Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, published a research article, A new definition of conjugacy for semigroups, in the Journal of Algebra and Its Applications. This research has been supported by a 2015-17 Waple Professorship.
Konieczny Publishes in Combinatorica
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, co-authored a research article, Automorphism groups of circulant digraphs with applications to semigroup theory, published in the journal Combinatorica.
Konieczny Presents at American Mathematical Society Meeting
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, gave a talk, A new definition of conjugacy for semigroups, in the Special Session on Recent Trends in Semigroup Theory at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society, University of Denver, Denver, Colorado, Oct. 8-9, 2016.
UMW Psychologists Discuss Balance on Public Radio Show
University of Mary Washington psychologists Miriam Liss and Holly Schiffrin say that finding happiness in life doesn’t come from having more material possessions.
“There’s really no way to be all in at work, all in as a parent, all in as a partner or spouse and all in in other social roles like volunteering,” said Liss who coauthors the recently released book Balancing the Big Stuff: Finding Happiness in Work, Family and Lifewith her colleague. “You have to find out what works for you to give balance in life.”
Liss and Schiffrin explore how to achieve this balance in an upcoming interview on Virginia’s Public Radio Program With Good Reason, which airs Jan. 24 through Jan. 30.
In the radio show, they discuss how to avoid working or parenting in excess, how to focus on what is intrinsically motivating, and how to work toward gender equality in the home and workplace in order to give concrete steps toward reaching harmony among our roles in life.
With Good Reason is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. The show also airs broadcast on public radio stations in Alaska, Colorado, Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Indiana, Massachusetts, Michigan, New Mexico, New York, Ohio, Tennessee, Texas, Virginia and Washington D.C. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen. Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature are available online at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/2015/01/where-did-you-come-from.
Liss and Schiffrin are international experts on the subjects of happiness, gender issues and intensive and helicopter parenting. Liss is the recipient of the prestigious 2015 Outstanding Faculty Award from the State Council of Higher Education of Virginia (SCHEV). Schiffrin is president of the Virginia Academic and Applied Psychologist Academy of the Virginia Psychological Association.
Balancing work and family also is personal for Liss and Schiffrin. While maintaining full teaching and research loads, they also are raising young children.
UMW Geography Professor Awarded National Grant
University of Mary Washington professor Stephen Hanna is the recipient of a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to conduct fieldwork at plantation museums in the American South. Hanna is professor of geography at UMW, and is an expert on commemorative landscapes, cartography, and critical applications of GIS.
Hanna and his research partners will conduct fieldwork at plantations, like the Oak Alley Plantation in Louisiana. Photo by Arnold Modlin (Norfolk State).
The NSF grant, totaling $445,423 over three years, will support the project “Transformation of Racialized American Southern Heritage Landscape.” Hanna is co-principal investigator for the project with David Butler (University of Southern Mississippi), Derek Alderman (University of Tennessee), Perry Carter (Texas Tech University), Amy Potter (Armstrong Atlantic State University), and Arnold Modlin (Norfolk State University).
The grant, supplemented by Hanna’s Waple Professorship, will allow Hanna and three UMW undergraduate students to join faculty and graduate students from the other universities to conduct fieldwork at plantation museums in Louisiana, coastal South Carolina and Georgia, and Virginia’s James River region.
Stephen Hanna
During the fieldwork, students and faculty will survey and interview plantation visitors, tour guides, and owners, and will conduct participant observations of the tours. Based on pilot research already conducted at four plantation museums in Louisiana, the researchers aim to determine how and to what extent narratives of the enslaved are incorporated in the landscapes and narrations of these museums. They will document visitors’ experiences to show how the role of slavery in the region’s and country’s history are presented at these sites.
Throughout the project, Hanna will teach UMW students to transcribe, code and analyze qualitative data. Students will map the plantation sites and create a website, hosted by UMW, to disseminate the project’s results.
Janusz Konieczny Publishes in Asian-European Journal of Mathematics
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, published a research article, Automorphism groups of endomorphism monoids of free G_sets, in the Asian-European Journal of Mathematics.
Historic Preservation Professor to Appear on Radio Program
Michael Spencer, assistant professor of historic preservation, will appear on the public radio show “With Good Reason” to discuss his class’s efforts to preserve a small church in Falmouth. The show, “Dreams of the Civil War,” will air beginning on Saturday, Nov. 2.
Michael Spencer
The program also will feature commentary from instructors from several Virginia institutions, including Christopher Newport University and Norfolk State University. Topics of the show will include life during the Civil War, the influence of slave culture and American colonial essayists. Audio files of the full program and its companion news feature will be posted online the week of the show at withgoodreasonradio.org/2013/11/dreams-of-the-civil-war/.
“With Good Reason” is a program of the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities. The show airs weekly in Fredericksburg on Sundays from 1-2 p.m. on Radio IQ 88.3 Digital. To listen from outside of the Fredericksburg area, a complete list of air times and links to corresponding radio stations can be found at http://withgoodreasonradio.org/when-to-listen/.
Janusz Konieczny Leads Seminar at VCU
Janusz Konieczny, professor of mathematics, gave an invited talk, “The Commuting Graph of the Symmetric Inverse Semigroup,” at the Analysis, Logic and Physics Seminar at Virginia Commonwealth University.
Keith Mellinger Publishes Research Article
Keith Mellinger, Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics, recently saw his co-authored research article Embedding cycles in finite planes published in the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. The article addresses graph cycles in planes, a topic that has been connected to certain soft-decision decoding algorithms for error-correcting codes.
Leo Lee Presents at US-Korea Conference
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Jangwoon “Leo” Lee, recently presented “Domain Decomposition Methods for Solving Stochastic PDEs” at the annual US-Korea Conference (UKC 2013) in New Jersey. In addition to attending many research talks at the conference, Dr. Lee chaired an applied mathematics session.