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Volume 3.0 | Fifth Issue | Summer 2000 | Archived Issues

From the Keyboard

Welcome to the fifth issue of the Integral found at:

http://aslan.wheatoncollege.edu/integral

Commencement 2000 at Wheaton College has come and gone ... and it was fitting. Along with the rest of the globe, Wheaton turns the page to a new century where mathematics and computer science will flourish and lead. Our graduates approach seemingly limitless horizons in genomics, cryptography, education, voting theory, palmtop e-commerce, nano-technology, and virtual spaces. In this context, our faculty face new tough questions about what it means to be liberally educated in the 21st century. In the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, we recognize our foundational role in shaping tomorrow's leaders in technological, social, theoretical, experimental, educational and economic venues. It is an exciting time to teach and learn.

In this issue, we highlight recent mathematics and computer science student achievement and awards, feature alumna Sara Smith '90 and Professor of Mathematics Rochelle (Shelly) Leibowitz, and take a peek into the research and scholarship of the computer science and mathematics faculty.

Hey, did you notice the two new changes to the URL of this newsletter?
The answer is at the bottom of this page :)

Thank you for your responses to our previous issue. Send us an email ... we'd love to hear from you. Enjoy v3.0 of the Integral!

News Bytes

It is an exciting time to graduate with a liberal arts degree in mathematics and/or computer science. Wheaton Math/CS 2000 graduates form a select group and the aggregate talent could create a new profitable(!) startup company if only they had the funding! Ok, one at a time:

Class of 2000
Wheaton Mathematics and Computer Science Majors
Glen AspeslaghComputer Science
Ken AspeslaghComputer Science
Rebecca EllinMathematics
Kayee KwokMathematics and Computer Science
Qui LuMathematics
Neva MetcalfMathematics
Tim NguyenMathematics
David Sartory Computer Science
Kim SearsMathematics
Rachel WalkerMathematics

More details of student talks, research projects, groups and abstracts are available at the student's computer science web page ( http://cs.wheatoncollege.edu ) and our department web page.

We must highlight our scholars and award winners:

Honors Theses:

Glen Aspeslagh '00, Computer Science, magna cum laude
Glen understands the visualization of data and visualization of most other things. His thesis, Search Algorithms for Locating Potential Regulatory Motifs in the Promotors of the Kreb's Cycle Genes of Caenorhabditis elegans is a wonderful piece of work in genomics (the world where biology meets computer science). Browse through the genes involved in the Kreb's Cycle....

Ken Aspeslagh '00, Computer Science, summa cum laude
Ken learns many things in serious depth, e.g., C++ templates, OpenGL, Perl, Neural Networks. His thesis combines two areas of Artificial Intelligence, learning in neural networks and genetic algorithms: Utilizing a Genetic Algorithm to Search the Structure-space of Artificial Neural Networks for Optimal Architectures.


Fred Kollett Award in Mathematics and Computer Science

Carol McGeoch '01 -- For her work in mathematics and computer science and impact on campus, Carol won the Fred Kollett Award in Mathematics and Computer Science. Especially worthy of note is her work in and with the new student Science House. This house of students tutored tens of hours and hosted a series of stimulating talks and teas with Wheaton and visiting scholars.


Madeline Clark Wallace Prize in Mathematics

Neva Metcalf '00, Mathematics, magna cum laude
Neva shared the Madeline Clark Wallace Prize in Mathematics with Rachel Walker.
Rachel Walker '00, Mathematics, summa cum laude
Rachel shared the Madeline Clark Wallace Prize in Mathematics with Neva Metcalf.

And last, two students in mathematics gave talks at the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference at Vassar on April 8:

  • Curlicues, Bulls, and Nessie: Exploring a Family of Polygonal Curves
    Carol McGeoch '01

  • The Existence of Pi in the Mandelbrot Set
    Anthony Doran '03

Meet our Alumnae/i

This year we introduce Sara Smith '90. Sara is especially notable because not only did she gain much from her Wheaton experience, Sara gives back to Wheaton each day as she helps shape Wheaton's information infrastructure. Sara gives us a cut on her life with Wheaton through the 90's: Sara Smith '90
 So, how does someone who majored in mathematics and music and who never took a computer class as an undergraduate at Wheaton end up doing web programming and computer technical support for a living? Fourteen years ago when I was a freshman at Wheaton I would never have predicted that I would end up working in the information technology field. I had originally considered studying sociology or anthropology or maybe becoming an education major. Of course, I also would never have predicted that when I graduated from Wheaton four years later that I would end up working at Wheaton -- and in the IT department! But here I am ten years after graduation, still here and still learning something new every day.

