| Until recently, Stephen Hawking held the title of `Lucasian Professor of Mathematics at Cambridge University'. This prestigious position had previously been held by such luminaries as Isaac Newton and Charles Babbage. However, tradition requires that the person holding the position give it up at age 67. So, Hawking -- famous for his theorems about black hole geometry and his popular books on cosmology -- is passing on the job to someone else. Have you considered applying? We are currently receiving applications for a vacant position as an assistant professor in our department. Click here for more details.
An article by Steve Lohr in the August 6 edition of 'The New York Times'
("For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics") talks about the
increasing demand for people who can make sense of data. Computing and
numerical skills are needed for applications such as improving Internet
search engines, and analyzing data from sensors. Along with statisticians,
Lohr writes that "the new data sleuths come from backgrounds like economics,
computer science and mathematics." Debby Jeter received the Distinguished Teaching Award, Liz Jurisich the Distinguished Advising Award and Alex Kasman the SSM Distinguished Achievement Award. The results for the 2009 COMAP Contest in Mathematical Modeling are in. Our
teams set a CofC record---both teams earned Meritorious Distinction this
year! Of the 1675 submissions, only .5% received the top honor of
Outstanding Paper, 18% received the next best honor of Meritorious, 18%
received Honorable Mention, and the remaining were Successful Participants.
If you see our mathletes, please take time to congratulate them on
this honor.
C of C COMAP Mathletes:
-
Meritorious Team of Hau Chan, Taylor Hamrick, and Ryan Parker
- Meritorious Team of Patrick Moran, Caroline Edwards, and Jonathan Tashakori
Cornell University math professor Steve Strogatz has an interesting piece in the NYTimes about the mathematical aspects of the size of cities. Look here and here for information about internships available to math majors from the American Mathematical Society and the American Statistical Society. The math department held our annual competition for high school students on February 21st, this year featuring the American  Mathematical Society's WWTBAM contest. Once again, the event was a huge success...especially for David Richman and the team from Spring Valley High School who started out the morning looking like they might not even make it to Charleston in time and ended up as the big $3000 prize winner! Richman is shown in the picture with Brendan Fletcher (who won $500) and WWTBAM host Mike Breen. The almost every human activity is become ever more dependent
on the collection and analysis of data, making statistician a particularly desirable
profession. Therefore, the math department is very pleased that we finally can offer our math majors a track specifically aimed at training statisticians. To learn more, click here or visit the math office. A new study (Jan 2009) listed 200 jobs and ranked them according to various criteria.  It determined that being a mathematician is currently the best job (and found that being a lumberjack is the worst). According to the Wall Street Journal, "The study, released Tuesday from CareerCast.com, a new job site, evaluates 200 professions to determine the best and worst according to five criteria inherent to every job: environment, income, employment outlook, physical demands and stress." Click here for more information about this study or here to learn about how you can major in math at CofC. National news article says that the attitude of American teens about math is a problem for all of us.
Our annual College of Charleston Math Meet, a competition we host for about 1000 high school students each February, is always special.
But, this year's Meet is sure to be particularly memorable. The American Mathematical Society will be bringing
their WWTBAM competition to the Meet. In this exciting event styled after the popular TV game show, student
contestants will be competing for prizes ranging from 500 to 2000 dollars!
The College of Charleston Math Department is organizing three research conferences in October. Charleston's Regional Undergraduate Math Conference will be held here on campus on October 18th. And our annual Cha-Cha Days conference, run jointly with the University of North Carolina, will begin on October 31st in Chapel Hill. In addition to those two conferences for students, the Palmetto Number Theory Seminar will feature plenary talks from Ram Murty and Florian Luca. Jennifer P. Smith, who has worked as an administrative assistant in the math department
for the past four years, has accepted a teaching position at West Ashley High School. We are simultaneously
happy for her and saddened by her departure. Jennifer, best of luck and thanks for everything! The Math Department is please to welcome two new professors: Iana Anguelova and Andrew Przeworski.
Professor Przeworski does research on the geometry of "packings" and begins teaching at C of C immediately.
