On-line Seminar and Colloquia Info
Speakers, affiliations and their titles:
Readers will notice that we have no View from the Headship this issue — Alan Newell has gone on sabbatical and is beyond the pale for at least a year. Marty Greenlee is Acting Head and his arm will be twisted for a View in the next erratic issue.
Due to unconscionably long deliberations by university level committees we also do not yet have reports on promotion and tenure decisions — next time.
Next — something positive. Our visiting faculty during the last 2 semesters has included:
Consider the 4 unit radius circles in the plane with centers at (±1,±1). They have a common tangent circle centered at the origin; this small circle has radius sqrt(2)-1=.414. The 4 larger circles lie within a square whose sides have length 4. One further obvious observation: from outside the square one can't "see" the small circle; it is completely surrounded by the 4 unit circles.
Next consider the analogous configuration in 3-space. There are 8 unit spheres centered at the points (±1,±1,±1), and they have a common tangent sphere, whose radius is a little larger, viz. sqrt(3)-1=.732 (think roughly of 8 tennis balls surrounding a golf ball). The 8 unit spheres lie within a square box whose edge length is 4, but notice that now it's possible to get a glimpse of the central sphere by looking between the unit spheres.
The analogous configuration can be considered in space of dimension 4, 5, and higher. In n-space there are 2n unit spheres centered at the points all of whose coordinates are ±1, and just as above they all lie within a "square" box whose edgelength is 4. They have a common central tangent sphere, whose radius is easily seen to be sqrt(n)-1. Thus in dimension n = 4 the central sphere has radius sqrt(4)-1=1, so it is the same size as the 16 unit spheres. In dimension n = 9 the central sphere has radius sqrt(9)-1=2, and it is tangent to the box containing the unit spheres, and for n > 9 the central sphere is no longer contained within the box, but pokes further and further out through the sides as n increases!
Hard work and dedication has paid off for the many students here in the department who have completed their Ph.D's or Master's degrees during the fall and spring semester. Congratulations to the following new Doctors in Applied Mathematics:
Many have had luck finding jobs:
Ph.D. graduates in the Math Department are:
Tailiang is working in the College of Medicine as a Research Specialist. Mike Brilleslyper, who will receive his Ph.D in August, will be leaving us for our rival school, ASU, where he has secured a position as lecturer. Good luck to them all!
Congratulations also to the Master's degree recipients! Those in the Applied Committee are:
Mathematics Masters recipients are:
Many of these students are continuing at the U of A while others have chosen to explore other interests: Steve Speer joins fellow math alumni Joel Vaag on the east coast as an actuary at Milliman and Robertson. James Dotzler will bring the consortium calculus to the people of the United Arab Emirates. Jim will teach the 'new' calculus at the UAE University, Basic University education center, in the department of mathematics and computer science. Jim is also 'preparing' for his May 15th wedding date to fiance, Donna. Jack Green will leave us to pursue his dream of opening The Epic Cafe. Jack and partner Josh Gibson plan to open the cafe in late May. The Epic cafe will be located on University and 4th. Although you can find pastries, 'lite' food and fine coffee and tea, Jack said "the sole reason for opening the cafe is to meet women".
We should also recognize those who gave up their summer and/or winter vacations studying for the qualifying exam. Applied Math students passing the exam were: Martin Bazant, Reva Chopra, Joe Erker, John Goshy, Jack Green, Wayne Hacker, Karl Haller, David Hochheiser, Serge Matheny, Marcel Oliver, Mohamed Ould-Lembrabott, Anu Rao, and Rebekah Speer. Math students passing the qualilfying exam were: Ed Alexander, Chris Bowman, Cheryl DeLorme, Olga Simik, Utith Imprasit, Amy Rabb-Liu, Xianbao Xu, Javier Diaz-Vargas, Matt Kruse, Matt Naughton, Tensia Soto-Johnson, Hsin-Min Sun, Slawomir Tomaszewski, and Mark Torgerson.
