MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT

We have had another great year in the department. It was an unusual year, in that many of the regular faculty were on leave. Edward Burger spent the year in Boulder, Colorado, Deborah Bergstrand in Philadelphia, Victor Hill in Williamstown and England, Frank Morgan at Lehigh University and then Granada, Spain. Stewart Johnson was on leave in the fall, and Cesar Silva was on leave in the spring. It’s hard to believe there was anyone left, but we did hire two visitors for the year, Jorge Calvo and Steve Wang, both of whom were a great help to the department. We also were very pleased to hire Jerome Reiter to begin a tenure-track position in fall of 1999. Jerry is a statistician who has just received his Ph.D. from Harvard. He is particularly interested in statistical issues related to the census.
Students are going off in a variety of directions next year, including math grad school at the University of California-Davis, University of Wisconsin, Penn State and two to the University of Michigan. Quite a few will be teaching in private schools from California to Switzerland. Others are off to do consulting and business, while some are pursuing grad school in a variety of other disciplines. Three students from last summer’s SMALL program received National Science Foundation fellowships to pursue graduate school in mathematics.
In August 1998, we were thrilled by the awarding of a Fields Medal to Curtis McMullen, Williams ‘80 math student. The Fields Medal is the closest mathematical equivalent to the Nobel Prize. In June 1999, Curt came to Williamstown to receive an honorary degree from Williams College for his achievements.

Curt McMullen '80 (third from left), Fields Medalist, at a reception
with members of the Mathematics Department and friends
while in Williamstown to receive an honorary degree.
This next year, Susan Loepp will be on sabbatical at Michigan State. Mikhail Chkhenkeli will spend the Fall at Harvard. Deborah Bergstrand will spend another year in Philadelphia with a part-time appointment at Swarthmore.
All of the faculty had busy and productive years. Highlights of their activities follow:
Over the last year, Colin Adams served his second year as chair of the Mathematics Department. In August, he started a new NSF 3-year grant to support his research in knot theory and low-dimensional topology. He gave a variety of research talks. He also began a two-year term as a Polya Lecturer for the Mathematical Association of America, one of two such nationally. The Mathematical Association of America provides funds for him to give talks at their sectional meetings.
His book “How to Ace Calculus: The Streetwise Guide” co-authored with Joel Hass and Abigail Thompson, appeared in August. Publicity included an Albany television appearance and articles in the Boston Globe, the LA Times and the San Francisco Chronicle. At its peak in January, it reached #62 on the amazon.com hot 100 books. He published three articles and submitted four more. He was advisor for two theses, one by Sang Pahk ‘99 on supercrossing number of knots and one by Scott Reynolds ‘99 on small volume hyperbolic 3-manifolds.
Professor Olga Beaver served in February on the review panel for grants submitted to the Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement division of the National Science Foundation. In April, she was Chair of the Visiting Committee to review the Mathematics Department at the Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut. At Williams, Prof. Beaver gave a summer talk on Bertrand’s Paradox and a spring Faculty Seminar. She has continued her long association with the Summer Science Program for minority students, again teaching in the mathematics component.
Professor Edward Burger spent the 1998–99 academic year on sabbatical at the University of Colorado at Boulder where he held the Ulam Visiting Professorship of Mathematics and was a visiting member of the Number Theory Center. While at the University of Colorado, he was the Masters Advisor for Angela Vanlandingham who did her masters work in number theory. Burger was also awarded another grant from the Educational Advancement Foundation for his work in number theory. Recently he was named a Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Number Theory Research at Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia.
Burger’s paper “On Real Quadratic Number Fields and Simultaneous Diophantine Approximation” was accepted for publication in Monatshefte für Mathematik. His paper “On Diophantine Approximation below the Lagrange Constant”, co-authored with Jonathan Todd ‘96, was accepted for publication in The Fibonacci Quarterly. He published his virtual video calculus text at www.thinkwell.com and in the fall he will release a college algebra virtual video text also with Thinkwell. He was a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews and a referee for the American Mathematical Monthly. Professor Burger gave numerous lectures throughout the country. (See the list of talks at the end of this section.) He also appeared on Beloit Public Access TV in their Public Lecture Series in September 1998; was a guest on Math Medley, a nationally syndicated radio talk-show in January 1999; a guest on 1370 Connection, WXXI-AM, Rochester NPR in February 1999; and was interviewed on 1190 AM News Briefs, KVCU-AM, Boulder in April 1999.
