Mathematics & Computer Science
2008-2009 News (most recent first)
Check out what some of our 2009 Graduates are doing after graduation.
And some of our current students:
Mark Shive, '10, will be working as an actuarial intern for Towers Perrin in Parsippany, NJ this summer. Towers Perrin is a global professional services firm and Mark will be working the retirement line of the business.
Kendra Joseph, '10, will be participating in an REU at Brookhaven National Laboratory in atmospheric chemistry with Dr. Yin-nan Lee. This research is part of the Global Change Education Program (a program offered by the Department of Energy).
Keith Leitmeyer, '11, will be participating in an REU at Penn State University from July 1 to August 14. This program combines learning with research including mini-courses in knot theory and degree theory.
Rose Hamershock, '11, will be participating in an REU at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute at Virginia Tech University this summer. Projects involve modeling microscopic biological systems.
Clif Kussmaul attended the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) Annual Conference in Austin, TX, June 14-17. He presented two papers:
Software projects using free and open source software: Opportunities, challenges, & lessons learned.
InovaED: A model and resource to help students leverage late-stage intellectual property.
Clif Kussmaul participated in the SoftHum Workshop on Involving Students in Humanitarian Free and Open Source Software Projects at Drexel University, June 11-12, 2009.
Clif Kussmaul attended the Portal Conference in Gettysburg, PA, June 2-5, where he gave a presentation on Lightweight Portals using Free and Open Source Software.
On May 11-15, Michael Huber, Clif Kussmaul, and Linda McGuire participated in a Bioinformatics Workshop with other faculty and students as part of an NSF CCLI grant received by Bruce Wightman, in Biology.
Thursday, April 30th was the annual Mathematics/Computer Science/Physics picnic. (pictures)
William Dunham gave a talk to the History of Mathematics Seminar at All Souls College, Oxford, on April 27, 2009.
Congratulations to Michael Huber on being awarded The Robert C. Williams Award for Junior Faculty at Honors Convocation on April 26th.
Byungchul Cha gave a presentation on Linear independence of zeta zeros at the American Mathematical Society sectional meeting on April 25 in Worcester, MA.
On April 20th, Muhlenberg College held the 7th Annual Inductions into the Pennsylvania Chi Chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, a national honorary mathematics society. Eleven students(Josh Adams, Alyssa Roller, Leah Wittenberg, Katelyn Finley, Sarah Hoenigmann, Alice Hurst, Kendra Joseph, Nicole Montambault, Vincent Reformato, Mark Shive, and Samantha Unger) and one faculty member(Dr. David Crombecque) were inducted. (pictures)
Clif Kussmaul attended the NCIIA Annual Meeting in Alexandria, VA, Mar 19-21. He facilitated a open space workshop on entrepreneurship education, participated in one panel on using industry intellectual property, and another panel on bootstrapping entrepreneurship education programs, and chaired a paper session on multidisciplinary approaches.
Clif Kussmaul attended the annual conference of the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education in Chattanooga, TN March 4-7. He gave a presentation on Free and Open Source Software Across the Curriculum, and organized a Birds-of-a-Feather session on Communication in Software Engineering Education.
On February 21, 2009, the Mathematics & Computer Science Department held its 31st Annual High School Mathematics Contest. Faculty and students welcomed participants from nine local high schools. Liberty High School took 1st place honors and Parkland HS was second.(pictures)
The 31st Muhlenberg High School Mathematics Contest is scheduled for Saturday, February 21, 2009. Three-person teams from nine local high schools will compete in short and long answer problems. See Math Contest 2007 for pictures from the last contest.
William Dunham published a paper When Euler Met l'Hopital in the February, 2009, issue of the MAA journal Mathematics Magazine, pp. 16 -- 25.
William Dunham and Penelope Dunham are on sabbatical at Cambridge University during Spring 2009.
Sarah Vodzak delivered a presentation entitled Using Absorbing Markov Chains to Model Caterpillar Populations Under Different Environmental Conditions at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. Her summer research was sponsored by George Benjamin and Rich Niesenbaum.
