Putnam 2009 Scores

I am very tardy in making the following announcement, as scores reached me in early March.

We had ten (wow! ten, really?) students take the exam, with two of our official team members, Joseph Simmons and Timothy Dean, scoring.

Timothy got a score of 10 points, earning a national ranking of 1461 out of 4036 contestants.
Joseph with a score of 20 points, earned a national ranking of 707.

Congratulations to all the students who gave part of their precious end-of-semester Saturday to compete. Here's looking forward to next semester!

Dekany Profile

Well, well, well: Christina (BS in Computer Science, 2004) didn't tell us she was featured on the SMU website! And I love the fact that a copy of Kreyszig's Advanced Engineering Mathematics is prominently featured in the photo. This is one of my favorite applied math text books (and a ready reference on many different topics).

By the way, the page is a little dated: Christina graduated this past December, got engaged on the same day --- she and her fiancé stopped at UD on the way home from the Graduation ceremony, and he proposed on Turkey Knob near the seminary! --- and is now planning a wedding while looking for jobs in San Antonio.

If you have any news to share with the Math community at UD, let us know!

Pi Day Songs

Happy Pi Day.

Pi Song

Pi, Pi, Mathematical Pi

Yes, another blog...

I've been kicking around ways to disseminate the information I (constantly) get about graduate programs, REUs, and the like to our current (and former!) undergraduate students. Then it dawned on me: what would be helpful would be to have a blog, and then interested students could either look at the blog, or (even better) subscribe to its RSS feed so they could see when it was updated. Doesn't everyone use a feed-reader of one kind or another to keep up on their favorite websites?

In any case, if you're interested the blog is right here (and, yes, I know: the name is not that original).

Thursday Math Tea

A few weeks ago, as we gathered for tea and scones (thanks, Jeffrey!), one of the students came in with a problem posed in an education class, which we then attempted to solve. Here's the deal.

Take a square and put positive integers at each of the corners. (Choose numbers between 1 and 99.) Now at the midpoints of each side of the square, write down the absolute value of the difference of the two neighboring corners. Finally, join the midpoints to make a new square. Repeat.

In the problem posed to the education class, the final figure has seven squares (I think), one inside the other. This is a problem that is used in grade school classrooms, and the (stated) goal is to find numbers for the outermost square, so that the number zero never shows up anywhere in the final figure. (The actual goal is to get the students to practice their subtraction.)

Well, that sounded like an easy problem, so we set to it. After some deliberations we came up with a solution, then proceeded to ask lots of related questions. (A real mathematical spirit filled our students.) One thing the students there were able to prove, is that given enough concentric squares, any starting configuration eventually ends with all zeros.

Final note: We have a Thursday tea every week as long as classes meet that day. Tea starts at 3:00 pm in the Math Lab. Please feel free to join us if you are in the area.

Some Series Stuff (Part I)

Okay, this is something of an experiment.  I have translated a LaTeX file into HTML using tth (link on the official math links page on the UD site).  This should look okay if you are using a mozilla or firefox browser.  Otherwise you are taking your chances.

The idea of this post is to compute Taylor series for sines and cosines without using Calculus.

The rest of the post is after the jump.  (Click on the post title to get to the whole article and comments.)

The New Faculty Member

As I'm the newest member of the Mathematics Department, it's unlikely that anyone knows much about me. So, let me take this opportunity to tell you a little about myself.

I earned my Ph.D. in Mathematics in 1998 from The University of Texas at Austin, but I had earned my M.A. in Mathematics from 1990 to 1993 from Rice University where I became good friends with Dr. Paul Phillips, who was earning his Ph.D at the same time. My area of expertise is in topology (specifically, knot theory and geometric topology), but I have a passion for teaching mathematics. Since graduating I've taught at several small liberal arts college, beginning with Eureka College in Illinois, then Hampden-Sydney College in Virginia, and most recently Millsaps College in Mississippi. I've taught courses at all level -- from College Algebra and liberal arts mathematics courses, to advanced math courses for majors. The only courses I tend not to teach are statistics and applied math courses, but I'll likely teach most courses that require students to prove theorems.

Since leaving graduate school, however, my research interests have broadened in a surprising direction. Although I still research questions in topology, I have recently begun a very exciting research program in game theory. Specifically, I'm studying a game called The Lying Oracle Game, where an "oracle" tells you the outcome of a coin toss, but may lie at times. Your job is to determine when the oracle is lying. So far, I have one publication in topology and two in game theory, with another paper in topology in preparation. I'm looking for colleagues and students with whom to collaborate on the many variants of this fascinating problem!

Finally, I am a proud husband and father as well. My wife, Carolyn, is an ordained Minister of the Word and Sacrament in the Presbyterian Church (USA) and is seeking a call as a hospital chaplain in the Dallas area. My son, Allen, is beginning Kindergarten this year and will turn 6 in November, and my daughter Rebecca is 2 and will get her first haircut soon.