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New
NSF Scholarships for Hunter Students
The Catalyst Scholarship Program
has been established at Hunter with an award from the National Science
Foundation, shared among the departments of Geography, Computer Science,
Mathematics and Statistics, and Physics. The main objectives are to recruit,
mentor and support talented students majoring in established or emerging
fields within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)
through degree completion. The program awards each recipient a $6,475
annual scholarship, renewable for a period of two years. The plan is to
have a cohort of 20 students for the period Fall 2009-Spring 2011 and
another cohort of 20 students for the period Fall 2011-Spring 2013. Information
about the program and an application form are available at http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/catalyst.
Student
in NSF Funded Summer 2009 Research Program
Joseph Quinn, one of our mathematics
majors, has been selected for the undergraduate Summer 2009 program of
the recently NSF funded Research Training Group (RTG) in Number Theory
taking place jointly at the three universities: Columbia, CUNY, and NYU.
The four-week summer program is for undergraduates at Columbia, CUNY,
and NYU to explore and investigate open research problems in algebraic
and analytic number theory. The program will take place at the CUNY Graduate
Center. The purpose of the RTG in Number Theory is to make the New York
metropolitan area a premier world center and model for the study of number
theory.
Putnam
Competition Winner
Three mathematics majors participated in the 69th annual William Lowell
Putnam Mathematical Competition on December 6, 2008. The Putnam Competition
is a six-hour contest for undergraduates administered by the Mathematical
Association of America throughout the United States and Canada since 1938.
One of Hunter’s contestants, Arkady Etkin, is listed
among the top participants (those ranked 1-473). Arkady is the only student
in CUNY with this achievement. The rankings go from 1 to 2771.5. There
were 3627 contestants.
Putnam
Competition
Three mathematics majors participated in the 69th annual
William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition on Saturday, December 6,
2008. They are: Arkady Etkin, Sharma Goldson, and Jordi Navarrette.
The Putnam Competition is a six-hour contest for undergraduates administered
by the Mathematical Association of America throughout the United States
and Canada since 1938. For several months before the competition, our
three students worked on problems together with Nikita Miasnikov,
an adjunct lecturer at Hunter College and a doctoral student at the CUNY
Graduate Center. We expect these workshops in problem solving to continue
– interested undergraduate mathematics majors are invited to join
the group by contacting the department chairperson.
New
Computer Lab BioSAM
The BioStatistics and Applied Mathematics (BioSAM) Computer
Lab is located in room 930 HE. While the BioSAM lab was created in connection
with Hunter College's unique interdisciplinary program in quantitative
biology (www.hunter.cuny.edu/qubi),
it is open for use by all students in the Department, both undergraduate
and graduate, as well as by any other member of the Department. The lab
is equipped with six high-end Dell Precision workstations that users may
access both locally at the terminals and remotely via a secure shell connection
(SSH).
Students
in Summer 2008 REU Programs
Yevgeniy Milman has been accepted into the program NSF
Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) established in Hong Kong
by the Department of Mathematical and Computer Sciences at the Colorado
School of Mines. The program is entitled Numerical Analysis and Scientific
Computing with Applications in Applied Science and Engineering.
Michael Vitz has been accepted into the REU program in
Geometric Group Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana –
Champaign.
MathFest
2008
Sharma Goldson and Shari S. Levine will
be going (cost-free) to MathFest, this summer held in Madison, Wisconsin,
on July 31 – August 2. MathFest is the annual summer meeting of
the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), consisting of lectures,
mini courses, and numerous student activities. Mr. Goldson is the winner
of the Student Problem Solving Competition held locally at Hunter this
past academic year, and Ms. Levine is the student who conducted the contest
at Hunter. At Mathfest, Mr. Goldson will participate in the finals of
this Problem Solving Competition.
Other
Summer 2008 Activities
David McGarry has been awarded an internship in The Joint
Program in Survey Methodology (JPSM) Junior Fellow Program. He will work
as an intern in one of the Federal statistical agencies and attend a seminar
on large scale surveys.
Dana Warmsley will be a participant in the Summer Math
Pilot at Columbia University, which includes a course in optimization
and workshops and seminars to provide valuable information about competitive
doctoral programs. Ms. Warmsley will also be at the Summer Intern Workshop
of the Institute for Recruitment of Teachers, based at Phillips Academy
in Andover, Maine, a program that helps participants prepare for graduate
study.