Sharon Albert, Religion Studies, and Clif Kussmaul had their chapter Why Wikis are Wonderful for Writing published in Writing and the iGeneration: Composition in the Computer-Mediated Classroom edited by Terry Carter and Maria Clayton and published by Fountainhead Press.
Chelsea Lobell, a CS major and presidential assistant for the Academic Resource Center, gave a poster on Free/Open Source Software Tools for a Library Website: A Comparative Analysis at the Educause Mid-Atlantic Regional Conference in Philadelphia on January 8, based on work she did during Summer 2008 with Mary Moulton, Head of Library Systems and Information Transfer, and Clif Kussmaul, Associate Professor of Computer Science.
Clif Kussmaul co-authored a chapter on Wikis for knowledge management: Business cases, best practices, promises, & pitfalls in Web 2.0: The Business Model, M. D. Lytras, E. Damiani, and P. Ordóñez Pablos (eds) Springer, 2009.
Clif Kussmaul attended the Annual Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA) in Nashville, TN Oct 19-23. He participated in a workshop on worked examples, gave a presentation on multistage assignments, and presented a poster on novel programming language features, based on work with Kellen Mickley '09.
William Dunham taught at Harvard University during Fall 2008. While there he delivered the 2008 Clay Public Lecture on the work of Leonhard Euler. The talk can be viewed on-line at www.claymath.org/video.
The Department of Mathematics & Computer Science welcomes David Crombecque. Dr. Crombecque will be teaching Calculus I & II.
2007-2008 News
Clif Kussmaul attended the American Society for Engineering Education conference June 22-25 in Pittsburgh, PA, and presented a paper on "Open source software to support student teams", and a poster on "Active learning in engineering and entrepreneurship education".
Clif Kussmaul attended the Usability Professionals Association meeting June 17-20 in Baltimore, MD, and gave a presentation on a model for iterative prototyping using multiple approaches.
Clif Kussmaul attended the NSF Chautauqua on Teaching Communication Skills in the Software Engineering Curriculum June 9-11 at Miami University in Oxford, OH. Clif presented on "Enhancing student collaboration and coordination with wikis and related tools."
Thursday, May 1st was the annual Mathematics/Computer Science/Physics picnic. (pictures)
On April 22nd, Muhlenberg College held the 6th Annual Inductions into the Pennsylvania Chi Chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, a national honorary mathematics society. Five students and one faculty member were inducted. (pictures)
Clif Kussmaul attended the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance conference in Dallas, TX, Mar 20-22. He presented a paper and moderated a panel.
Mar 14 is Pi Day (3/14)
The 31st Annual Muhlenberg High School Mathematics Contest scheduled for Saturday, February 23 was postponed due to the snow. Due to scheduling conflicts, the 2008 contest has been canceled.
Feb 7 is e Day (2/7)
Michael Huber has had "00" (Zero raised to the zeroth power) published in Convergence, a journal of the Mathematical Association of America. He co-authored the paper with Fred Rickey.
Byungchul Cha gave a presentation on his research "Chebyshev's bias in function fields" at the spring eastern meeting of the American Mathematical Society, at New York University.
Linda McGuire had the paper "Long Cycles in 2-Connected Triangle-free Graphs" appear in the journal Ars Combinatoria Vol. 86 (2008). This paper is the result of joint work with D. Bauer, N. Kahl, and E. Schmeichel.
Several faculty attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, Jan 5-9.
William Dunham presented a talk titled "When Euler Met l'Hospital".
Michael Huber presented "Using the Sympodium to Support the Teaching and Learning of Modeling". He also moderated a contributed paper session and attended two editorial board meetings for a journal and NSF grant of which he is a part.
Penelope Dunham presented "The 'Write' Transition to Abstract Mathematics" and "Show Me Your Data: Statistics for Millennials."
William Dunham won the Beckenbach Book Prize for his book Euler: The Master of Us All.
On September 26-29, 2007 Chelsea Lobdell ('09) gave a presentation titled Data Management and Analysis for a Tutoring Program or Center with Wendy Cole, Director of the Academic Resource Center, at the National College Learning Center Association Conference in Atlanta, Georgia. The presentation was based on a summer research project supervised by Clif Kussmaul and Wendy Cole.