After the qualifying and before the thesis defense comes - the oral preliminary exam. The following students successfully convinced their committees that they knew their stuff: Applied Math: John Geddes, Craig Abbey, Richard Brazier, Silvia Aldana, George Fennemore, Abbie Warrick, Mohamed Ould-Lembrabott, Andrew Rybolt, and Marcel Oliver; Math: Yu-Wen Cheng, Son-Xuan Dang, Javier Diaz-Vargas, and Stephen Shipman.
Many of our students here are supported by fellowships, congrats to them: Joe Erker (NASA), Cecilia Fosser (National Physical Sciences for Minority and Women), Aric Hagberg (LANL), Aaron King (NSF), David Ropp (DOE), Carol Smith (Patricia Roberts Harris), and Chris Bowman (NDSEG).
Dan Mcgee served the Math Department in a different way. Dan represented the sciences as a member of the GPSC (Graduate Professional Student Council). Among other accomplishments, Dan fought to increase tuition wavers for graduates students as well as to get our fees waived and higher pay. Melanie Ayers was elected to serve on the GPSC next year and she will continue in some of this work. Other of Dan's accomplishments and efforts you may have read about in your e-mail or even in the daily Wildcat. Another name you may have seen in the Wildcat was that of the Math Department's very own John Kiesling. John's article appeared every Thursday fall semester and alternate Thursdays in the spring. John voiced his (sometimes unpopular,but always entertaining) opinions to the campus and never failed to draw many readers and responses.
All math and no play? Not true for many of our grads. Wedding bells are in the future for: James Dotzler and Donna, Annalisa Calini and Brenton, Matt Naughton and Ellen, and Eric Pearson and Nicole. Becky Dahl welcomed a new baby boy, Alan Parker, into her family on 27 October; and a baby girl, Janay Beth, arrived to Mark Torgerson and family on 20 April. Coming attractions include a new baby in August for math grad Amy Rabb-Liu. Congratulations and good luck in the future to all of these people.
The Graduate Student Seminar took place this semester on Mondays at 4 PM.
First, Margie Lyscas and David Hrencecin established the transcendentality of π, then Adam Stinchcombe used ?-functions to show that there are infinitely many primes of the form b(mod a), where a and b are relatively prime. He overkilled the problem by showing that the sum of their reciprocals diverges.
Mike Brilleslyper presented more of his original research with D. Pickrell on harmonic maps from the disk into the sphere. He is studying critical points of the energy functional in great detail.
Warren Staley demonstrated that he is not afraid of heights. This turns out to be a useful quality when one works with elliptic curves and their groups of rational points. Cheryl Delorme proved by the process of descent that the group is finitely generated.
Lastly, Stephen Shipman showed how to see that the space of oriented two-dimensional subspaces of R4 is diffeomorphic to S2 x S2. For this, the spin decomposition of so(4) as so(3) x so(3) enters.
The seminar should (will!) continue next Fall semester.
Three of our recent PhD graduates have kindly agreed to send back word telling us some of what they have been doing since graduating.
*************************************************
After finally finishing up my doctorate in May of 1991, I, Fernando Avila, started paying for the fun times I had in Tucson. I returned to my post as a professor at the Universidad de Sonora (UNISON), in Hermosillo, Sonora, México, and was designated Head of the Mathematics Department. I did such a terrible job that when the University went through a complete reorganization in the fall of 1991, I was designated Division Director (i.e. Dean of College) of the Division of Exact and Natural Sciences, comprising the departments of Mathematics, Physics and Geology, plus a Research Center in Physics. This is a four year appointment and although I have tried very hard to do a good job, I haven't been thrown out of office...yet.
As a university bureaucrat (administrator) I have gained in weight and enemies, and have even been seen wearing appropriate clothing. I pushed for an agreement between the U of A and UNISON, which is now working and providing funds for research projects and full time scholarships for students coming from UNISON to do their graduate studies at the U of A.