Professor Jorge Alberto Calvo held a one-year visiting appointment in the department for 1998-99. He continued his research in geometric and polygonal knot theory. A joint paper with Kenneth Millett, “Minimal Edge Piecewise Linear Knots,” appeared in Ideal Knots (World Scientific Publishing). He gave several talks in Europe last summer and attended the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin. In the spring, he gave a variety of talks at other institutions. He has accepted a tenure-track position at North Dakota State University beginning in Fall of 1999.
Professor Mikhail Chkhenkeli continued his research in Four Dimensional Topology and Gauge Theory. In particular, he investigated the problem of determining the general homology classes of 4-manifolds and representing them by smoothly embedded 2-spheres. He prepared the following 4 papers for publication: “2-Spheres in 4-Manifolds,” “Characteristic 2-Spheres in 4-Manifolds,” “Homology Classes of K3” and “Homology Classes of 4-manifolds.” He co-authored with Thomas Garrity a paper “Intersection Forms and CR Geometry for Four-Manifolds: The Kirby-Lai Adjunction Formula.”
Chkhenkeli advised two honor’s thesis students: Craig Westerland ‘99 and Alexandre Wolfe ‘99, on various 4-dimensional topology research projects. Chkhenkeli organized the Twenty First Annual Green Chicken Math Contest, and was the coach of the Williams College team in the national Putnam mathematical competition. In the summer of 1998 he taught an accelerated course, Mathematical Reasoning, Probability and Game Theory, at the summer program organized by the Institute for the Academic Advancement of Youth (The Johns Hopkins University).
Professor Richard De Veaux continued his research in data mining and the use of neural networks for environmental process control. This past academic year he developed a new course, Computational Statistics and Data Mining, MATH 442, a senior seminar in which advanced students in Statistics put together what they’ve learned in previous courses to analyze large, complex data sets. De Veaux published “Hybrid Neural Networks for Environmental Process Control” in Environmetrics, a paper based on the J.S. Hunter lecture which he gave last summer in Australia. Dick gave several invited talks and short courses this year both in this country and abroad. Dick continued his work as Associate Editor of Technometrics, and Environmetrics and finished his term as General Methodology Chair for the American Statistical Association. He was named Program Chair for the Joint Statistical Meetings in Atlanta in 2001. Last summer Dick was honored with being named Fellow of the American Statistical Association.
Tom Garrity has continued his research in higher co-dimensional CR structures and classical algebraic invariant theory. He has also started to work in number theory on methods for generalizing continued fractions. He has begun a collaboration with Mikhail Chkhenkeli on relations between CR structures and four-manifold theory and has collaborated with Zachary Grossman on finding the syzygies for the invariants of vector-valued forms. This last work stems from Grossman’s senior thesis. Garrity has spoken a number of times at Williams and at the Hudson River Undergraduate Math Conference.
Victor E. Hill IV, Thomas T. Read Professor of Mathematics, was on sabbatical leave for the full year, spending time based both in Williamstown and in England. His projects included an investigation of the mathematical theory of change-ringing, a new course on the mathematics of investment, and the history of the teaching of mathematics at Williams. His new book Groups and Characters will be published by Chapman & Hall (London) later in 1999. He gave his multi-media lecture recital “Mathematical Aspects of the Music of Bach” at a variety of occasions.
Professor Stewart Johnson began applying his background in dynamical systems, control, and optimization to mathematical problems in cancer chemotherapy. The basic construction is a compound system of host and invader each with their own dynamics. A single control is toxic to both components, and optimality is concerned with maximizing the toxic effect on the invader and minimizing the effect on the host. Rather than using global measures of toxicity, Prof. Johnson is isolating the most vulnerable host systems and performing optimization as a competition between a small selection of cell cultures. Recent simulations indicate a possibly chaotic response to standard periodic fixed dose chemotherapy regimes, which would appear as noise in real applications. Prof. Johnson is also continuing his work on his differential equations textbook.
Professor Susan Loepp continued her research in Commutative Algebra. During the summer of 1998, she advised a group of three undergraduates in the mathematics department’s SMALL research program. The group consisted of Davina Kunvipusilkul ‘99, Mark Florenz ‘00, and Junghee Yang ‘00. They were successful in proving an original result in Commutative Algebra and have submitted a paper to a research journal. During the 1998-99 year, Loepp supervised the senior honors thesis of Aaron Weinberg ‘99.
