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A New Faculty Learning Community for Instructors and TAs: The Community for the Advancement of Antiracist Instruction (CAAI) seeks instructors and TAs for a spring pilot, weeks 5 through 8. In this professional development opportunity, participants will explore antiracist teaching in a community of colleagues and create an antiracist teaching action plan. Apply here by March 31.
OSU Mathematics graduate students Rachel Wofford, Lisa Bigler, and Naren Vohra were selected for the prestigious NSF (National Science Foundation) sponsored internships for Summer 2021. Rachel Wofford will work with a lab in New Hampshire on determining how socioeconomic status impacts cancer patients. Lisa Bigler will work on the project "Implicit time-stepping method to solve phase-field equations in a moving frame" at Oak Ridge National Lab. Naren Vohra wil work on "Numerical permafrost model" at the Los Alamos National Lab.The students will receive a weekly stipend but the internships will be conducted virtually. Congratulations to Rachel, Lisa, and Naren! The National Science Foundation (NSF) Mathematical Sciences Graduate Internship (MSGI) program is administered by ORAU through the Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education (ORISE) under an agreement between NSF and the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). ORISE focuses on scientific initiatives including educating the next generation of scientists. More information...
SIAM CSE (Computational Science and Engineering) Conference met virtually March 1-5 and featured strong preence of OSU Mathematics students. PhD students Lisa Bigler, Choah Shin and Naren Vohra and recent PhD alum Sebastian Naranjo gave talks in minisymposia. Lisa and Choah also participated in and were supported by the Broader Engagement program which featured a rich scientific program, mentoring, and career and professional development to students from underrepresented and underprivileged backgrounds who aspire to broaden their experience in research-based professional activities. Choah even served a sa TA in the BE tuorial on "Fundamentals of Accelerated Computing with CUDA C/C++" !!!! There is more: Lisa, Choah and Evan Rajbhandari presented posters; all this in the virtual setting which made the activities both exciting and challenging. Finally, Naren and Nachuan Zhang received conference participation support from SIAM. [SIAM has generously extended financial support for conference participation for graduate students and early career...
A new faculty learning community that focuses on antiracist teaching practices is being planned for Spring 2021. Organized by Raven Chakerian, Filix Maisch, Shawn Massoni, Dan Rockwell, Rachael Cate, and Liddy Deter, this new community of practice (COP) will create a safe space where instructors and GTAs will have agency and feel empowered to explore antiracism in a community of peers of similar ranking. The COP is co-sponsored by the Office of Faculty Affairs and the Center for Teaching and Learning. More details, including how to participate, will follow soon.
The December 2020 issue of SIAM News features an article co-authored by Nathan Gibson on " Advancing SIAM’s Mission with the COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling ". The article describes the Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), organized by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP) and mentions the many ways in which the OSU Mathematics Department has supported and mentored succesful teams since 2006.
The December 2020 Issue of the American Mathematical Monthly (published by the Mathematical Association of America, and now available online at maa.org) features an article by Tevian Dray: "Using Embedding Diagrams to Visualize Curvature". Abstract: We give an elementary treatment of the curvature of surfaces of revolution in the language of vector calculus, using differentials rather than an explicit parameterization. We illustrate some basic features of curvature using embedding diagrams, and then use such a diagram to analyze the geometry of the Schwarzschild black hole.
Prof. Malgorzata Peszynska has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for "outstanding contributions to multidisciplinary mathematical and computational modeling of flow and transport in porous media". More details to follow in a feature story. Congratulations Malgo!
New feature articles have been created by the newsletter/media committee and are now published on the Math Website. These are New Graduate Students 2020-2021 The mathematics department welcomes new graduate students for 2020-2021. Math alumna models COVID-19 Carrie Manore’s disease modeling at national lab aiding public health initiatives to combat COVID-19 Mary Beisiegel awarded new NSF grants Mary Beisiegel awarded funding for training of mathematics GTAs and algebra education at community colleges Computational Mathematics grant awarded to Bokil and Gibson Mathematicians awarded funding for computational modeling of plasmas and novel nanocomposites. New Faculty Hires 2020-2021 The mathematics department welcomes new faculty in 2020-2021. --Media Committee (Gibson & Wing)
Congratulations to Azhar Alhammali (Oregon State Mathematics PhD 2019 alumna) who received the prestigious title of a Fellow for Advance HE https://www.advance-he.ac.uk/fellowship . The Fellowship demonstrates a personal and institutional commitment to professionalism in learning and teaching in higher education. Across four categories, from Associate to Principal, Fellowship provides individuals with recognition of their practice, impact and leadership of teaching and learning. Dr Alhammali is currently an assistant professor at Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University in Saudi Arabia.
