Olivia DrakeFour staff from Information Technology Services and one student spoke at the NorthEast Regional Computing Program (NERCOMP) Annual Conference held in Providence, R.I. on March 26. Karen Warren, director of user and technical services for Information Technology Services, led a poster session on "The Best thing to Ever Happen at Wesleyan: Justifying and Sustaining LyndaCampus." Warren explained the successes of Wesleyan's LyndaCampus implementation backed by usage data statistics, cost comparisons, and a description of the cross-departmental approach used to garner support campus-wide. The poster featured quotes and anecdotes from Wesleyan student users underscoring the benefits of the campus (versus a limited)…
While technology at Wesleyan is growing by leaps and bounds, the computational capacity is growing by gigaFLOPS and now, teraFLOPS. Not to be confused with the prehistoric pterodactyl's beach footwear, a teraFLOP is a term used in high-performance computing to quantify the rate at which computer systems can perform arithmetic operations. TeraFLOPs can perform one trillion operations per second (S), and for scientists at Wesleyan, this means calculations can be done up to 50 times faster with the new computing cluster, installed during the summer 2013. "The new cluster has been revolutionary in my own work," said Francis Starr, professor…
James Reid, professor of mathematics, emeritus, died Oct. 27. An authority on algebra, Reid joined the Wesleyan faculty in 1969 as associate professor, becoming professor of mathematics in 1971. Previously, he had held faculty positions at Syracuse University and Amherst College, and he also had served as a research associate at Yale University. He obtained his PhD from the University of Washington, where he was an instructor. Reid published in scholarly journals throughout his career, presented numerous invited lectures, and was an adviser for 14 PhD students, 11 master’s degree students, and six undergraduate honors theses. Among his colleagues, he…
Chris Rasmussen, assistant professor of mathematics, recently finished teaching a summer professional development course for K-8 teachers in the Danbury, Conn. school district. The program, called Intel Math, increases the mathematical content knowledge of elementary and middle-school teachers, with the long-term goal of strengthening STEM training. The Intel Math course ran eight hours a day for two weeks. Rasmussen co-taught the course with Sharon Heyman, a mathematics education specialist from the University of Connecticut. In 2012, Rasmussen taught the course with a cohort of 15 teachers from around central Connecticut. This summer, he taught 23 teachers in the Danbury school…
In this Q&A we speak with Cameron Donnay Hill, assistant professor of mathematics. Hill joined the Wesleyan faculty this fall. Q: Professor Hill, welcome to Wesleyan! What attracted you to the University and the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science? A: Wesleyan provides a wonderful balance between teaching and research that can be found almost nowhere else, and I can only think of a few additional places where the "average" undergrad is remarkably clever and curious. Q: What are your research interests? A: I'm mostly interested in questions about "finite and discrete" mathematical objects, but my research program is to…
Carol Wood, the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, retires this summer after 40 years at Wesleyan. In honor of her retirement and her many contributions to the University and the profession, the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science hosted the Conference on Model-Theoretic Algebra, May 31-June 1. Professor Wood is pictured below in the green sweater. (Photos by Eki Ramadhan '16) (more…)
Bill FisherTwelve students participated in the Senior Week Hackathon in Exley Science Center May 18-19. For 36 hours straight, the students worked in teams of four to create different web application products. The winning team was "WesMaps+." Team members included Justin Raymond '14, Tobias Butler '13, Max Dietz '16 and Anastasis Germanidis '13. See their app online at: http://wesmapsplus.com/ Wesleyan computer science alumni Sam DeFabbia-Kane ’11, Carlo Francisco ’11, Micah Wylde ’12, and Ryan Gee ’11 judged the final apps on a scale of 1-11 in creativity, technical difficulty and polish. A video and photos of the Hackathon are below: [youtube width="640" height="420"]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24UJulhFo7I[/youtube] (more…)
Lauren RubensteinWhen Anna Haensch tells new acquaintances that she’s a mathematician, many people immediately recoil. “There’s this repellent nature to math,” she said. “There’s this big wall up around it—people find it terrifying or uninteresting.” That’s exactly why Haensch, a Ph.D. student who just successfully defended her dissertation, wants to learn how to communicate better to the general public about math. She is the recipient of a Mass Media Fellowship, administered by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Haensch's fellowship is sponsored by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). The 10-week summer program, which starts June 3, places graduate and post-graduate…
A Wesleyan team scored 130th out of 402 teams at the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, administered by The Mathematical Association of America. In Dec. 2012, 4,277 students from 578 institutions took the exam. Some students competed in groups of three. Wesleyan's top scorer was Joshua Neitzel '14 with a rank of 239. Sangsan Warakkagun '15 ranked 569, and Eli Halperin '15 and Jeremy Fehr '13 ranked 870.5. The Putnam Exam is given every year on the first Saturday in December. The exam's first problem was: "A1 (2012) Let d1, d2, ..., d12 be real numbers in the open interval…
The American Mathematical Society (AMS) named Carol Wood and Wis Comfort to its inaugural class of AMS Fellows. Wood is the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics. She is an expert in mathematical logic and applications of model theory to algebra. Comfort is the Edward Burr Van Vleck Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus. He's an expert on point-set topology, ultrafilters, set theory and topological groups. The Fellows of the American Mathematical Society program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of mathematics.
Constance Leidy, assistant professor of mathematics, received a $130,000 grant from the National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematics Science to support her research on "Noncommunative Techniques in Knot Theory" through Aug. 31, 2014.
Constance Leidy, assistant professor of mathematics, received a grant for $130,436 from the National Science Foundation's Division of Mathematics Science on Sept. 9. The grant will support a project titled "Non-commutative Techniques in Knot Theory" through August 2014.