In January, Loepp attended the annual Joint Mathematics Meetings and the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference in April. She served on the steering committee for the 1999 Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, held at Siena College. Seven Williams students and two faculty participated in the conference. Loepp gave several talks during the year including colloquia at Vassar College and Williams College.
Loepp and William Wootters (physics) developed and taught a new interdisciplinary winter study course, Building and Cracking Codes: How Will We Protect Information in the Coming Centuries? Kevin O’Connor ‘00, supported by a Mellon grant, designed a web page for the course during the summer of 1998.
Professor Frank Morgan’s sabbatical travels included California, Italy, Germany, and Spain. From his base at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, he visited the Universities of Trento, Pisa, Freiburg, Tübingen, and Granada. Indeed, he spent the whole spring under the shadow of the Alhambra in Granada, presenting his famous Soap Bubble Geometry Contest in Spanish (“El Concurso de Geometría de Pompas de Jabón”) to some 500 students and working with Ritoré and Ros on some famous geometry problems. He predicts that there will be an announcement this year on the Double Bubble Conjecture, which says that the familiar double soap bubble is the most efficient (least-area) way to enclose and separate two given volumes of air. His “SMALL” undergraduate research Geometry Group will be working on this conjecture this coming summer. Last year’s Geometry Group had a paper on immiscible fluids accepted in the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.
Morgan’s publications include two joint papers with Geometry Group alumni. The first, “The Isoperimetric Problem on Surfaces” in The American Mathematical Monthly, with Hugh Howards (Williams ‘92, now an assistant professor at Wake Forest University) and Michael Hutchings (Harvard ‘92, now Szego Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Stanford), includes some results from Howards’s undergraduate thesis. The second, with Christopher French (Williams ‘94, now a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago) and Scott Greenleaf (Bates ‘94, now a Ph.D.student at SUNY, Stony Brook), studies crystals.
In January, Morgan will teach a Winter Study course, Teaching School, in which Williams students will work with fourth and fifth graders and publicize the ideas the young students come up with.
Morgan’s Math Chat column continues at the MAA web site (www.maa.org). A Math Chat Book will be published by the MAA later this year. In addition, he published four papers a nd has five others in the pipeline. He also gave some twenty-eight talks during the course of the year, and has been nominated as second vice-president of the Mathematical Association of America.
Professor Cesar Silva taught a new course on fractals in the fall along with the second semester calculus course. The fractals course studied the mathematics of fractals and made use of the web and other computer resources to investigate and draw interesting fractals. During Winter Study, he taught a course in color photography that also used the computer to scan and produce digital prints. He was on leave in the spring, when he continued his research in ergodic theory and measurable dynamical systems. In summer ’98, he supervised Jeff Kaye ‘99 and Alex Wolfe ‘99 as part of the SMALL Summer Research Program.
Before starting his leave he visited his colleague Toshihiro Hamachi at Kyushu University in Japan. Professor Hamachi had already spent a month in Williamstown the previous summer. They have prepared a paper that has been submitted for publication. He also completed another paper based on research from previous SMALL programs that was submitted for publication. His work with Terrence Adams on mixing higher dimensional examples is to appear soon in the journal Ergodic Theory and Dynamical Systems.
Steve Wang enjoyed a busy and productive year as a Visiting Assistant Professor. He continued his research in computer handwriting recognition, and he spoke about his work at a meeting of the Mathematical Association of America and at the Interface ‘99 meeting on statistics and computing. He also served as a referee for The American Statistician. Highlights of his teaching included two new courses of his own design. One was a Winter Study course, Baseball’s Highest Honor, that explored the scientific method, standards of evidence, and the history of the Baseball Hall of Fame. The other was a course on exploratory data analysis and statistical graphics and visualization, in which students became “statistical detectives” in investigating many curious real-world datasets. Finally, Steve served as faculty advisor to the Williams College Bowl team, which reached the national championships, representing New England, for the first time since 1991. He will be a lecturer at Harvard starting in Fall 1999.