I have organized meetings about various scientific matters at different places in Mexico, so that I can spend most of my time traveling and not being in my office. I come often to the U of A, but I still owe my advisor (Don Myers) an uncountable number of papers due for publication. My current address is A.P A-32, Hermosillo, Sonora, México 83190. Phone (62) 135171 and Fax (62)134817.
*************************************************
I have been working for Cray Research, Inc. since June 1991. I am currently working as an environmental applications analyst in the earth and environmental sciences group in the applications department. I have a lead technical and marketing role in promoting Cray Research's efforts in maintaining our traditional environmental customer base (atmospheric and ocean modeling), as well as expanding our market into other areas of environmental science (groundwater and hydrologic simulation).
My job functions include acting as a contact point for Cray Research's environmental customers, consultation, benchmarking, code porting and optimization of various environmental models, and participating in commercial and academic forums. I also give environmental presentations and demonstrations to visitors and customers at Cray Research, and visit environmental customers on site.
Some of the environmental codes I work on include the Community Climate Model (CCM2) from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), SKYHI, the global circulation model, from the Geophysical Fluid Dymanics Laboratory (GFDL), the Parallel Ocean Project Model (POP) from NCAR, GFDL, and Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL), and the Regional Acid Deposition Model (RADM) from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (U.S. EPA).
For the past year I have also been the software representative on the Cray Research Customer Satisfaction Advisory Committee (CSAC). My responsibilities include working with market analysts to ensure that clear, valuable software questions are included in subsequent customer satisfaction surveys, review surveys, work with group leaders to help ensure prompt, appropriate follow up on software issues with customers and the Cray Research people involved with the customer accounts. The position also requires giving presentations to the software division, sales force, and service managers on software trends and software division plans for addressing those trends. After moving from the software division to the applications department I will act as the applications representative on CSAC.
*************************************************
I have been working as a Senior Research Specialist in the office of biometry, consulting in the College of Medicine of the University of Arizona since 3 January 1994. The office of biometry consulting is one of the tiny service units in the Arizona Health Sciences Center. My job is to provide statistical support to faculty members and staff in the College of Medicine. I have been working on nine projects of different sizes since then. These projects involve different area of health sciences such as cardiovascular study, heart transplantation, anesthesiology, and new drug clinical trials, etc.. It appears to me that there are great needs for statistics in the health sciences.
The 1994 Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM) was held on the weekend of 19 February, a few weeks back. For those of you who did not see the poster in the Lobby during Math Awareness Week, the MCM is the marathon of undergraduate math contests. It is a team event, with teams typically consisting of three students possessing a variety of skills. Each team is presented with a choice of two real-world problems, not necessarily mathematical but requiring some kind of quantitative answers, at 12:01 a.m. (midnight) on Friday morning. They then have until the following Monday evening to devise a mathematical model for the problem, analyze it, and interpret their analysis in terms of the original problem. The team reports its work in the form of a written technical report, upon the basis of which their performance is judged.
Success in the MCM requires great breadth of vision as well as mathematical skill. One never knows whether a problem will require knowledge of geometry, mechanics, economics, or biology, so the team must be prepared to deal with anything. Then again, since the problems are not posed mathematically, there are many ways to develop an effective model. The rules of the contest also encourage unorthodox approaches by allowing almost unlimited use of outside materials: libraries, computers, public records, and so on. The only prohibition is on discussion of the problem with any human beings not on the team.
This year, the Mathematics Department was represented by two teams. Team 361 consisted of Jordan Gerton (an Engineering Physics major), Tony Kwasnica (Economics), and Martin Rieke (Math/Creative Writing); all were newcomers to the contest. Team 362 consisted of Geoff Brimhall (Math), Kenny Kim (Math/Computer Science), and Stephan Schaub (Math/Music). Geoff was another rookie, but Stephan competed last year and Kenny is a real veteran with two prior performances.
