Olivia DrakeEdward Taylor, associate professor of mathematics; Petra Bonfert-Taylor, associate professor of mathematics; and David Bodznick, dean of Natural Sciences and Mathematics, professor of biology, professor of neuroscience and behavior, received a grant worth $199,924 from the National Science Foundation for their “Collaborative Research: Analytic and Geometric Methods in Limited Angle Tomosunthesis.” The grant expires Aug. 27, 2011.
The Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software (HFOSS) project was featured in the Aug. 1 edition of The Chronicle of Higher Education in an article titled “In Emergencies, Aid Agencies Turn to a College-Created Software Program.” The article focuses on an emergency-management program called Collabbit. Collabbit is a continuing effort involving undergraduates and computer science faculty at Wesleyan and Trinity College. The software tool helps coordinate large numbers of people and supplies involved in responding to disasters like blackouts and flooding. This is by far the largest project of any kind that I've worked on," Samuel DeFabbia-Kane’11 says in the…
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Connie Leidy, assistant professor of mathematics, received a $18,900 grant from the National Science Foundation for a workshop on “Knot Concordance and Homology Cobordism.” The grant, awarded July 6, supported a conference held July 19-23 at Wesleyan.
Mathematics major Joel Specter ’11 is ahead of the program. Despite only finishing his junior year at Wesleyan, he’s already completed all first-year graduate courses for the department’s Ph.D. program. “When discussing mathematics with him it becomes clear that he is already thinking like a mathematician in a very serious way that one rarely sees in students until well into their graduate careers,” says Specter’s advisor David Pollack, associate professor of mathematics. For Specter’s achievements in mathematics, he was awarded with a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship for the 2010-11 year. Congress established (more…)
A $298,736 grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) will allow Wesleyan to remain competitive in numerical modeling research and education on an international level. Francis Starr, associate professor of physics, David Beveridge, the Joshua Boger University Professor of the Sciences and Mathematics, and Michael Weir, professor of biology, director of the Hughes Program in the Life Sciences, received the grant for a project titled “Major Research Instrumentation – Recovery and Reinvestment program (MRI-R2): Acquisition of Shared Cluster and Database Computing Facilities at Wesleyan University.” The grant, awarded over three years beginning May 1, will fund growth of the computer…
Computer Science students Sam DeFabbia-Kane '11, Juan Pablo Mendoza '10, and Foster Nichols '10 all presented posters on their current research at this year's regional conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges, which was held at the University of Hartford April 16-17. DeFabbia-Kane won third place in the poster competition.
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David PesciThis issue we ask 5 Questions of…David Pollack, associate professor of mathematics and computer science. Q: How did you become interested in mathematics in general, and as an academic career specifically? DP: Mathematics was my favorite subject in school as far back as I can remember. At that time I had no idea that one could be a mathematician, so I imagined I would be a scientist or engineer. After my sophomore year in high school I was fortunate enough to attend the summer mathematics program at Hampshire College, where I was first exposed to professional mathematicians. I realized more…
Karen Collins, chair and professor of mathematics, served as a judge in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology that awarded $100,000 to high school students. In a Dec. 7 New York Times article, Collins said, ''We never expected high school students to achieve such success in examining this upper-bound aspect of graph theory."
David LowIn The Calculus of Friendship (Princeton University Press), Cornell University professor Steven Strogatz chronicles the moving story of the friendship he developed with his former high school math teacher, Don Joffray ’50, over 30 years through the exchange of letters between them. For a long time, their friendship revolved almost entirely on a shared love of calculus. Joffray goes from the prime of his career to retirement, competes in whitewater kayaking at the international level, and loses a son. Strogatz matures from high school math whiz to Ivy League professor, has a failed marriage, and experiences the sudden death of…