MATHEMATICS COLLOQUIA

Colin Adams
Williams College
“Detecting Unknotting Tunnels in Knot Complements”
“Walnuts and Systoles in Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds”
“How I Blew My Fall: Crossing Number and Surfaces for Knots”
Olga R. Beaver
Williams College
“Bertrand’s Paradox and Other Oddities of Probability”
“Generalized Probability Functions on Non-Boolean Structures”
Greg Buck
St. Anselm College
“Physical Knots: Rope-Length, Energy, and Crossing Number”
Jorge Calvo
Williams College
“Geometric Knot Spaces and Polygonal Isotropy”
“All The Eight-Stick Knots”
“Polygonal Unknots and Erdos Problem # 3763”
Mikhail Chkhenkeli
Williams College
“The Exotic Four-Dimensional World”
Richard De Veaux
Williams College
“Hybrid Neural Networks –How to Incorporate Science into Data Analysis”
John Emerson ‘92
Yale University
“Bayesian and Frequentist Statistics: Opposite Ends of the Log?”
Susan Engel
Lecturer in Psychology and Director of the Program in Teaching at Williams College
“The Math Curse: What School Children Should Learn About Math, and How”
Robert Franzosa
University of Maine, Orono
“Classifying Disk Intersections in the Plane: An Application of Topology to Geographic Information Systems”
Nathaniel Friedman
SUNY, Albany
“Visualization in Art and Mathematics”
Thomas Garrity
Williams College
“How to Give a Prize Winning Talk”
“Struggling with Compact Manifolds via CR Geometry”
“A Universal Levi Form on Flag Manifolds”
“Functions and Topology”
“Cubic Irrationals and Triangle Sequences”
Gretchen Greene
University of California
“Feature Recognition for Automated Sculpture Reproduction”
Victor E. Hill IV
Williams College
“206 Years of Mathematics at Williams”
Martin Hildebrand ‘86
SUNY – Albany
“A Combinatorial Conjecture of Simion”
Stewart Johnson
Williams College
“Dynamic Optimization Applications in Chemotherapy”
Joy Jordan
University of Iowa
“Does the Right Eye See Better than the Left Eye?”
Susan Loepp
Williams College
“My Completely Excellent Summer Vacation”
“An Open Question in Commutative Algebra”
“Bad Excellent Rings”
Jerome Reiter
Harvard University
“Sampling and Census 2000: The Statistical and Political Issues”
Jennifer Schumi ’97
Iowa State University
“Do bullets have Fingerprints? Cluster Analysis of Trace Element Composition in Bullet Fragment”
Cesar Silva
Williams College
“Mixing Along Sequences”
“Ergodic Ramsey Theory”
Steve Wang
Williams College
“A Statistical Model for Computer Handwriting Recognition, with an Application to ZIP Codes”
“Statistical Detective Work: Exploratory Data Analysis and the Smoking Gun”

MATHEMATICS STUDENT COLLOQUIA

SMALL Commutative Algebra Group
“Shortest Enclosures and Immiscible Fluids”
SMALL Geometry Group
“The Isoperimetric Problem”
Catherine Bagley ‘99
“Dunkin vs. Dunking – The Fundamental Group and Why a Basketball is not a Donut”
Matthew Bell ‘99
“Tube-Equivalence of Link Spanning Surfaces”
Stephen Bennett ‘99
“Minkowski’s First Theorem of Lattice Points and Convex Bodies”
Garren Bird ‘99
“The Dynamics of Resource Depletion: How Math Can Save the World”
Gregory Bloch ‘99
“Wallpaper Groups: A Musicologist’s Perspective”
Jana Comstock ‘99
“Cayley Digraphs and Hamiltonian Paths”
David Cowan ‘99
“A Model of Computation Over the Complex Numbers”
Jessica N. Green ‘99
“Spline Interpolation”
Zachary Grossman ‘99
“An ‘I-deal’ -ly Defined Metric on Commutative Rings: No Calipers Involved’”
Jason Hadnot ‘99
“Why Trekking in the Complex Plane Always Amounts to Little or Nothing”
Saumitra Jha ‘99
“How to Save Venice with a Minimum of Spadework - An Introduction to Generalized Least Squares and Spatial Interpolation”
Jeffrey Kaye ‘99
“Linear Algebra: Ya Mean it’s Useful”
Dragomir Kolev ‘99
“Fractal Markets and the Joker Effect: Applying Chaos Theory to Economics and Investments “
Davina Kunvipusilkul ‘99
“The Banach-Tarski Paradox”
Stephen Lehman ‘99
“Contour Integrals and Cauchys First Integral Theorem”
Yuneng Li ‘99
“How GPA’s are unfair: A Bayesian Model as an Alternative Form of Evaluating Student Performance”
Earle McCartney ‘99
“Place linkages: Putting an End to the Ruler’s Tyranny”
Daniel McCue ‘99
“Quantifying the Landscape: Mathematical Approaches toward the Study of Geography”
Edward Melnick ‘99
“Math and the Rubiks’s Cube: Solutions and Beyond”
Courtney O’Connor ‘99
“It’s Life or Death! Models for Survival and their Importance in Actuarial Work”
Elizabeth Oltmans ‘99
“Does Cancer Cause Smoking? An Introduction to Causation Theory”
Sang Pahk ‘99
“Stick Knots and the Inverse Function Theorem”
John Platt ‘99
“The Power of Variational Calculus: The “Maxi-Min” Problem Revisited”
Michael Rapport ‘99
“Complex Differentiation and Conformal Maps”
Scott Reynolds ‘99
“Managers, Markov, and McGwire: The Mathematics of the Baseball Lineup”
Edward Richards ‘99
“The Prime Avoidance Theorem”
Emily Shanks ‘99
“Multicollinearity Got You Down? Try Ridge Regression”
Eric Soskin ‘99
“It May Be March, But There’s a Lot of Ising Left to Do”
Joseph Vanderwaart ‘99
“Monosomy theorem? Dromedary theorem? No, Monodromy Theorem!”
Aaron Weinberg ‘99
“Knotty Polynomials: The Birth of a New Invariant”
Craig Westerland ‘99
“Modules: Vector Space Wannabe’s”
Nathaniel White ‘99
“Show Me the Money! Sounds Better in Swedish”
Alexandre Wolfe ‘99
“Orthogonal Latin Squares and Finite Projective Planes”
Cara Yoder ‘99
“Knot Your Airlines: a Logistic Regression on Late Arrivals”

OFF-CAMPUS COLLOQUIA

Colin Adams
“Real Estate in Hyperbolic Space”
Math Camp, University of Toronto, Toronto, CA
Boston University
Polya Lecturer, Metropolitan New York Section of the MAA, Hempstead, NY
“Reform or Anti-Reform” and “Teacher as Scholar”, panelist
Project NExT, Ryerson Polytechnic University, Toronto, CA
“Detecting Unknotting Tunnels in Knots, Links and 3-Manifolds”
Georgia Topology Conference, University of Georgia, Athens, GA
“Systoles of Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds”, Special Session on Low-Dimensional Topology
American Mathematical Society Meetings, Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem
“Walnuts, Systoles, Unknotting Tunnels and Other Refuse Cluttering Up Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds”
Rutgers University, Newark, NJ.
Valley Geometry Seminar, U-Mass., Amherst, MA
“Deja Vu Cusps, Walnuts and Systoles in Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds”
Geometry and Topology Conference, the Technion, Haifa, Israel
“How to Make Calculus Fun and Exciting”
Project NExT, AMS/MAA Mathematics Meetings, San Antonio, TX
“Making Math Fun: For You, For Your Students”
Williamstown Public Library
“Why Knot?”, Skidmore College
Saratoga Springs, NY
“Bus Tours of the Universe and Beyond”
Keynote lecture, Texas Sectional Meeting of the MAA, San Marcos, TX
“Making Calculus Fun” and “Real Estate in Hyperbolic Space”
Polya Lecturer, Iowa Sectional Meeting of the MAA, Iowa City, IA
“Minimal Volume Maximal Cusps in Hyperbolic 3-Manifolds”
AMS Meetings, Denton, TX
Olga R. Beaver
“The Williams Summer Science Program - Not With a Whisper But a Bang”
1997 Fall Conference of the Northeastern Section of the MAA
“Calculus Reform: Good or Bad”
Independent Schools Math Reform Calculus Panel Discussion, The Hotchkiss School
Edward B. Burger
“Bending Space”
The Contemporary Artists Center, North Adams, Massachusetts;
Charles Wright Academy, Tacoma, Washington
“Infinite Series and p-adic Analysis”
Slow Pitch Seminar, University of Colorado at Boulder
Beloit College; SUNY at Geneseo; Utah State University
“On Simultaneous Diophantine Approximation in Q+Qa”
Special session in number theory, AMS Conference, DePaul University
“Why I Hate Mathematics but Love Museums”
Beloit College, Dean’s Lecture Series at the Illinois Institute of Art Mesa State College
SUNY at Geneseo; Kempner Colloquium; University of Colorado at Boulder
“Is There a Fourth Dimension? Can You See it?”