The problem that both teams elected to try was to develop a strategy for routing file transfers between divisions of a company. The problem was nebulously stated, and the teams interpreted it in quite different ways. They each produced nice analyses, as usual battling the Monday night Post Office closing deadline before exhaustedly heading out for supper at Bob Dobb's. In the confusion, Team 362 actually mailed off all copies of their solution, so that we have since been unable to look at what they did! Team 361 kept one copy of their work, and copies may be obtained from Bruce Bayly.
The results came back on the 24th of April, saying that Team 362 made the Successful category and Team 361 made Meritorious. Meritorious is typically obtained by the top 20 - 30 entries on each problem, and is a distinction of which we can be very proud. Over the four years in which the Math Dept has been entering teams in the MCM, our record has been 3 Meritorious, 2 Successful, and 1 Honorable Mention, which is well above the national average.
The usual sponsor of this contest, Bruce Bayly, will be out of town on sabbatical next year. If anyone is interested in running a team next year, please do! See Bruce for details.
On-line Seminar and Colloquia Info
Speakers, affiliations and their titles:
This Spring the Mathematics Department hosted two conferences on mathematics education. The first was for junior high and high school teachers in the Tucson area while the second was for math educators statewide, including teachers, curriculum coordinators, university faculty, and representatives of the State Department of Education.
The first conference, held on 12 February 1994, was sponsored by MathKIND (Mathematical Knowledge in New Directions). MathKIND is an organization of teachers from the Tucson area. A MathKIND steering committee representing a dozen high schools planned and organized the program. They invited JoEllen Hillyer from Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts to be keynote speaker. They also offered teachers a choice of six curriculum sessions to attend with high school teachers as presenters. The conference was attended by over eighty teachers - some traveled from as far as Phoenix and the Albuquerque area. The conference was funded by a grant from Edgar J. McCullough, Interim Vice Provost for Undergraduate Affairs.
The second conference was organized by Marta Civil, Fred Stevenson, and Elias Toubassi as part of an NSF funded teacher enhancement grant for teachers in grades 3-8. The conference was held on 23 April1994 with an attendance of about 50 education leaders from across the State. The keynote speaker at the conference was Cathy Seeley, the director of precollege programs at the Dana Center for Math and Science Education, University of Texas, Austin, who spoke on Moving Mathematics into the 21st Century.
The program included a panel discussion consisting of Gary Bitter, Arizona State University; Carol Brooks, Project Specialist, Tucson Unified School District; Linda Jaslow, Arizona Department of Education; and Ann Modica, a mathematics teacher at Rincon High School, Tucson. This was followed by four presentions describing projects going on across the State. The presenters were David Gay, University of Arizona, on Making Everybody Count; Dan Griffith, Page High School, on Project A+; Rita Henry, Chino Valley, on Project SMART; and Nora Ramirez, Tempe, on the Comprehensive Regional Center for Minorities. The participants felt that the meeting was worthwhile and a follow-up conference will be held next Fall in Phoenix to be hosted by the Community Colleges in that area.
We have had a very active advising and intervention program running now for several years. The objective of the program is to advise every minority student who is enrolled in the standard calculus sequence. With funds provided by the Coalition to Increase Minority Degrees, I have hired an undergraduate mathematics major to call these students and set up 15 minute appointments. Approximately 60-70 students are contacted every semester. During the 15 minute sessions, we go over their schedules. This in itself is a very useful service since students make very curious decisions about their coursework. Once the schedules are determined, I go over the importance of calculus in their schedules and discuss with the students their choices of majors.
As a result of these advising sessions, I have picked up many undergraduate minority students who declare mathematics as their major. At present there are about 35 of them. This academic year several of these students will graduate (or already have graduated). In December '93 Ricardo Martinez graduated in mathematics with a minor in computer science. In May '94, six of my minority students are graduating with degrees in mathematics. Cynthia Granado Teasley, Carlos Urcuyo, and Claudina Plaza have minors in computer science, Pauline Palko has a minor in Finance, and Cathy Yslas has a minor in Linguistics. This is the first year that we have had this many Hispanic students graduate with degrees in mathematics and it appears that next year the numbers will be even greater.
