A Newsletter for UMW Faculty and Staff
Leo Lee
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Dr. Jangwoon “Leo” Lee, gave a presentation titled “A Stochastic Galerkin Method for Stochastic Control Problems” at the Uncertainty Quantification Conference hosted by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in North Carolina.
The Paul VI Catholic High School team won the 2011 tournament
On Saturday, March 31, seven regional high schools will compete Jeopardy-style at the Sixth Annual University of Mary Washington High School Calculus Tournament. This year, the tournament will feature 10 high school teams, with a total of 38 students competing. About 10 UMW students will help run the competition.
Last year, the “Ubiquitous C’s” from Paul VI Catholic High School in Fairfax, Va., ranked first, and Paul VI student Matt Whitlock earned the top individual score. High schools expected to attend this year include Orange County, Paul VI, Mountain View in Stafford County, Riverbend in Spotsylvania County, Fredericksburg Academy, Fredericksburg Christian and the regional Commonwealth Governor’s School. More than $1,000 worth of prizes will be awarded to the student winners as well as the schools represented by the top two teams.
The event will be held in Trinkle Hall on the Fredericksburg campus beginning at 8:30 a.m. The final round will take place at approximately 2:15 p.m. This year, the event is sponsored by GEICO, SimVentions Corporation, HDT Global and Texas Instruments.
Keith Mellinger
Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, together with a colleague from Kean University in N.J., recently published “The Spider and the Fly” in the College Mathematics Journal, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America.
The Spider and the Fly puzzle, originally attributed to the great puzzler Henry Ernest Dudeney, and now over 100 years old, asks for the shortest path between two points on a particular square prism. The authors explore a generalization, find that the original solution only holds in certain cases, and suggest how this discovery might be used in the classroom.
Yuan-Jen Chiang, professor of mathematics, has a research article “Some Properties of Biwave Maps” published in the April issue of the Journal of Geometry and Physics.
The article was presented at the recent International Congress of Mathematicians, held every four years, in Hyderabad, India. She also presented a research paper “Biwave Maps, Stability and Conservation Law” at the 5th International Conference on Mathematics and Statistics in Athens, Greece.
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, has published a letter to the editors, Are Financial Jobs Morally Unjustifiable?, in the journal Mathematical Intelligencer.
Julius Esunge
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
Debra Hydorn
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.
Leo Lee
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.
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.
Keith Mellinger, associate professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, had his article “Spreads, arcs, and multiple wavelength codes” published in the journal Discrete Mathematics. In addition, he presented the talk “Blocking Semiovals and Cryptology” as an invited speaker at the Combinatorics, Algebra and Geometry Seminar at George Mason University in November.
Three UMW students presented results of their research projects at the fall regional meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held at Christopher Newport University in November. Catherine O’Doherty presented “Explanation of the Matrix Exponential,” a work based on her project under the direction of Dr. Julius Esunge. Ryan Vaughn’s presentation, titled “On the Contractibility of Finite coH-Spaces” extends his work with Dr. Randall Helmstutler which began during the Summer Science Institute of 2011. Finally, Kelly Scott presented “Anti-Blocking Sets” based on her honors project currently in progress under the direction of Dr. Keith Mellinger.
Julius Esunge, assistant professor of mathematics, had his article “Density Dependent Utilities with Transaction Costs” published in the December issue of the journal Communications on Stochastic Analysis.