Newsletter #3, March 2008
Department News
The first UTC Mathematics Poster
Competition, co-sponsored by BlueCross BlueShield of Tennessee, was
held on January 26, 2008. The winning poster in the junior/senior
division was entered by students from Notre Dame High School. Kristen
Hill, Danielle Del Valle and Wells Heath won with their entry A
Mathematical Model of the Spread of a Mutated Strain of Hepatis B.
Josh Leverette of Boyd Buchanan won in the freshman/sophomore with his
entry Time Dilation Calculator.
The Tennessee
Higher Education Commission
(THEC) has generously given three grants to our department this year to
fund five-day summer
workshops for regional mathematics teachers.
Dr. Francesco Barioli and Dr. Ron Smith have secured $74,993 from THEC
to implement a workshop for
24 high school teachers. The
award is particularly noteworthy as it marks the seventh consecutive
year of THEC funding for this project. Workshop participants will learn
new strategies for teaching algebraic equations, statistics, and
probability using a discovery-oriented
approach and real-world mathematics applications in science and
business. Teachers will also receive a TI-84+ calculator and a
Calculator-Based Laboratory (CBL2) and will learn to use these
resources to engage students through experimentation.
Meg Kiessling has secured $61,500 from THEC. Twenty participating
middle school teachers will
learn to use the eighth-grade EXPLORE (pre-ACT) test to spot problem
areas, adjust their instruction accordingly, and monitor student
progress. The teachers will also receive classroom
resources including a document camera, LCD projector, and supplemental
texts and software packages.
Tracy Hughes has secured $60,000 from THEC to offer an innovative
workshop for 20 high school math
teachers.
The workshop will focus on mathematics content
standards aligned with the PLAN (pre-ACT) and ACT exams. In addition to
developing their content knowledge, teachers will learn test-taking
strategies, error analysis, and the content and implications of the
PLAN test results. Teachers will also receive significant classroom
resources, including a document camera and LCD projector.
Faculty News
Dr. John Graef recently served as a
proposal review panelist for the National Science Foundation (NSF)
Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics
(S-STEM) grant program. Through S-STEM, NSF supports scholarships to
enable academically talented but financially needy students to complete
degrees in science and engineering disciplines.
In the 2007 calendar year, 11 faculty members published a total of 33
scholarly works. Please see our list of publications.
Dr.
Lucas van der Merwe was recently named a Full Fellow by the
Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.
Dr. Francesco Barioli and his wife
Diana are proud parents again. Their second daughter, Margherita, was
born on December 11th, 2007. See a picture of the growing family to the
left.
Student
News
At least two majors are headed to graduate school in mathematics next
year.
Emily Casey plans to attend UTK and
get a Masters degree for teaching secondary mathematics. Ulyana
Pugina has been accepted to the Master's program at MTSU with an
assistanceship. Additionally,
Daniel
Varnell, a math minor, has been accepted to graduate school at
Emory University in a music (conducting) program.
Frank "Trip" Brannen and Maria Knox both passed the first exam
of the Society of Actuaries. This is important accomplishment which
will greatly improve their career placement in the actuarial sciences.
Alumni News
For the past 3 years, Michael Ahmadi (B.A. 2003) has been a
software
engineer with a search engine optimization firm (iProspect) outside
Boston in Watertown, MA. He's been writing lots of SQL and C# code,
and developing various Microsoft .NET applications. Most recently, he's
been developing web crawlers that spider client sites and pull down
various metrics from their web pages. He recently started a new
position as a developer for a consulting firm (Infusion) in Cambridge.
Check out his SQL article at http://www.sqlservercentral.com/columnists/mAhmadi/2875.asp
Michael offers some advice to current students. ``My work isn't always
blatantly mathematical in nature, but there's no question that my
course of study (math major, cpsc minor) has given me an edge. For any
students looking to break into the technology field, I'd recommend a
strong math program along with a thorough foundation in OOP (object
oriented programming, either C# or Java) and a bit of SQL. By the time
a student reaches graduation, they should be comfortable writing a
complete program in one of those languages.''
Vince
Betro (B.S. 2001) is currently a PhD student at the UTC Sim Center
as well as an instructor in our department. He recently presented two
of his papers at national conferences: "Parallel Hierarchical
Unstructured Mesh Generation with General Cutting" co-authored with Dr.
Steve L. Karman, Jr. at the American Institute of Aeronautics and
Astronautics 46th Annual Aerospace Sciences Meeting in Reno, NV on
January 7, 2008, and "A Parallel Algorithm for Optimization-Based
Smoothing of Unstructured 3-D Meshes" at the SIAM
Conference on Parallel Processing for Scientific Computing in Atlanta,
GA on March 12, 2008.
Sonja Petrovic (B.S.
2003) is finishing her PhD at the University of Kentucky and has
accepted a postdoc offer from the University of Illinois at Chicago.
Congratulations Sonja!
Alumni, if you have not
yet done so, please fill out and submit
our
Alumni
Information Form.
Questions or comments about the Department may be
addressed to Math-mail@utc.edu .
This Newsletter was created by Sharon Brueggeman (March 2008).
Dr.
Lucas van der Merwe was recently named a Full Fellow by the
Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications.