Dept. of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics2016 Fall Newsletter

1015 Floyd AvenuePO Box 842014Richmond, VA 23284

Phone: 804-828-1301Fax: 804-828-8785math@vcu.eduwww.math.vcu.edu

The mission of the Department of Mathematics and Applied Mathematics is to foster excellence in mathematical research and to offer a strong undergraduate and graduate education that will prepare our students for stimulating and rewarding employment, career, and life-long learning opportuni-ties. In addition, we strive to help all VCU students achieve a level of quantitative literacy and ana-lytical skills enabling them to deal effectively with the quantitative issues that they will encounter throughout their lives.

MATH ADVISING

Math Advising takes place on the 4th Floor of Harris Hall Rooms 4103 and 4103a!

Our Advisors will help you with Overrides, Holds, Grad-uation Applications and any other questions you may have regarding your Major or Minor in Math!

HELP CENTER

The Math Help Center is located in Harris Hall2nd Floor Room 2126!

DEPARTMENTAL TEA

The department of Math-ematics & Applied Mathe-matics has a departmental Tea every Friday afternoon from 2:00-3:00 pm in the Math Mall Commons Area on the 4th Floor of Harris Hall. Come and join us for Coffee, Tea, Cookies, and Board Games!

ALL are Welcome!

Faculty and Staff News“The only way to LEARN Mathematics, is to DO Mathematics”

- Paul Halmos

MARRIAGE

Congratulations to Alex McWhorter on his marriage to Henry Winfiele on June 3rd. Alex spent 2 weeks in the U.S. Virgin Islands for his honeymoon. Best wish-es to you both!

GRADUATION

Congratulations to Michelle Carpenter (Assistant to the Chair, & Dept. Administra-tor) for graduating from the Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute HIGHER Ground Women’s Leadership De-velopment Program! Way to go!

Congratulations goes out to Brent Cody for his recent marriage to Anna Maternick!

Sean Cox (PI), Brent Cody (co-PI), and Monroe Eskew (co-PI) obtained a $40,000 grant from the VCU Presidential Research Quest Fund. The project, titled “Open problems in the foun-dations of mathematics,” runs from July 2016 through De-cember 2017. The project provides support for the investi-gators' research, a small workshop to be held at VCU, and a special topics course for graduate students in Spring 2017 ("Filters, Ultrafilters, and applications").

Rebecca Segal is a PI on a new NSF Grant. The Grant is a Collaborative Research: A National Consortium for Syner-gistic Undergraduate Mathematics via Multi-Institutional Interdisciplinary Teaching Partnerships (SUMMIT-P), which brings together 11 Institutions on a 5-year, $2.6 Million Dollar Project.

The main goal of the grant it to improve student learning in lower level math courses by engaging partner disciplines in curriculum development. That is, we will work with oth-er STEM disciplines to ensure that our mathematics cours-es are meaningful to students in other majors, as well as to math students. Different institutions in the grant have differ-ent math course of focus and different partner disciplines, and we will pool knowledge/curriculum development over the course of the grant. The grant is joint work with Bill Ha-ver, Rosalyn Hargraves (Education/Engineering), and Vennie Filippas (Engineering).

PUBLISHED

Professor Joy Whitenack co-authored a book that was released in late Fall of 2015. The book is called“It’s Elementary: A Parent’s Guide to K-5 Mathematics”Make sense of and connect with today’s Elementary Mathematics! By Joy Whit-enack, Laurie Cavey, and Catherine Henney! Great work Joy!

“Mathematics is like love, a simple idea, but it can get

complicated.”- George Polya

GRANTS

Congratulations to Dr. Daniel Cranston! The National Securi-ty Agency will fund his grant application entitled “Improved bounds for edge coloring simple graphs: the structure of edge-critical graphs” This is part of the NSA Young Investi-gator program.

Congratulations to Craig Larson for being awarded a 5-year Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant. His project is: “Alpha-critical Graphs and Stability Number LPs.”

Congratulations to Suzanne Robertson for being awarded a 5-year Simons Foundation Collaboration grant. Her project is: “Controlling Infectious Disease project.”

CONFERENCE

In March of 2016, our De-partment Chair, Glenn Hurl-bert co-organized a confer-ence with Visiting Assistant Professor Vikram Kamat.IntersectionFest: A work-shop on Intersecting Set Systems. The workshop was supported by the Simons Foundation.

RESEARCH

Rebecca Segal and Suzanne Robertson presented their research at the Internation-al Symposium on Biomath-ematics & Ecology Educa-tion and Research, which was held on Oct 14-16, 2016 at the College of Charleston in South Carolina.

WELCOME

A warm welcome to our new faculty who arrived at VCU this fall in the Department of Mathematics & Applied Mathematics!

