MST faculty and students active at 2018 Joint Mathematics Meetings

Six faculty members from the Department of Mathematics and Statistics participated in the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California January 10-13, 2018.

Associate Professor Alex Capaldi attended the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) Subcommittee on Research by Undergraduates meeting and helped judge the undergraduate research poster session.

Professor and Associate Provost Rick Gillman chaired the meeting of the MAA Committee on Department Review and was a member of a panel discussion on how to prepare for a career in university leadership.

Assistant Professor Tiffany Kolba gave a talk on  “Minimal Noise-Induced Stabilization of One-Dimensional Stochastic Differential Equations” in the Contributed Paper Session on Probability and Statistics.

Associate Professor Lara Pudwell gave a talk on “Patterns in Trees” in the Special Session on Open and Accessible Problems for Undergraduate Research.

Assistant Professor Karl Schmitt organized and chaired sessions on “Technology and Apps for Teaching Mathematics and Statistics” and  attended MAA Committee meetings for the Committee on Faculty and Departments (ex-officio) and the Committee on Technology in Mathematics Education (CTiME) (member).

Visiting Assistant Professor Jonny Stephenson also attended the meeting.

Capaldi and Pudwell also attended events as mentors for Project NExT, a professional development program for early career mathematics faculty, and the department held a reunion dinner for past participants of the Valparaiso Experience in Research by Undergraduate Mathematicians (VERUM) program.

Current Valparaiso mathematics majors Davina Boykin and Samuel Iselin also attended the conference to present posters based on their summer research.  Davina worked on “Topology of Positive Zero Sets of n-variate (n+4)-nomials” at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Oakland, California while Samuel worked on “A Cellular Automaton Modeling Approach to Chestnut Blight Canker Development” at the University of Wisconsin – LaCrosse.