by Ken Luther

What a difference a month makes!  The writing had been on the wall for a while now in terms of the likelihood of me succeeding Rick Gillman as Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science.  Starting next year, I had assumed.  Fall 2012.  And then one day in mid-July, Rick strolled into my office and announced that he had news for me.  And then as of August 1, he was Associate Provost for Faculty Affairs, and I was appointed Chair of the department.

The department has changed quite a bit over the last year.  As many of you may know, our long-time colleague and friend Bill Marion passed away in November of 2010.  We have four new faculty members, who are introducing themselves to you below.  We are building our graduate programs (both Information Technology Management and now also Computational Science), and Zsuzsanna Szaniszlo is our director of those programs.  Perhaps she wishes she remained in Germany!

Homecoming weekend is the first weekend in October.  On October 1, we will have a department open house in Gellersen from 11am until noon.  If you are visiting that weekend, please stop by and say hello.  Prior to that, there is a fundraiser pancake breakfast for the Bill Marion Scholarship, at the Gandhi-King Center in the Harre Union; this fund supports multicultural programs at the University – which was a passion of Bill’s.