles without which our section could not work. Some of these positions are elected, and we have a hard-working nomination committee (thank you Kyle Riley, Gulden Karakok, and Greg Oman for your work) who look for candidates for these elections. If you are interested in serving in future in one of the elected positions, please contact the nominating committee.

There are also other positions (such as being on the nominating committee) that are not elected, but to which members (according to our bylaws) will be named by the elected officers.

The common-sense mandate we have from the national organization is to have these roles, in particular, the nomination and awards committees, filled from members selected equally from the membership. The naive solution — picking members by random from the member roll — however is clearly not a good option, as we cannot force anyone to serve in an officer role. I therefore would like to encourage you to think about serving in some of these roles, and to talk (or email) to me (or other EC members) if you could be interested. This is not a burden: The time commitment for the awards committees, for example, is probably less than half a day per year. Serving on such a committee also might help you with your own nominations or grant proposals in the future.

Some of the named positions take significantly more work, and I would like to thank the incumbents for their contribution to the section, in particular our long-time newsletter editor Linda Sundbye, our Section NExT committee Rebecca Swanson and Amanda Schaeffer-Fry, and our new CCTM representative Heather Johnson.

Finally, I would like to thank my predecessor, Michael Jacobson, who in the (definitely not ceremonial, but hard-work) role of past chair has helped us enormously and is still doing so until the election of the new chair-elect following the spring meeting.

Amongst the changes that happened over the last year is that the deadline for the Spring Newsletter moved earlier to January 15. I'm thus writing this before flying off to Baltimore for the Joint Meetings. Don't forget that the 2020 Joint Meetings will be on our home turf in Denver. The deadline for proposing special sessions for this event will be April 2.

Wishing You an Excellent Spring Term,

Alexander Hulkpe,
CSU — Fort Collins

Chair, Rocky Mountain Section

Newsletter Editor Position

After 15 years serving as Newsletter Editor, I am retiring from this position. I have certainly enjoyed this work over the years, but it is time to let someone younger and more energetic takeover. If you are interested in this position, please contact one of the members of the Executive Committee.

Best wishes to all,

Linda Sundbye
Metropolitan State University of Denver
Rocky Mountain Section Newsletter Editor

24th Annual Colorado Mathematics Awards Ceremony/Reception

Plans are underway for CMA XXIV -- the 24th Colorado Mathematics Awards Ceremony and Reception to be held on Tuesday, May 7 at the Grant - Humphreys Mansion in Denver. At the school level we'll be recognizing the top ten participants on MATHCOUNTS, the AMC 8, 10, and 12 contests, and the members of the 2018 Colorado American Regions Mathematics League team. At the collegiate level we'll be recognizing all Section Putnam scorers in the top 500, and the top team(s) on the Mathematical Contest in Modeling. We expect to recognize between 50 and 60 winners. With the winners, parents, and teachers, we expect between 120 and 130 to attend the event.

We appreciate the support that the Rocky Mountain Section has provided for this event over the years.

Other sponsors of the Colorado Mathematics Awards: the Professional Engineers of Colorado, and individual and past members of the Colorado Mathematics Awards Steering Committee. Suggestions for additional sources of funding are always welcomed. Please contact me at gibbs_d@fortlewis.edu.

Thank you,

Dick Gibbs
Co-Chair CMA Steering Committee
Emeritus Professor of Mathematics
Fort Lewis College


Section News

Colorado School of Mines

The Colorado School of Mines Applied Mathematics and Statistics department welcomes new faculty members:

Douglas Nychka is a statistical scientist whose areas of research include the theory, computation and application of curve and surface fitting with a focus on geophysical and environmental applications. His statistical expertise is in spline and spatial statistical models, especially as applied to large geophysical data sets and numerical models. Nychka joins Mines from NCAR where he most recently served as director of the Institute of Mathematics Applied to Geosciences.