Illinois Institute of Art
“Quadratic Fields and Simultaneous Diophantine Approximation”
University of Colorado at Boulder
“Magic with Mathematics: Is the Equation Faster Than the Eye?”
Keynote Address at the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, Hartford, Connecticut
“Confessions of an Unusual Mathematics Professor”
Williams Club of New York City; Williams Alumni Association of Naples Florida;
Williams Alumni Association of St. Louis
“Innovative Experiments and How I Survived Them”
Keynote Address, MAA New Jersey Sectional Fall Meeting, the Stevens Institute
“You Can Sum Some of the Series Some of the Time...”
Harvey Mudd College; Swarthmore College; Washington University
“Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Blue: Becoming Engaged in Diophantine Approximation
The Claremont Colleges Mathematics Colloquium; UCLA
“Research in Number Theory”
SUNY at Geneseo
“On Diophantine Approximation in the Vector Space Q+Qa”
Special Session in Diophantine Analysis, AMS Conference, University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana
Jorge Calvo
“Geometric Knot Spaces and Polygonal Isotropy”
Algorithms Seminar, School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montreal;
California State University, Chico; Furman University; North Dakota State University;
University of Wisconsin, Green Bay; Salem State College;
Valley Geometry Seminar, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
Centre de Mathematiques et d’Informateriques, Universite de Provence, Marseille;
Invited lecture, International Knot Theory Meeting, Delphi, Greece

Richard De Veaux
“Neural Networks in Chemistry
American Chemical Society, Boston, MA
“Hybrid Neural Networks for Process Control”
Duke University; North Carolina State University
“Data Mining” (short course)
for American Society for Quality’s Deming Conference, Atlantic City, NJ
“Data Mining and Experimental Design: Synergy or Disaster?”
American Management Systems Conference, Tysons Corner, VA
“Data Mining: What’s New, What’s Not”
Making Statistics Effective for Schools of Business (MSMESB) Conference, Babson College
“Data Mining: Fool’s Gold or Mother Lode?”
Alumni College; Williams College
“Data Mining”
Discussant, Gordon Research Conference, Plymouth, NH
“A Guided Tour of Data Mining Tools”
American Statistical Association, Baltimore
Thomas Garrity
“On Algebraic Number and Triangle Sequences”
Hudson River Undergraduate Research Conference, Siena College
Victor E. Hill IV
“The Hypercube and Bach: Seeing Things We Can’t See, Hearing Things We Can’t Hear”
Emma Willard School, Troy, NY
“Story Problems: Their History, Purposes, and Solution”
Mathematical Association of America, Northeastern Section, Spring Meeting, Keene State College (NH)
“Mathematical Aspects of the Music of Bach”
National Meeting of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences
Mid-Atlantic Regional Meeting of the Association of Anglican Musicians
Sarah Lawrence College
Susan Loepp
“Rational Numbers and Polynomials”
Mathematics Colloquium, Vassar College
“Detecting and Correcting Errors: A Useful Application of Abstract Algebra”
Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, Siena College
Frank Morgan
“New Isoperimetric Theorems”
Geometry Conference, Lehigh University; University of Pennsylvania
“Isoperimetric Theorems Redux”
Geometry Conference, Lehigh University
“The Soap Bubble Geometry Contest”
Southern Vermont College; Duke University; NCTM Meeting, Long Island;
Stuart Country Day School; Princeton University; Rotary Club, Princeton, New Jersey;
Riverside Elementary School, Princeton, New Jersey
University of Hartford; Morehead State University; Cape Cod Community College;
Cedar Crest College; John Carroll University; Princeton High School
“New Classical Isoperimetric Theorems”
Duke University; Brigham Young University
“The Three Secrets of Good Teaching”
Princeton University; Oklahoma State University
“New Isoperimetric Inequalities”
Princeton University
“The Double Soap Bubble Breakthrough and Fallout 1998”
Oklahoma State University
“The Isoperimetric Problem and Freshman Calculus”
Milton Academy
“Math Chat Contest TV”
Morehead State University
“Soap Bubbles ‘98”
Morehead State University
“Generalizing the Circle and Undergraduate Research”