Math graduate students Lisa Bigler and Choah Shin have been accepted, with full funding, to the the Broader Engagement Program for the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Computational Science and Engineering (CSE) conference. This program will take place March 1-5, 2021. More information can be found at http://shinstitute.org/siam-cse21-broader-engagement-program/ .
Mathematics graduate student, Choah Shin, was awarded the Oregon Lottery Graduate Scholarship for the 2020-2021 academic year. You can find more information about this award at https://gradschool.oregonstate.edu/awards/oregon-lottery-scholarship .
Sarah Hagen has just published "Active Learning and the Transformation of a Graduate Student Instructor" in the AMS Blog on Teaching and Learning Mathematics at https://blogs.ams.org/matheducation/ . The article is about her own transformation from lecturer to facilitator of student active learning in the classroom, and her insights about it, in the context of teaching the OSU Math boot camp for incoming graduate students.
Patrick Flynn (BS Mathematics & Physics ’18), a Ph.D. student of applied mathematics at Brown University and Gregory Mirek Brandt (BS Mathematics & Physics ’18), a Ph.D. student of astrophysics at the University of California Santa Barbara are awarded 2020 NSF Graduate Research Fellowships. Read about them in this IMPACT article.
The Daily Barometer featured our Virtual MSLC and some of the mathematics faculty involved in its running in a recent article. Read the article here.
Professor David Pengelley presented " Sophie Germain's Grand Plan to Prove Fermat's Last Theorem " on May 11, 2020, via Zoom. Sponsored by the Oregon State University student chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and introduced by Branwen Purdy, President of the AWM student chapter. The audience was primarily OSU Mathematics faculty and graduate students, and external guests Dora Musielak and Dominic Klyve. Abstract: The Oregon State University chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics invites you to join in celebrating International Women in Mathematics Day with a special colloquium on a famous woman mathematician. Sophie Germain (1776-1831) is the first woman known to have created important new mathematical research. She is best known in number theory for the first general result aimed at proving Fermat's Last Theorem, finally proven only 25 years ago. However, her unpublished manuscripts, and a letter to Gauss, reveal that for...
New featured stories (slider stories) have been created by the newsletter/media committee and are now published on the Math Web Site. These are regarding New Instructors for 2019-2020, the recent online Cascade RAIN meeting, and the recent online NUMS meeting.
Sara Clark, Senior Mathematics Instructor and Academic Advisor, and Liz Jones, Instructor of Mathematics, will be discussing their experiences redesigning developmental math courses, as well as lessons learned during the current COVID-19 crisis, in a webinar this Thursday. This APLU sponsored webinar - A Team-Based Approach to Redesigning Developmental Math Courses at Oregon State University - will be Thursday, May 7, 2020, at 8:30 am. The free webinar will also be recorded and shared after the event. You can register for this event at the following link: https://zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_43eBIo-bR-OD6TGL9CJYog?mkt_tok=eyJpI... .
Mathematics major Saki Nakai has received a Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) award to support her summer research on mathematical modeling of psychological disorders, with a particular focus on bipolar disorder. Saki is an Honors scholar double majoring in Mathematics (with an option in mathematical biology) and Psychology and minoring in French and Music Performance. This SURE project will be an interdisciplinary project that will bridge mathematics and psychology. Saki will work with Professor Vrushali Bokil on her research. The SURE program provides students with a stipend for 11 weeks of full time research, and an additional $500 for research expenses to support their project..
Worapan Homsomboon, Slade Sanderson, and Mesa Walker were supported participants at the Riemann Surfaces and Their Moduli Spaces Conference. This conference was held at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, February 7-9. More information about the conference can be found here: https://sites.google.com/view/rtgmini-conferenceutah2020/home?authuser=0 .
Mathematics graduate student Lisa Bigler has received funding from a Graduate School Travel Award to attend the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Conference on Mathematics of Planet Earth. This SIAM conference will take place June 8-10, 2020, in Garden Grove, California. You can find more information about the conference here: https://www.siam.org/conferences/cm/conference/mpe20 . Bigler, the Vice President of the SIAM student chapter here at Oregon State, will be the speaker for a talk - "Coupled Processes and Scales in Permafrost." This talk will be within a mini-symposium - "Advances In Permafrost Modeling." You can find the schedule of the mini-symposium here: https://meetings.siam.org/sess/dsp_programsess.cfm?SESSIONCODE=68536 .