Dorit Hammerling is a statistical scientist interested in spatio-temporal statistical methods applied to the geosciences, with a focus on massive data from satellites and climate models. Hammerling comes to Mines from NCAR where she was most recently a Project Scientist II in the Analytics and Integrative Machine Learning Group.

Assistant Professor Cecilia Diniz Behn was selected as the winner of the 2017- 2018 Mines Teaching Award for Tenure-Track Faculty. She has introduced two courses focused on mathematical biology into our curriculum: Mathematical Biology and Mathematical and Computational Neuroscience. She is also an important player in the interdisciplinary MS and PhD degree programs in Quantitative Biosciences and Engineering. Diniz Behn has strong research ties: while continuing her own research in the Math Biology field, she also assists graduates and undergraduates with research. Her mentorship has led to three successful master's students and an active research group. She is a regular participant in SWiM (Society for Women in Mathematics) and an active member of AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics)

Teaching Professor Gus Greivel was selected as the winner of the 2017-2018 Mines Teaching Award for Teaching Faculty. Greivel is not only an AMS alum but he has also been a member of the Mines faculty since 1996, teaching over 20 different courses and 7,000 students in a wide variety of courses. He led the development of significant curriculum changes in the mathematical and computer sciences degree program from 2005 to 2008, work that now serves as the framework for three undergraduate degree programs. This award recognizes the quality, quantity and diversity of his instructional contributions to Mines, his continued pursuit to improve the undergraduate experience, and his leadership among the Mines teaching faculty.

Adjunct faculty member, Jane Walker, received the 2018 Mines' Blue Key Outstanding AMS Faculty Award.

William Navidi received the 2017 Outstanding AMS Faculty Award by the Mines Class of 2017 Graduating Seniors.

Program Manager Jaime Bachmeier received the 2018 Mines Blue Key Outstanding AMS Staff Award.

Faculty Grants:

Mahadevan Ganesh (PI): National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), "Adaptive Power Reduction and Uncertainty Quantification Algorithms"

Soutir Banyopadhyay and Willy Hereman (Co-PIs): State of Colorado, Flowline Risk Review Soutir Bandyopadhyay (PI) and Dorit Hammerling (PI): National Science Foundation (NSF), "Collaborative Research: Theory and Methods for Highly Multivariate Spatial Processes with Applications to Climate Data Science" Cecilia Diniz-Behn (co-PI): National Science Foundation (NSF), RAISE-TAQS: Entanglement and information in complex networks of qubits. Congratulations to Soutir Bandyopadhyay on being selected as Web Editor for the Bernoulli Society and as an Associate Editor for Statistics and Probability Letters.

PhD Candidate, Katy Martinez’ research was featured in an online article on the American Geophysical Union's website, following the 2018 AGU Fall Meeting. Martinez's research is building a numerical model that predicts areas in Brazil at risk for mosquito-borne disease outbreaks. Unlike other models that make outbreak predictions based solely on climate factors, Martinez's model also incorporates how human demographics, such as the percentage of people living in poverty or how many households had a garbage collection service, impact the spread of mosquito-borne diseases. She hopes that taking human demographics into account will improve risk predictions, helping policymakers make decisions to stop the spread of potentially deadly mosquito-borne diseases.

Student Awards:

PhD Candidate Nicholas Fisher received the annual 2018 Graduate Teaching Award.

PhD Students Nora Stack and Nick Danes received the inaugural Graduate Research Awards.

Erica Dettmer-Radtke (STAT) & Clayton Kramp (CAM) received the Spring 2018 Outstanding Graduating Senior Awards.

John Alley (STAT) and Matthew Baldin (CAM) received the December 2018 Outstanding Graduating Senior Awards.

Jaden Davidson received the 2017-2018 Ryan Sayers Memorial Scholarship.

Nathanael Smith and Connor Mattes received the 2017-2018 Ryan Sayers Memorial Award.

Kaitlyn Mobley received the 2017-2018 E-days Award.

