Tag: dhydorn

At the 2013 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, Calif., in January, two faculty members and a student from UMW presented their work.  Suzanne Sumner, professor of mathematics, delivered the talk “Intensive Experiences for Undergraduate Mathematics” in a session on Communicating Mathematics sponsored by the Mathematical Association of America.

Debra Hydorn, professor of mathematics, spoke in a session devoted to Innovative Ideas for Courses in the First Two Years.  Her talk was titled “Exploratory Projects in an Introduction to Discrete Mathematics Course.”  Hydorn gave a second talk titled “Using R for Data Analysis Assignments in an Introductory Statistics Course” in a session devoted to Modern Ideas in Introductory Statistics Courses.  In addition, she was honored to have a piece of geometric artwork accepted through a juried process to the Mathematical Art Exhibition.

Finally, UMW senior Ryan Vaughn presented a poster at the National Undergraduate Student poster competition.  Ryan’s poster, titled “Embeddings of Complete Bipartite Graphs in Finite Projective Planes” won one of the Outstanding Poster Awards.

As an associate editor for the website Statistics on the Web, Professor of Mathematics Debra Hydorn recently published two lesson plans.  Titled “The Taste of Yellow” and “How Long is 30 Seconds?” these lesson plans serve as exemplars that follow the Guidelines for Assessment and Instruction in Statistics Education from the American Statistical Association and also meet standards set by the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the Common Core for State Standards for Mathematics Practice.

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.

Kathryn Loesser-Casey, professor of biological sciences, and Debra Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave the poster presentation “Putting BIO2010 Into Practice: A Course on the Research Process for STEM Majors” at the Association of American Colleges and Universities conference “Engaged STEM Learning: From Promising to Pervasive Practices” held in Miami in March. The poster presentation provided an opportunity for Hydorn and Loesser-Casey to share information about the UMW course, Biology 260 The Research Process, with faculty from across the STEM disciplines.

Debra L. Hydorn, professor of mathematics, gave an invited presentation on community service-learning in statistics at the eighth International Conference on Teaching Statistics (ICOTS) held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in July.  Her presentation, “Combining On- and Off-Campus Service-Learning in a Statistics Methods Course,” described how students in MATH 210 Statistical Methods provide statistical consulting for students enrolled in Biology Professor Kathy Loesser-Casey’s BIOL 385 Human Physiology.  ICOTS is held every four years and is organized by the International Association for Statistical Education.  According to the conference website, the main purpose of ICOTS is to “give statistics educators and professionals around the world the opportunity to exchange information, ideas and experiences, to present recent innovation and research in the field of statistics education, and to expand their range of collaborators.”