Professor Anguelova
will be taking a leave of absence this year so that she can work on her research in algebraic mathematical
physics at the Simons Institute at SUNY Stony Brook. The COMAP contest is a prestigious applied math competition
in which teams of undergraduate students from different universities
attempt to find the best solution to realistic mathematical
challenges. C of C Team working on Problem A (Climate Change): Hau
Chan, Taylor Hamrick, and Amanda Goedeker Score of **Meritorious**
C of C Team working on Problem B (Sudoku Puzzles): Patrick Moran and Kathryn Pedings Score of **Honorable Mention**
COMAP Statistics:
-- 1162 participating teams
-- with over 880 from international institutions
-- only 1% (9 teams) received the highest possible score of Outstanding
-- 13% of the participating teams received Meritorious score
-- 40% of the participating teams received Honorable Mention score
-- 45% of the participating teams received Successful Participant score
-- 1% of the participating teams received Unsuccessful Participant score
April is Math Awareness Month and the theme this year (appropriately) is the mathematics of voting. Learn about this interesting and politically important application of mathematics at http://www.mathaware.org. Colin Stephenson and Neil Goodson's project for their Operations Research class was discussed on national radio program. Click to listen. The Mathematical Association of America's meeting at the Citadel featured Polya lecturer George Andrews and special sections on education and research. CofC graduate students Kelly Epperson and William Baynard III presented posters and professors Martin Jones and Paul Young gave research talks. On February 23, 2008, the College will hold its annual Math Meet.
This is a day offering many different challenging and creative competitions for high school students from around the country.
The event attracts approximately 1000 talented students to campus.
Click for more information or to register. To help answer this common question, the American Mathematical Society profiles the jobs
of recent recipients of undergraduate math degrees.
Six C of C students are now among those profiled!
Take a look at what C of C alumni and others are doing with their math degrees. This Fall, the College of Charleston hosted two mathematics conferences:
The Palmetto Number Theory Seminar and the Midwest Conference on Combinatorics.
Click for more info. The Math Department has moved to our new location in the Robert Scott Small Building! We are on the third floor of the building directly across from Maybank Hall that used to be the library. Professor Kunkle, Associate Chair of the math department, was awarded the collegewide Distinguished Advising Award for 2007 and Professor Caveny, our chair, was awarded the School of Science and Math's Gordon E. Jones Award for 2007! Professor Diamond, from the Math Department, will become the new Associate Provost of the College of Charleston beginning in August. We already knew
that C of C Professor Amy Langville has an impressive research
program. After all, she won the SSM Distinguished Achievement award
last year, published a book on the mathematics of information
retrieval, and received an NSF CAREER grant. But, just wait until you
hear this latest piece of news: Amy was the keynote speaker at the
annual AMS Congressional Briefing on November 16, 2006. At these
briefings, elite mathematicians update the United States
Congress on developments in mathematics! (To see a listing of the
impressive people who have spoken at this briefing in recent years,
click here.)
Congratulations, Amy!
The 30th Annual College of Charleston Math Meet, a competition
designed to inspire and reward high school students, was held on
February 24th. We had over 800 students comprising 57 teams (one was unable to attend due to a bus
breakdown, but won an award in the Math Marathon competition anyway!)
from South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Alabama and Tennessee. For more information, or to see a list of winners, visit the website at:
math.cofc.edu/mathmeet.htm.
Or, to see the scores of your students on the written test if you were a teacher who brought a team, login with your password at the registration site. A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works. The fourth dimension is a popular theme in science fiction and was a topic of popular conversation in the 19th century. In this talk aimed at a general audience, C of C alumnus and Dartmouth College professor Jody Trout will explain both the fact and the fiction of the notorious fourth dimension. The College of Charleston and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill together sponsor this workshop series for young scientists in applied mathematics. This year it will be held in Charleston from 29 September until 1 October 2006. The College and the School of Science and Math give awards to professors who have excelled in areas such as teaching, research and service. The Math Department is very proud to say that this year our faculty won three of these prestigious awards:
- Bob Mignone (current Speaker of the Faculty Senate) received the 2005-2006 Distinguished Service award from the College
- Alex Kasman (me) was awarded the Distinguished Teaching award from the College
and
- Amy Langville (one of our new faculty members with an exciting research program invovling the mathematics of the internet) won the coveted Distinguished Achievement award from the School of Science and Math.
