This year marks my 35th year working in the field of secondary mathematics education. It all began at Wheaton where I decided to become a mathematics major along with six classmates. Over the years, the joys of working with teenagers, the frustrations of dealing with educational bureaucracies, the camaraderie of working with colleagues, and the challenges of trying to change the existing high school mathematics system in the United States has kept me busy, enthusiastic, and involved.

In 1984 I began working with the EQUALS program at the Lawrence Hall of Science at the University of California at Berkeley. Colleagues and I focused on teacher workshops to develop strategies for increasing the participation of female and underrepresented students in high school mathematics courses. In 1989 two of us joined with two university mathematicians and began the development of the Interactive Mathematics Program (IMP). We wanted to provide a quality, challenging, relevant mathematics experience for all high school students.

Now in its 10th year, IMP is a growing collaboration of mathematicians, teacher-educators, and teachers who are connected to one of 10 Regional Centers around the country. With extensive funding from the National Science Foundation and additional state and private foundations, we have created both an exciting full four-year secondary mathematics curriculum and a rich professional development program for secondary mathematics teachers. My thoughts went back to my college days several years ago when an IMP student applied to and was accepted at Wheaton.

Call for Participation

Are you interested in coming to campus to meet our students and present a talk on your work? We welcome your involvement and the students greatly appreciate hearing the advice from professionals in the field. Let us know.

On this note, are you coming to AutumnFest '99 this year? If yes, let us know if you'd like a personal tour of the department, especially our new smart classroom and NSF-funded lab. Look for details in mailings from the Alumnae/i Office, phone (508.285.8207) or email (alum@wheatonma.edu) the Alumnae/i Office for AutumnFest '99 details.

We are starting a page with a list of MathCS alumnae/i email addresses and links to personal and/or company web pages. The site will offer our current students a chance to meet (virtually) some of our previous graduates, as well as provide alumnae/i with a place to match old names with new links. Please send us your URL and/or email address so we can make you a part of this page.

Meet the Faculty

Our department staff currently numbers 5 full-time members and one half-time member, all PhD's. It has been a busy year for all of us. Here are some of our highlights:

• Bill Goldbloom-Bloch -- In addition to his First Year Seminar (Technology: The Means of Salvation or Tools of Evil?), Bill introduced two upper-level courses: Dynamical Systems and Chaos and Fractals. Bill published some of his latest results in a paper entitled:
  Tension in Generalized Geometric Sequences
  in the College Mathematics Journal. Bill continues to investigate the behavior of chaotic attractors of smooth diffeomorphisms in low dimensions with a local Anosov structure, with the express purpose of classifying these important mathematical entities.
• Mike Gousie -- Mike taught the introductory year in computer science and introduced a new advanced course entitled: Computer Graphics. In his spare time during his first year(!), Mike published a paper entitled:
  Interpolating Elevation Contours to a Grid
  and was second author on the paper
  Terrain Elevation Data Structure Operations.
• Mark LeBlanc -- Mark redesigned the Algorithms course to center around the theme of DNA, specifically the study of algorithms to search human and other genome sequences (see the class syllabus Algorithms and DNA). Mark also won the "Best Paper Award" at the Northeast Consortium of Computing in Small Colleges for his paper entitled:
  Service Learning in Computing
  
  In collaboration with Dr. Betsey Dyer (Biology), Mark has submitted a paper to Nucleic Acid Research entitled:
  An annotated catalogue of inverted repeats of Caenorhabditis elegans
  Chromosome III with observations concerning odd/even biases and conserved motifs.
  

  Slides of a talk on this work given at MathFest'99 can be viewed.



• Shelly Leibowitz -- Shelly has poured countless hours into the department's new offering Concepts of Mathematics geared for Education minors. In addition to her leadership as Chair of the department, Shelly taught Discrete Math workshops to math teachers in the Bridgewater-Raynham school district, and she taught graph theory and combinatorics to motivated high school students in the Young Scholars Program of New Jersey, Rutgers University this past summer.


• Tommy Ratliff -- Tommy offered independent studies to some of our best students in his new research area of Voting Theory. His web page of calculus projects continues to be among the most popular on Wheaton's server to off-campus visitors. In addition Tommy has recently submitted a paper on a voting method proposed by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) for faculty legislation at Oxford. His current focus on geometric approaches to voting theory has yielded some deep insights into the paradoxes that can arise when there are three or more candidates in an election.


• Janice Sklensky -- Janice continues to lead the department's efforts on courses geared for social science and humanities students. Her courses provide students with a variety of opportunities to practice mathematical communication, including group writing projects, journals of "mathematical thoughts," and individual projects where students present their findings in a "commercial." Her scholarly pursuits presently include a study of mathematical history and a reading of essays on various women in mathematics.

Web pages for each member are also available from our department web page

Bill Bloch

Assistant Professor of Mathematics
bbloch@wheatonma.edu

Mike Gousie

Assistant Professor of Computer Science
mgousie@wheatonma.edu

Mark LeBlanc

Associate Professor of Computer Science
mleblanc@wheatonma.edu

Rochelle Leibowitz

Professor of Mathematics & Department Chair
rleibowi@wheatonma.edu

Tommy Ratliff

Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science
tratliff@wheatonma.edu

Janice Sklensky

Assistant Professor of Mathematics (half-time)
jsklensk@wheatonma.edu

The Integral

Integral v2 - Fall 1999

Archived Issues | Computer Science | Mathematics

Wheaton College
26 East Main Street
Norton, Massachusetts 02766
Phone: 508.286.3970
Fax: 508.285.8278

Editor: Mark LeBlanc, Associate Professor of Computer Science
mleblanc@wheatonma.edu | website

Graphics Design: Glen Aspelagh, '00
gaspesla@wheatonma.edu

Transition Design: Nick Ralton, '07
nralton@wheatonma.edu