Cheri DoucetteInstructor

Faith JohnInstructor

Mark SchwitzerlettInstructor

RETIREMENT

On September 30th Karen Murphy, Project Adminis-trator, officially retired from VCU as the Math depart-ment’s Project Administra-tor. Congratulations Karen! You will be missed!

Brent CodyAssistant Professor

Reed OgroskyAssistant Professor

Ihsan TopalogluAssistant Professor

Justin AlbertInstructor

Faculty Conferences

RESEARCH AND DEVELOPEMENT CONFERENCE

The Research and Development Conference: Preparing and Implementing Successful Mathematics Coaching Programs took place in the VCU Student Commons, June 7-8, 2016.

One hundred and fifty mathematics educators, mathemati-cians, mathematics teacher leaders, and policy makers from across the country attended the conference. The presenters represented institutions and professional organizations from across the country and included nationally recognized math-ematics education researchers in the field of mathematics teacher leadership (e.g., mathematics specialists, mathemat-ics coaches, instructional mathematics leaders, and so on).

This two-day event was organized by Drs. Aimee Ellington and Joy Whitenack in collaboration with Dr. Christine Trinter in the VCU School of Education and supported by the Nation-al Science Foundation and the Brookhill Institute of Mathe-matics. The papers presented at the conference will be dis-seminated in a special issue of the Journal of Mathematical Behavior that will be published in 2017.

http://www.vmsiresearchconference.com/

INAUGURAL BAMM!

The BAMM! Conference (Biology and Medicine Through Mathematics!), the first of what we hope to be many, was held in Richmond, Virginia May 2016. Our incredibly rainy weather took a break and we had a beautiful first day on Friday. We enjoyed a wide range of dynamic plenary talks throughout the conference. Dr. Bard Ermentrout, Universi-ty of Pittsburgh, was our opening act and delighted the au-dience with a talk on his new research venture in olfaction driven movement. Dr. Leah Keshet, University of British Columbia, gave an overview of her work on understanding molecular motors. Dr. James Keener, University of Utah, dis-cussed the various ways in which diffusion is actually helpful in biological systems and also treated us to a demonstration of the Hodgkin-Huxley Macarena. Dr. Jim Cushing, Univer-sity of Arizona, gave mathematical motivation for how gull cannibalism could be a viable survival response to rising sea temperatures.

We had about 100 attendees with 40 talks and 40 posters to round out the conference. What we had envisioned as a local conference exceeded our expectations with a vibrant group comprised of mathematicians from 20 states and 3 other countries, from undergraduate students on up. Every-one participated in a networking lunch which allowed great opportunities for career conversations and idea sharing. The poster session took place in VCU’s newly renovated library event space and fostered further conversation and social-izing. The conference was supported by grants from NSF, SMB, MBI, and VCU and was held in cooperation with AWM. We greatly appreciate all the support that allowed for a di-verse group of participants.

Inaugural BAMM! conference organizers and plenary speakers: Angela Reynolds, Jim Cushing, David Chan, Leah Keshet, Suzanne Robertson, Bard Ermentrout, Rebecca Segal, Laura Ellwein-Fix, Cheng Ly, and James Keener!

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them”

- Albert Einstein

Student Activities

ESTIMATHON

Be on the lookout for the Math Department’s event “ESTIMATHON” This event is a competition in which groups try to estimate the answers to questions like:

“What is the volume, in cu-bic feet, of the Statue of Lib-erty?”

Prizes are awarded to 1st 2nd and 3rd place winners! Don’t miss out on the fun!

(Details can be found on the math website at www.math.vcu.edu).

PRIZE PROBLEMS

Join your fellow classmates in finding the solutions to the “PRIZE PROBLEMS” which are updated every third week in the Math Dept. and on our website at www.math.vcu.edu. Prizes are given to those who can an-swer the problems correct-ly! Good Luck…..

MATHLETES CLUB

During the 2016 fall semes-ter, VCU students (math and LSEE majors) will be work-ing once a week with mid-dle school students at Rich-mond Montessori to form a Mathletes Club. The club will investigate mathemat-ics through hands-on activ-ities each week. Throughout the semester, the middle school students will explore problem solving skills in mathematics in preparation for the MATHCOUNTS Com-petition in the spring.

GIRLS IN MATH DAY

Women in Math will be hosting Sonya Kovalevksy Day on December 3rd 2016, from 9-2 at the MathScience Innovation Center. This event will provide extracurricular enrichment in STEM for middle school girls, hopefully encouraging them to consider future careers in STEM. Presenters will consist of Richmond area women who work in the STEM field. These women will provide the students with female role models from within our community. Middle school participants will be selected from five Richmond area school divisions.

The one-day event will include a short history of its name-sake Sonya Kovalevsky, the first female professor in Europe and a pre-emanate mathematician. A plenary talk will be given by a local professional who has dedicated their life to mathematics. The bulk of the day will consist of hands-on sessions that the participants choose according to their in-terests. Sessions topics may include biomathematics, statis-tics, animation, engineering, and architecture.