Nicholas Rummel is the recipient of the 2018 Professor Everett Award in Mathematics. The Award is given to a senior who demonstrates scholarship, leadership, community service and potential for the innovative application of mathematics to mineral engineering. Daniel Mendoza (not pictured) received the 2018 AMS Honors Fund to Honor Excellence in Teaching and Learning Award.

Colorado State University – Pueblo

Janet Nichols led CSU-Pueblo’s (and her!) 41st Math Day, November 15, 2018, for over 200 students and their teachers from 19 Colorado High Schools. See https://www.chieftain.com/news/20181119/math-students-shine-at-csu-pueblo-event for more information.

James Louisell again wrote the Swanson Competition Exam, his 22nd since 1995.

Paul Chacon’s and Igor Melnykov’s collaboration with others CSU-P faculty lead to the 2018 publication: “Distribution of the internal and external rates of return in a partially stochastic oil pump problem”, Engineering Economist, https://doi.org/10.1080/0013791X.2018.1468945

Jonathan Poritz is currently serving full time as Director and Data Analyst in the Center for Teaching and Learning at CSU-Pueblo. He also serves at the Chair of the Colorado OER Council through the Colorado Department of Higher Education. His piece “Blockchain Pixie Dust” appeared on Inside Higher Ed., September 12, 2018.

Paul Chacon began his third stint as Department Chair in May 2018. He is also designing and leading a major revision of our entry level and remedial mathematics curriculum.

Bruce Lundberg’s term as Chair ended May 5, 2018, but he now serves as Physics Program coordinator. After a three-year hiatus, he returned summer 2018 (his 20th) to full-time summer consulting in optimization of spacecraft trajectories.

Travis Hurst joined our Department as a tenure-track assistant professor of physics. His specialty is dark matter research.

Darren Funk-Neubauer is teaching a special seminar in combinatorics Spring 19. Over 2018 Thanksgiving break, he climbed the highest 4 volcanos in Mexico: 15,354; 17,126; 18,045 and 18,406 feet high.

Igor Melnykov is teaching a special seminar in regression Spring 19, along with his regular graduate course in Statistics for Biology and Chemistry Master’s students.

Metropolitan State University of Denver

Student Ahern Nelson participated in the Budapest Semester Abroad in Mathematics. And Elizabeth Foster participated in the Undergraduate Student Poster Session at the JMM, presenting her team℉s work from the previous summer’s REU at Boise State.

Montana State University

Montana State University welcomes two new faculty members to the Department of Mathematical Sciences.

Katharine Banner is an Assistant Professor of Statistics. She believes that statisticians have a responsibility to not only develop methodology for addressing specific research questions, but to also provide tools for assessing when those methods are appropriate to use. She is interested in developing tools and guidelines (e.g., R packages for visualizing data/results) for practitioners to aid in understanding complex (and often popular) methods so that they can make informed decisions about when to use them.

Derek Williams is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education. Williams is interested in students‘ experiences while learning mathematics; relationships between affect and cognition; students’ understanding of concepts central to calculus and precalculus; and students’ mathematical reasoning with technology.

South Dakota School of Mines and Technology

There have been many changes this year for our department at the South Dakota School of Mines & Technology. The decision has been made to split the department so there will be a new department in Computer Science and Engineering while the mathematics portion of our mission will live on in the Department of Mathematics. Kyle Riley has stepped down from the position of Department Head and Travis Kowalski has stepped up to the position of Interim Department Head. Last year, Martha Garlick was granted promotion to Associate Professor and awarded tenure. The math major has been doing well and we have enjoyed an increasing number of graduates in recent years. We hope to continue this trend with our new department.

University of Northern Colorado

We are very excited to welcome Virgil Pierce, Neil Hatfield, and Shweta Naik to our department.

Virgil Pierce, our new director, served as Associate Dean for Student Success in the College of Sciences at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. His research interests are applied mathematics, mathematical and statistical physics, combinatorics, and probability. In addition, he has been focusing on placement and college readiness issues from mathematics education and administration perspectives.