Every weekday my car leaves my driveway and I travel the 20 minutes to Wheaton, but somehow, I never know in advance where I'll end up when I get there. I was originally hired to do institutional research. Ok, I thought, as a student I worked in the Library, I know something about research. And while I never had to write many papers as a math major, I did have to write them for a few of my music classes, so I felt comfortable that I had the necessary writing skills for this job. And sure, after calculus and discrete math and probability and number theory, the math I would need to do this job would seem easy by comparison. But the first time my boss asked me to "write a little program", I thought for sure I was in big trouble. I tried desperately to remember the stuff I had learned in high school about programming (some BASIC and FORTRAN). Somehow, and I'm sure not without some divine inspiration/intervention, I found the answer to my problem.

Because of the increase in the number of computers on campus, in less than a year I switched to doing microcomputer support. I installed hardware and software, and also did troubleshooting, training, and project consulting. And, every once in a while, a programming question would sneak up on me. Four years later I started working with the group of people who support Wheaton's administrative software, a package called Banner. I was suppose to train users on system navigation and report writing. But then Wheaton purchased an add-on piece to Banner which allows students, via a web interface, to do the following things online: register for courses, view a transcript or grades, or apply for admission. And that's when I really started getting into trouble. Someone had to figure out how this new product worked and, the really fun part, how to modify it and add features to it. That someone turned out, at least initially, to be me. This was no easy task for a non-programmer, but, with lots of persistence and determination (and supportive colleagues) I not only got it working, but found out that I enjoyed programming. Me, the one that had always hated word problems. And what is each programming challenge if not one big word problem (they usually begin: "how long will it take a programmer to write a program that will...?").

So, after years of thinking I didn't have the skills to be a programmer, here I am. I'm still not entirely clear how I got to this point, but I am lucky to be doing something that is always challenging and where each new day brings an opportunity to learn something new. With some luck (and some decent GMAT scores) in the fall I hope to begin a graduate program in information technology management. What happens then? I guess I'll know when I get there.

Call for Participation

Our department will host the inauguration of the Norman Woodason Johnson
lecture series this academic year (date TBA). Tom Banchoff of Brown University
will be the speaker. Invitations will be sent to alumnae/i closer to the date of the
lecture, so be on the lookout.

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 campus 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. Contact the Alumnae/i Office, phone (508.285.8207) or email (alum@wheatoncollege.edu) the Alumnae/i Office for event dates.

Meet the Faculty

Our department staff currently numbers 5 full-time members and one half-time member, all PhD's. We feature our senior member, Shelly Leibowitz, this issue and share some of our faculty highlights:

  • Shelly Leibowitz is finishing her 13th (and last) year of being Chair of the Department on June 30. Her current research interest is mathematics education, specifically using discrete math as a means to teach problem solving to middle school students. She is scheduled to give a talk "Walking or Standing Still: Getting to the Same Destination" at the NCTM Eastern Regional Conference in November. She has been busy spreading the good word about discrete mathematics to a wide variety of audiences. She was an instructor to elementary, middle school, and high school teachers at the Leadership Institute in Discrete Mathematics, and currently is an instructor in the Young Scholars Program, a summer "math camp" for motivated high school students, both at Rutgers University. A recent article "Writing Discrete(ly)" which appears in Discrete Mathematics in the Schools, vol. 36 of the DIMACS Series in Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, talks about how college discrete math courses can be used to teach students how to write mathematically. Currently, she is co-organizer of an NSF-sponsored conference called Reconnect '00, which reconnects college faculty with heavy teaching loads to the mathematical sciences research enterprise.

    (Editor's note: Shelly is a flag bearer on campus for time spent in her office with students. Her writing intensive Discrete Math course and Concepts in Education course are rigorous and practical parts of our programs. Her work as department chair has been stellar, hiring the other five members of the department in seven years! (and good picks too! :) Her work as chair was so good that the department tried to buy her a chair as a gift, but she already had one ordered! Hmmm, now what is fitting?)

