Category: Professional Notes

Dr. Julius Esunge, assistant professor of mathematics, recently organized a session at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings held in Boston, Mass., in January. His session, titled “Stochastic Analysis in Honor of Professor Hui-Hsiung Kuo” ran for two concurrent days and brought in about 20 speakers from around the world.

Dr. Debra Hydorn, professor of mathematics, delivered a presentation titled Fostering Artistic

Explorations with Geometer’s Sketchpad in a session on Arts and Mathematics at the conference. In addition, Dr. Hydorn had a piece of art selected for display at the Joint Meetings.  A video about the art exhibit was made to showcase the event.

Dr. Jangwoon “Leo” Lee, assistant professor of mathematics, delivered the presentation Galerkin Finite Element Approximations of an Optimal Control Problem for Elliptic PDEs with Random Input Data, in a session on Numerical Analysis at the conference.  Dr. Lee also served as a judge for the national undergraduate student poster competition at the same meeting.

In addition, five majors in the Department of Mathematics presented results of their research projects at the meeting.

Ryan Vaughn, mentored by Dr. Randall Helmstutler, along with Katie Dillinger and Rebecca Pressor mentored by Dr. Leo Lee presented posters that detail their work as part of the national undergraduate student poster competition.

Additionally, Catherine O’Doherty and Marianne Dubinsky, mentored by Dr. Julius Esunge, delivered presentations on their research.  Each of the projects extends work initiated as part of the Jepson Summer Science Institute from summer 2011.

Associate Professor of Political Science and International Affairs Jason W. Davidson’s chapter, “Italy at War: Explaining the Italian Contribution to the Kosovo War (1999),” was recently published by Lexington Books in a volume edited by Giampiero Giacomello and Bertjan Verbeek titled Italy’s Foreign Policy in the Twenty-First Century.

Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has published a research article, A proof of Devadze’s theorem on generators of the semigroup of Boolean matrices, in the journal Semigroup Forum.

Marjorie Och’s article, “Vittoria Colonna in Giorgio Vasari’s ‘Life of Properzia de’ Rossi,'” has been published in Wives, Widows, Mistresses, and Nuns in Early Modern Italy:  Making the Invisible Visible through Art and Patronage, edited by Katherine McIver (Ashgate 2012).

Ranjit Singh, associate professor of political science, will reflect on his experience with Bahrain’s royal family in relation to last year’s uprising in the Middle East during an interview on the “With Good Reason” public radio program beginning Saturday, January 7.

The interview can be heard on January 7 at 4:30 p.m. on WCVE 88.9 FM and on Sunday, January 8 at 7 p.m. and Monday, January 9 at 12:30 a.m. on WAMU 88.5 FM. The segment, “Reflections on Arab Spring,” is expected to be online beginning the week of the show at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2012/01/reflections-on-the-arab-spring/.

Read the full news release.