Neil Hatfield is a visiting assistant professor of mathematics education. His research interest is the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics and statistics with primary focus on how students develop their understandings of distribution in statistics.

Shweta Naik is a post-doctural research assistant fellow working on an NSF grant entitled Initiating a Foundational Research Model for Secondary Mathematical Knowledge for Teaching (INFORMS MKT). She received her PhD from the University of Michigan and her research interests are in the area of teaching and studying teachers learning to teach mathematics.

The Howard Hughes Medical Institute awarded UNC a five-year, $1 million dollar grant to develop a classroom model and establish a new center to engage more students from all backgrounds, in the sciences. Jodie Novak serves as Co-Project Director for Improving Classroom Culture to Support Intrinsic Motivation as a Pathway to STEM Inclusive Excellence grant.

Katie Morrison, in collaboration with Carina Curto of Pennsylvania State University, received a $1.1 million dollar NIH Brain Initiative grant to support research on mathematical models of neural activity with an aim toward understanding how neural connectivity shapes the patterns of activity observed in different brain regions.

Hortensia Johnson is the MAA’s new Associate Secretary and started her position on August 15, 2018. Nathaniel Miller was recently elected as the Chair-Elect of the MAA SIGMAA on Inquiry Based Learning (IBL). Nate Eldredge was tenured and promoted to Associate Professor. Igor Sczcyrba retired in May 2018.

    Is news from your school missing?
Send your news to your department liaison now with a request to forward it to the Newsletter Editor,
Pam Peters, for inclusion in the next issue.
    pam.peters@ppcc.edu


CCTM News

Happy New Year!
Heather Johnson, UCD
CCTM Rep

Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month

Information for this year’s Mathematics and Statistics Awareness Month will be available soon at http://www.mathaware.org

SIAM 15th Annual Front Range
Applied Mathematics Conference
University of Colorado – Denver
March 2, 2019

For more information, visit https://www.colorado.edu/amath/2019-siam-front-range-student-conference

Conference Keynote Speaker:
Jan S. Hesthaven, École Polytechnique
Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland Title of Talk: How to Predict a Tsunami

Abstracts due February 22, 2019. Submit to: FRAMSC.abstracts@gmail.com.


Section Nominating Committee Report

The nominating committee is pleased to report that we currently have two candidates nominated for the position of chair-elect. As you may know, the chair-elect is a very important position in leadership for the Rocky Mountain Section.

The chair-elect serves one year as chair-elect, two years as chair of the section, and one year as past-chair. In the first and fourth year the position includes the role of chairing our teaching awards committee and also being chair of the section activity grant award committee. As chair, the person elected would lead the executive committee and preside over all business meetings for the section. The chair is also responsible with appointing committee members to the standing committees.

As you may recall, this is our first election under our revised by-laws, which means the actual vote will occur electronically. The nomination committee will continue to accept nominations and all nominated candidates will be presented at our next section business meeting, April 6 in Durango, CO. At the business meeting, we will also accept nominations from the floor and then close nominations. The actual election will be held electronically with section members contacted via email to vote following the same procedures that are used for the elections conducted for our congressional representative.

If you have anyone you would like to nominate then please feel free to contact any member of the nominating committee:

Note: Elected officers of the section must be members of the MAA.

Respectfully submitted,
The Nominating Committee

NOMINEES FOR CHAIR-ELECT:

Dan Swenson
Associate Professor, Black Hills State University

BIO:

Dr. Swenson received a B.S. in Mathematics and a B.A. in Philosophy from Iowa State University in 2003. He went on to study Mathematics at the University of Minnesota (Twin Cities), where he completed an M.S. in 2007 and a Ph.D. in 2009. Since August 2009 he has been a faculty member at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, SD, where he currently holds the rank of Associate Professor. Some of his current interests include the study of political redistricting (gerrymandering), math education, and any kind of puzzles or games.