Students
Entering Programs outside Hunter in Fall 2008
Henry Chong - PhD program in Economics at Carnegie Mellon
Hans Gilde – MA program in Statistics at Baruch
Samiul Jubaed – Study Abroad at Oxford University
Shari S. Levine – PhD program in Mathematics at
Oxford University
Blanca Marmolejo – PhD program in Mathematics at
SUNY Stony Brook
Elizabeth C. Paul - MA program in Civil Engineering:
Transportation at MIT
Irina Pavlyuk – PhD program in Mathematics at CUNY
Graduate Center
Mimi Tsuruga – PhD program in Mathematics at Berlin
Mathematical School
2007-2008
Scholarships from outside the Department
Philip and Aida Siff Foundation – awarded to Mimi Tsuruga
Hunter Scholarship and Welfare Fund – awarded to Shari S.
Levine and Mimi Tsuruga
Alumni Association: Joseph A. Gillet Memorial Award – awarded to
Shari S. Levine and Mimi Tsuruga
2007-2008
Student Presentations
Shari S. Levine presented a poster at the Einsteins in
the City 2 International Student Research Conference at The City College
of New York in October 2007. This was the third in a series of student
research conferences (evolving into a multi-disciplinary conference) whose
host sites alternate between CCNY and The Technical University of Vienna.
Ms. Levine’s poster described the results she found in developing
Cliffs Notes for Shakespearean plays using differential equations and
other mathematics.
Yevgeniy Milman presented a co-authored paper at the
joint meeting of the national professional mathematics associations (AMS/MAA)
in January 2008 in San Diego, California. His travel expenses were covered,
partially by Hunter’s Presidential Student Engagement Student Presentation
Initiative Award. The paper, entitled “A Buckling Problem for Graphene
Sheets” is the result of Mr. Milman’s participation in the
Summer 2007 REU program at the University of Akron.
Library
Competition
In Spring 2007, Philip Ross was a winner of the Best
Student Paper competition based on his paper "Sets as Totalizations
of Extensions," submitted by Professor Daniel Cohen from a Computer
Science course.
Online
Mathematics Calculator Developed by Faculty Member
With funding received through a Hunter College TLT (Teaching
and Learning with Technology) Development grant, Daniel Chess
has developed online a mathematics calculator that can perform operations
such as factoring a sum of
polynomials, dividing polynomials, plotting a function, solving an algebraic
equation, differentiating a function, and evaluating a definite integral,
among others. The URL for this online calculator is http://www.danchess.com/wm/calculator/.
It was created using the application webMathematica.
Another
Technology Grant
Daniel Chess has been awarded a second Hunter College
TLT (Teaching and Learning with Technology) Development grant for his
proposal "Addressing the Problem of Success Rates in the Mathematics
Department's Service Courses." He is developing the use of WebWork
in Hunter’s multi-section precalculus and calculus courses. This
will allow students to do homework problems online with instant feedback.
The calculus coordinator, Robert Thompson, has already experimented with
this online resource in a section of calculus that he taught some semesters
ago.
Faculty
Receive Grant for Research in Mathematics Education
The Responsive Research Network (RRN) has awarded funding to Barry
Cherkas, Dana Draghicescu, and Rachael Welder for a grant proposal
entitled "Investigating Learning and Assessing Performance from Online,
Student-selected, Worked-out Examples in Precalculus.” The RRN is
part of the MSPin NYC (Mathematics and Science Partnership in New York
City), a five-year NSF-funded grant that partners with the NYCDOE and
CUNY.
Extension
of Grant for Pre-college Math Students and Teachers
Barry Cherkas has been awarded an extension
(2007-2010) of his Mathematics and Science Partnerships Project: Region
7, NYC Department of Education. This grant provides scholarships to teachers
to take mathematics courses at Hunter to enrich their background. The
grant also provides high school students with the opportunity to earn
college credits by taking Hunter’s Mathematica Precalculus Workshop.
New
Programs in Bioinformatics
In the years since the draft of the human genome was published
in 2001, biology has increasingly been evolving from a mainly experimental
science performed at the bench to one in which large databases of information,
statistical methods and computer models play a significant role. In order
to effectively extract, model and analyze this enormous amount of data,
various computational tools and statistical models are taking rapidly
expanding roles in biomedical research.
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Hunter now has 1) a new
concentration within the mathematics major for Bioinformatics, 2) a new
Bioinformatics sequence within the statistics major and 3) a new Bioinformatics
track in the master's program in statistics and applied mathematics. Information
on the curriculum for these new programs is available on the MAJORS
and GRADUATE pages of this web site. The
departmental program directors are Dana Draghicescu and Makram Talih.
Kolchin
Seminar in Differential Algebra
The Kolchin Seminar in Differential Algebra meets most
Fridays at 10:30am at the Graduate Center in Room 6421. The lectures introduce
the audience to differential algebra. For the latest information, please
visit the Kolchin Seminar web site at http://www.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~ksda/.
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