Moreover, not meaning to brag, but the math department is especially proud of our record in connection with the teaching award: The winner of the Distinguished Teaching Award has been a member of our department three out of the last four times!
(Lindsay Packer won in 2003 and Martin Jones in 2004.) Click here for a complete list of awards and recipients. Our departmental colloquium will meet at a special time on Friday April 21 from 4-5:30 in 219 Maybank and will feature three talks by our graduate students. Our Future's Forecast: Enrollment Forecasting Through Least Squares (B. A. Copeland, L. P. Bailey, and R. B. Bailey)
An Investigation into New Approaches for Clustering Matrices
(Barbara Ball and Clare Jordan Rodgers) and Ranking NCAA Basketball Teams using Markov chains (Luke Ingram and John McConnell). We've added a new feature to the Website. The "Research Publications" page now lists the most recent publications by math faculty at the College of Charleston using a search of the MathSciNet database. Distinguished Professor of Mathematics, Herb Silverman, has co-authored a new textbook on Complex analysis. "Complex Variables with Applications" by S. Ponnusamy and H. Silverman will be available from Birkhäuser publishing in April 2006. Professor Langville has just received a CAREER award from the National Science Foundation to support her research into the mathematics of the Internet and the development of a 'mathematical dissection lab'. This is the first CAREER award ever received by a professor at the College. And, while we're on the subject, we should also mention Professor Langville's new book. Way to go, Amy! On March 4-5, the College of Charleston hosted the SEGC, a floating annual conference whose theme this year was Geometry and Physics. On February 25, 2006, the College held its annual Math Meet. This is a day offering many different challenging and creative competitions for high school students from around the country. The event attracts approximately 1000 talented students to campus. Click for more information or to register. Prime numbers, those which cannot be factored into a product of smaller positive whole numbers, are of fundamental importance in many areas of mathematics and have important applications in computer science. (In fact, all of internet security is based on the number theory of prime numbers! Click here and scroll down for my description of how this works.) Although there is no largest prime (we can easily prove that there are prime numbers bigger than any number you can name), there is a biggest prime number that we know of currently. And, the record for the largest known prime number was just broken by a math professor at Central Missouri State University. It is 230,402,457-1! (If you write it out in decimal form, it is over nine million digits long!) Click for more info. Mathematician Dennis P. Sullivan will receive this prestigious award from President Bush for his work in the area of dynamical systems. Robert J. Aumann has received the 2005 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences "for having enhanced our understanding of conflict and cooperation through game-theory analysis". Check out the official Website of this new degree program offered by the College which combines cutting edge math and computer science with disciplines like biology, economics, sociology, physiology and astronomy. Professor Kasman has published a book of short stories about mathematics. This conference focuses on involving students in the applied mathematical sciences. It will be held September 23-25, 2005 in Chapel Hill, NC. The College of Charleston and the Citadel together hosted a conference of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in March. those who understand binary and those who don't. Our annual competition for high school students was another big success. Check out the website for a list of winners and other info. We are currently receiving applications for a vacant position as an assistant professor in our department. Click here for more details Check out the new textbook by our own Mick Norton. Congratulations to Bob Mignone: who recently won an election making him the new Speaker of the Faculty Senate. Congratulations to Bev Diamond on being elected as a Member at Large of the American Mathematical Society Check out the new differential geometry book Cartan for Beginners: Differential Geometry via Moving Frames and Exterior Differential Systems by our own Professor Tom Ivey At the 2003 collegewide faculty meeting, three math department professors received well deserved appreciation. Congratulations to Deanna Caveny (Distinguished Advising Award) Lindsay Packer (Distinguished Teaching Award) and George Haborak (Distinguished Service Award). Our team of three undergraduates participating in Math Jeopardy at the SIAM Conference came in first place, earning more points than the teams from the Citadel, Furman and Coastal Carolina combined! Congratulations to Ryan Fenno, Shaun Wood and Kevin Young. The 2003 Southeast Geometry Conference was here! March 29-30, 2003. Click here for details. Check out the new homepage for the C of C Math Club The Math and Computer Science departments at CofC received a federal grant to support thirty outstanding math and cs majors. Click here for information and to apply! The answers may surprise you! Look here for five good reasons why you should major in math at C of C. The math department at C of C gives you the best of both worlds. |