POSITION STATEMENT:

I have been actively involved in the MAA since moving to the Rocky Mountain Section. I have attended and delivered a talk at every section meeting since the spring of 2010. I was also fortunate to be named a Section NExT fellow in 2010-2011, and I felt that that experience was helpful to me in many ways as a new faculty member. Quite a few of us from that cohort are still active in the section, and I enjoy re-connecting with them at least every year at the section meeting.

One thing that makes the MAA an especially valuable and important organization for me is its commitment to excellence in teaching mathematics at all levels, especially through its excellent publications and conferences. In particular, the Pikes Peak Regional Undergraduate Mathematics Conference and the annual Section meeting are valuable opportunities for our undergraduate Mathematics and Mathematics Education students to directly experience new and exciting mathematics, here in our own geographic region. I have repeatedly seen our students get inspired by a talk they attended, or a conversation with someone they just met, at these events. Ensuring robust participation in our section and at our meetings is and will be a significant challenge, but it is critical to our success as a section.

I am proud to be a part of the Rocky Mountain Section, and I look forward to continuing to work with the section in the future. Thank you!

Jonathan Poritz
Associate Professor, CSU – Pueblo

BIO:

Dr. Poritz has been at Colorado State University-Pueblo for about thirteen years, but before that he was one of those tattered minstrel mathematicians one sees wandering dusty backroads with nothing but a piece of chalk and a box of Springer-yellow textbooks to his name. In total, he was a student or faculty member at around a dozen universities in every time zone in the contiguous 48 and two in Europe. During breaks in the mathematical wandering, he also worked in various IT firms, from start-ups to multi-nationals, doing things like: AI, cryptography, and consulting on public policy towards technology. His research has studied a variety of pure and applied problems, but his recent focus has been on pedagogy. He has written a couple of textbooks and recently became the director of the Center for Teaching and Learning on the CSU-Pueblo campus. He is also working at the state level in Colorado to get more open educational resources to students in higher education as chair of the state OER Council created last year by the Colorado legislature. More information is available on his website poritz.net/jonathan .

POSITION STATEMENT:

If elected, there are many things I would like to pursue under the umbrella of all of the wonderful work that the MAA already does. Here are three specifics:

  1. OER: I've been working on my campus and at the state level in Colorado to promote the use of "Open Educational Resources" in higher ed. These include free, and freely customizable, textbooks and other written materials, but also go much farther. For example, another OER is the amazing tool WeBWorK, an open-source online homework system supported by the MAA and developed with support from the NSF, which uses a Perl-like language to build sophisticated, customized problems for a range of mathematical topics. OER can improve students' lives by lowering part of the high financial barrier imposed by today's funding model of higher ed, while improving faculty members' lives by giving us greater control over the educational content and approach used in our classes as realized by the materials [such as textbooks] we use. In the same way the MAA has supported WeBWorK, it can support OER more generally, and this would be something I would very much like to facilitate.
  2. Pedagogy: These are exciting times for mathematical pedagogy, with new results of careful studies coming out about what makes for effective instruction, as well as new tools (many technological) allowing new pedagogical methodologies. The MAA can share information, bring in speakers, run workshops to share these developments.
  3. Research: It is an even more exciting time for pure mathematical research, of course: in recent years and months we've had a new Mersenne prime, controversies about the Riemann Hypothesis and the ABC Conjecture, and advances towards the twin prime conjecture, just to name a few things it is fairly easy to discuss with a wide audience. It is also a moment, in the larger sense, that mathematics is relevant to so many fields, from astrophysics to cryptocurrencies to topologies of social networks to machine learning -- it's all math! The MAA can help to spread the joy of mathematical discovery to a wider audience, to the general public, to our students, and to the professionals in so many fields who now use quite sophisticated mathematics in everything they do.