SUMMER STUDY ABROAD

Dr. Rebecca Segal will lead a summer program at the University of the West of England (UWE) in Bristol during the summer of 2017. Students will be able to take MATH/BIOL/BNFO380 Introduction to Mathemat-ical Biology along with a MATH391 Topics Course: History of British Mathemat-ics. Faculty from UWE will augment the mathematical biology course with their own research expertise and students will take day trips to mathematically relevant historical sites. Contact Dr. Segal for more information.

UNDERGRADUATE STUDENT CONFERENCE

Hailey Belleperche, Kellan Childers, Hanqiu Tan and Robert West attended the Spring MAA MD-DC-VA Section Meet-ing held at Montgomery College on April 15-16, 2016 with Instructor Jody Cox. Catherine Rayno and Sarah Williams attended the 18th annual Nebraska Conference for Under-graduate Women in Mathematics on January 29-31, 2016.

Josephine Bly, Kellan Childers, Dongchen Guan, Riley Harris, Asa Kaplan, Jennifer Pettyjohn, and Sarah Williams attend-ed the SUMS (Shenandoah Undergraduate Mathematics and Statistics) conference held at James Madison University on September 24, 2016 with Instructor Jody Cox. Asa gave a talk titled “An Introduction to Surreal Numbers” based on his work with Dr. Marco Aldi.

Student Success

AMS 2016 RECIPIENT

Please join us in congrat-ulating Renee Adonteng, this year’s recipient of the $3,000 Waldemar J. Trjitz-insky Scholarship awarded by the American Mathemat-ical Society (AMS). Renee is a junior at VCU, working on a mathematics degree with a concentration in ap-plied mathematics. She hopes to pursue a career in actuarial science once she completes her degree. She joined the mathematics de-partment after changing her major from studying health and physical exercise sci-ence. We are certainly glad that she decided to choose mathematics as her major. Congratulations Renee!

VCU/MCV WOMEN’S CLUB

Congratulations to Brooke Sanders on behalf of the VCU/MCV Women’s Club and the Graduate School of Virginia Commonwealth University for being award-ed a 2016-2017 Graduate School Scholarship.

The Virginia Common-wealth University Founda-tion Endowed Scholarship host a dinner in mid-March at the Commonwealth Club.Please accept our most sin-cere congratulations for this achievement and for the outstanding scholarly abili-ties you have shown in your discipline.Best wishes for continued success.

MATH MODELING CHALLENGE

VCU Math represented themselves well at a recent model-ing contest at VMI in Lexington. Randolph Qiao, Josephine Bly, and Maurice Turner competed in the Shenandoah Valley Math Modeling Challenge on September 17 & 18 at Virginia Military Institute. The students had 24 hours to develop a model, write a report and prepare a presentation on the giv-en challenge problem. This year’s problem was to develop an economic impact model should the state of Virginia de-cide to legalize marijuana. The team received an Honorable Mention, a great performance given that none of them had experience with this type of competition!

RESEARCH GRANT

Dewey Taylor received a Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (CURM) grant for the 2015-2016 academic year. The CURM program is funded by the National Science Foundation and Brigham Young University. This grant provided $3000 sti-pends for four undergradu-ate students (Torie Chomko, Kevin McCall, Alexander McCleary and Jamie Shive) to work in graph theory during the academic year.The students presented their research at two con-ferences, the 11th Annual Regional Mathematics and Statistics Conference at the University of North Caro-lina at Greensboro (UNCG RMSC) and the MAA/CURM Conference at Loyola Ma-rymount University in Los Angeles, CA. Kevin McCall and Alexander McCleary won the Best Presentation Award at the UNCG RMSC.

MAA GRANT

Ghidewon Abay-Asmerom, Moa Apagodu and Dewey Taylor received a Nation-al Research Experience for Undergraduates Program (NREUP) grant from the MAA in May 2016. NREUP supports the participation of mathematics undergrad-uates from underrepresent-ed groups in focused and challenging summer re-search experiences.

This grant supplied $4000 stipends for four undergrad-uate students (Jillian Allen, Hailey Belleperche, Idalmy Escobar and Hermella Tes-sema) to work in graph theory in a concentrated 6-week summer program. All four students are pre-senting their research at the 12th Annual Regional Math-ematics and Statistics Con-ference at the University of North Carolina at Greens-boro in November 2016.

MATH CHALLENGE

In the figure below, ray EF was constructed starting from

rays ED and EG. By using a compas D and G were marked

equidistant from E on rays ED and EG. The compass was

then used to locate a point F, distinct from E, so that F is

equidistant from D and G. For all constructions defined by

the above steps, the measures of DEF and GEF:

(A)are equal(B) are NOT equal(C) sum to 30°(D) sum to 45°(E) sum to 60°

“Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas.” - Albert Einstein

D

F

GE