On Saturday, Dec. 4, 1993, seven of our undergraduates spent six hours wrestling with the 12 challenging problems of the 54th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Our thanks to the seven: Jon Wilkening, Chris Vera, Brian Starrfield, Amir Shaerzadeh, Roger Levy, Joshua Lackey, and Randy Ho, for representing the Department.
The outcome was very satisfying. Randy Ho, a sophomore, was ranked 62nd out of the 2,356 participants, and missed by one point receiving an official Honorable Mention (we mention him honorably anyway). Jon Wilkening placed in the top 10%, and was mentioned in the published list of Top Participants. Roger Levy placed in the top 22% - one point more would have also placed him on the Top Participants list. The U of A team was ranked 48th out of 291 schools participating.
Here's a typical problem for you to ponder: Show that there do not exist four points in the Euclidean plane such that the pairwise distances between the points are all odd integers.
The solutions usually appear in the Monthly about October, and somewhat earlier in Mathematics Magazine.
We are happy to acknowledge the following staff members who have recently joined our Department over the past year:
The Computing Services area has two new staff members:
The following are other loyal and dedicated U of A staffers who, come rain or shine, have weathered the storms of the classified staff syndrome (the syndrome, unique to this special classification, has no visible symptoms but can cause strange behavior without provocation): Carole Anderson (10 years),Jerrie Bieberstein (5 years), Roxann Batiste (4 years), Mary Bollschweiller (4 years), Betty Fink (30 years), Lois Gorski (10 years), Kathleen Leick (6 years), Bridget Mendibles (7 years), Debbie Rodriquez (5 years), Stephanie Snyder (5 years), Sandra Sutton (5 years), Faye Villalobos (28 years), Carie Wells (7 years), Julie Zehring (8 years), and myself, Deborah Gaines (23 years). A total of 157 years of U of A experience to serve you.
Have a great Summer '94!
PS For those interested, I regret to inform you that Elliot left the department because he couldn't handle the pressure.
The club has had a very busy year. Twelve members passed the 100 exam in the past year (May 1993, November 1993, and February 1994). Five of those also passed the 110 exam and one passed the 135 exam. This is not only an increase in activity but also an increase in the success rate. A number are scheduled to take exams in May 1994. Members passing exams were recognized at the annual departmental student reception held on 29 April as a part of MATH AWARENESS WEEK.
Beginning last fall the club has had a long list of speakers from various companies and recruiters, these included several UA graduates. Two members have already accepted internships for this summer to work in the insurance industry. One of the new developments in the past year has been the organization of a Southwest Actuarial Educators Forum which includes Arizona State Univ. and Northern Arizona Univ. A number of students and the Faculty Advisor (Donald E. Myers) attended a meeting held at ASU, another meeting is planned for next fall.
One of the recent club meetings featured speakers from INTERGROUP, which is a local firm specializing in managed health care. On 29 April the club had an opportunity to make a visit to the offices of INTERGROUP to see what the real world is like.
As with most organizations the club is always in need of funds. This year the club is sponsoring a final exam review session for students in College Algebra. This will not only provide an opportunity for club members to practice their tutoring skills but will also provide a service to students in College Algebra (as well as generate income for the club). If successive the club expects to repeat the function at the end of each semester.
Finally the club participated in MATH AWARENESS WEEK (25-29 April) by preparing a poster about club activities and opportunities in the field of actuarial science.
The University of Arizona has expanded the Co-Op teaching program to include high schools in the Phoenix area and Pima Community College. One of the Co-Op participants this year is Debra Grieder from Shadow Mountain High School in Phoenix. The other six Co-Op participants are Suzanne Bouwens from Sahuaro High School, Kathy King from Amphi High School, Bob Koenig from Tucson High School, Steve Kraus from Orange Grove Middle School, Kathy Lackow from Cholla High School, and Theresa Riel from Pistor Middle School.