Cape Cod Community College
“Acquainting Calculus Students with the Frontiers of Research”
MAA Meeting, Brigham Young University
“The Soap Bubble Geometry Contest for Teachers”
Cedar Crest College
“Bubbles and Crystals in Surfaces and in Space”
John Carroll University
“The Double Soap Bubble Breakthrough”
Princeton University
“Acquainting Undergraduates with the Frontiers of Research”
Princeton University
Cesar E. Silva
“Zd Staircase Actions”, Special Session on Ergodic Theory and Topological Dynamics
American Mathematical Society Meeting, DePaul University, Chicago
“Power Weakly Mixing for Infinite Measure Preserving Transformations”
Ergodic Theory Seminar Northeastern University; Kyushu University, Japan
“Factors of Nonsingular Cartesian Products”, Special Session on Ergodic, American Mathematical Society Meeting
Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem
“A Survey of Results and Problems in the Ergodic Theory of Mixing Actions”
Connecticut Valley Mathematics Colloquium, Amherst
“Rank one mixing Z2 actions” Ergodic Theory and Information Theory and their Related
Topics Conference, Nihon University Seminar House at Lake Yamanaka, Japan
“Infinite Ergodic Index Does Not Imply Power Weak Mixing”, Special Session in Ergodic
Theory, American Mathematical Society Meeting, University of Florida, Gainsville
“Infinite Ergodic Index Nonsingular Zd Actions”
Maryland-Penn State Dynamics
Steve C. Wang
“A Statistical Model for Computer Handwriting Recognition”
Mathematical Association of America, Northeastern Section, Western Connecticut State University
Interface ‘99, Symposium on the Interface of Statistics and Computing, Chicago, IL

POSTGRADUATE PLANS OF MATHEMATICS MAJORS


Catherine Bagley: Teaching math and coaching softball at the Bishop’s School in La Jolla, California
Matthew Bell:
Stephen Bennett: Working for the Americorps NCCC Program while applying to medical school
Garren Bird: Working for the World Bank in Indonesia and U.S. Agency for International Development in Madagascar. Then working for Bain and Company as an Associate Consultant.
Gregory Bloch: Entering the Music Ph.D. program at the University of California, Berkeley
Jana Comstock: Teaching math at a private school
John Cowan: Teaching mathematics at Holderness School, Plymouth, New Hampshire
Jessica N. Green: Attending engineering school
Zachary Grossman: Teaching math and economics at the American School in Switzerland
Jason Hadnot:
Saumitra Jha: Entering the M.Phil. program in economics at University of Cambridge and eventually get an M. Phil. In Statistical Science
Jeffrey Kaye: Teaching math and coaching at the Horace Mann School in New York
Dragomir Kolev: Working for Merrill Lynch in New York as an Analyst
Davina Kunvipusilkul: Entering the Ph.D. program in Operations Research at Cornell University
Stephen Lehman: Working for Monitor Consulting in Cambridge, Massachusetts
Yuneng Li:
Earle McCartney:
Daniel McCue:
Edward Melnick: Teaching English near Osaka, Japan. Then attending medical school
Courtney O’Connor: Actuarial Development at John Hancock in Boston, then Mutual Life Insurance Company in Boston
Elizabeth Oltmans: Entering the Master’s Program in Public Policy at the University of Michigan
Sang Pahk: Entering the math Ph.D. program at the University of California, Davis
John Platt: Government/Management Consulting for PriceWaterhouse Coopers, then attending graduate school in engineering
Michael Rapport: Analyst at Goldman, Sachs & Co. then attending business school
Scott Reynolds: Entering the math Ph.D. program at Penn State University
Edward Richards: Investment banking at Salomon Smith Barney in New York
Emily Shanks: Working in the Start Analyst Program at Lehman Brothers
Eric Soskin:
Joseph Vanderwaart: Entering the Ph.D. computer science program at Carnegie Mellon University
Aaron Weinberg: Entering the math Ph.D. program at University of Wisconsin, Madison
Craig Westerland: Entering the math Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan
Nathaniel White: Coaching then playing minor league hockey
Alexandre Wolfe: Entering math Ph.D. program at the University of Michigan
Cara Yoder: Teaching math and coaching at Cate School in Santa Barbara, California