Fort Lewis College in Durango to host the annual
Rocky Mountain Section Meeting
April 5 – 6, 2019

The 2019 Rocky Mountain Section meeting will be held April 5-6, 2019 on the campus of Fort Lewis College in Durango, CO. The conference will begin late Friday afternoon and run all day Saturday. The meeting promises two days of engaging speakers, student activities, book sales, and more.

Plenary Speakers for the meeting will include:


Burton W. Jones Award Nomination Form


You may use the form on the section website, or copy the PDF version of the form.

Early Career Teaching Award Nomination Form


You may use the PDF form on the section website, or copy the PDF version of the form.


Early Career Teaching Award Guidelines


Part of the core mission for the Rocky Mountain Section is to provide recognition for quality mathematics teaching. The Early Career Teaching Award was established to recognized excellence in teaching in the mathematical sciences for faculty that are early in their career.

Eligibility

Nominees must:

Guidelines for nomination

Nominees for the award may be made by any member of the Rocky Mountain Section of the MAA. Nominees should:

Nomination form is due December 15

Complete nomination packet is due January 15

Nomination Packet

A complete nomination packet should consist of the following documentation as it is described below.

  1. Nomination Form and One-Page Summary – Describe the unusual and personal and professional qualities of the nominee that contribute to his or her extraordinary teaching success, and attach to this completed nomination form.
  2. Narrative (Up to 2 pages) – Describe the nominee's extraordinary success in teaching by providing a narrative of the nominee's background, experience, teaching style, special contributions, other teaching awards, and any additional evidence of the nominee's unusual achievement in teaching. Note especially effectiveness in teaching undergraduate mathematics and influence beyond the nominee's own classrooms. The narrative should not exceed two single-spaced pages.
  3. Additional Documentation (Up to 2 pages) – Submit no more than two pages of further evidence to document the nominee's extraordinary teaching success. This documentation will vary greatly from institution to institution, but may include summaries of peer or student evaluations, comments on teaching, possible increases in numbers of majors in mathematics (with clear evidence of the nominee's substantial responsibility for them), possible student success in mathematics competitions (with clear evidence of the nominee's substantial responsibility for them), success in research in mathematics conducted by undergraduate students under the direction of the nominee, production of superior quality honors theses by undergraduate students under the direction of the nominee, development of curricular materials successfully used by colleagues, adoption of the nominee's teaching methods or techniques by experienced colleagues, service as a respected adviser for a student group, etc.

    Nominators should bear in mind that the selection committee for the award might view a nomination more positively if it is accompanied not just by carefully chosen testimonials from a few selected students and faculty, but also reports comments and criticism which is representative of the whole spectrum of opinion among students and faculty on the nominee's teaching.

  4. Letters of Recommendation (Each letter is one page. Maximum of 5 letters.)
    • Two letters from the nominee's present or former students.
    • One letter from the nominee's colleagues (could be the department chair).
    • At most two additional letters from anyone qualified to comment on the nominee's extraordinary teaching success, including additional students and/or colleagues.

Voluntary Section Dues


Many thanks to those members who have made a voluntary dues contribution to the section along with their Spring Meeting Registration!

Although the section has found itself in good financial health in recent years, additional funds are always needed in order to pursue special initiatives suggested by the membership. The successful John Fauvel Memorial Conference and William Dunham Special Lecture, both supported in part by the Section Activity Grant program, provide excellent examples of what can be done with even a small amount of funding to support our section mission and goals.

Contributions may also be made in support of the Pikes Peak Regional Undergraduate Mathematics Conference; simply choose "Other" on the coupon below, and specify "PPRUMC" in the space provided. A voluntary section dues contribution from you now can help build up funds in support of similar initiatives!

A Voluntary Dues Contribution Form is also available on the Section Website in docx, odt, or pdf formats. Complete and send with your contribution to the Section Treasurer/Secretary.

MAA Rocky Mountain Section Voluntary Dues Contribution Form


-

MAA Rocky Mountain Section Mission Statement


A copy of the Mission Statement is available on the Section website.