  • Bill Goldbloom-Bloch -- Bill used his junior leave to sharpen the theory he began to develop the summer he spent in Oregon. The leave allowed him to spend hours in libraries, in deep thought and at his keyboard--an altogether good thing. The theorems include a decomposition of the space of all compact subsets of n-dimensional Euclidean space, R^n; the construction of a "sensible" dynamical system that captures certain kinds of natural phenomena, such as waterfalls and clouds; and, the characterization of the differentiability and Hausdorff dimension of the boundaries of generic compact n-dimensional manifolds continuously embedded in R^n. The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

    He intends to use the summer to explore more hyperspace theory and also spend a week at the Santa Fe Institute. He hopes to find more applications of his theory there.

    (Editors note: Bill (and Mom Ingrid) are new parents of Dylan Joshua Goldbloom Bloch.

  • Mike Gousie -- Mike recently attended CCSCNE2000 at Ramapo College in NJ. (some pictures can be found at: http://orion.ramapo.edu/~ccscne/) and in upholding our department tradition, his paper, "Teaching Computer Graphics in a Small Department" won the Best Paper award. Continuing his computer graphics research in surface reconstruction, Mike submitted his latest paper: "Improving Thin Plate Digital Elevation Model Generation" to the International Journal of Geographical Information Science. This summer, Mike is writing a program to display large 3D data sets representing real terrain. One of Mike's students, Nate Buggia '01, began this project last year, allowing a user to view a mountain from any angle. The goal this summer is to implement a software package which will handle more realistic data sets requiring the manipulation of many millions of data points.

  • Mark LeBlanc -- For his sabattical year, Mark worked for the Foxboro Company as a senior software engineer, where he got a number of lessons in big business, process control, and threads on Windows NT. Mark will introduce a new course next spring in Software Engineering based on his experience. On the research end, Mark and his colleague in biology, Betsey Dyer, have submitted the first paper from the Wheaton Genomics Group (http://genomics.wheatoncollege.edu). In keeping with the faculty-student spirit of the genomics work, two student Mars Fellows are programming for the Genomics Group this summer, and this fall, Mark's students from Algorithms (and DNA) will again share three labs with Biology students from Cell Evolution.

  • Tommy Ratliff -- Tommy Ratliff's paper in "A Comparison of Dodgson's Method and Kemeny's Rule" was accepted for publication in the journal Social Choice and Welfare. The paper shows how a voting method proposed by Charles Dodgson (aka Lewis Carroll) in the 1870's can give a different winner from the method proposed by John Kemeny in the 1950's. He gave talks on his research at the spring 1999 meetings of the Northeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America, at the meetings of the American Mathematical Society in Washington, DC in January, at the meetings of the Public Choice Society in Charleston, South Carolina in March, and at Wellesley College in April. He also gave a talk on using writing project in calculus at the summer meetings of the MAA in August, and he took four students to the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference at Vassar College in April. He attended a National Science Foundation workshop on Integrating Research into the Undergraduate Mathematics Experience at the University of Arizona in February and hopes to use the information he gained there to start a research group in voting theory with students next year.

  • Janice Sklensky -- Janice taught four courses this last year rather than her usual three: Precalculus and Math Thought, which she has taught several times since starting here, and also Calculus I and II (two of her favorite courses to teach). This year Janice changed the order in which she covered the Precalculus material, and she made "gateway exams" an even larger portion of the course than they already had been. In fact, every two weeks, roughly, students either had (i) a gateway exam, which aims to ensure that each student has mastered the skills and techniques already covered by not giving credit until they have made no mistakes on an exam (with each exam attempt there are different questions), or (ii) a comprehensive exam covering the concepts and the students' problem-solving abiltities. Those who did go on to Calculus fared better on the whole than her previous Precalculus students. In Math Thought, Janice asks students to bring their own interests into the class by selecting anything in the world that interests them and preparing a presentation or "commercial" that describes how math is involved in that topic. In addition, Janice organized the 4th annual Math/CS year-end picnic, as well as co-hosting with Tommy several dinners and parties for our students.

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

    http://www2.wheatoncollege.edu/academic/academicdept/MathCS

    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 & Department Chair
    mleblanc@wheatonma.edu

    Rochelle Leibowitz

    Professor of Mathematics
    rleibowi@wheatonma.edu

    Tommy Ratliff

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

    Janice Sklensky

    Assistant Professor of Mathematics
    jsklensk@wheatonma.edu

    The Integral

    Integral v3 - Summer 2000

    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 & Department Chair
    mleblanc@wheatonma.edu | website

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

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

 

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