Next Session:
Saturday, January 31: 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. 52 Broadway, 6th floor, Conference Room
Jeff Weeks is a freelance mathematician living in Canton, NY. He has an A.B. from Dartmouth College and a Ph.D. from Princeton University in mathematics. His main interests are geometry, topology, cosmology and education. After several years of teaching undergraduate mathematics he began doing mathematical research and software development for the University of Minnesota's Geometry Center. Designing and implementing software for creating and studying possible shapes for 3-dimensional space. He explores universes of two, three, and four dimensions, leading both students and researchers to experience the different shapes that could describe the universe in which we live. A master of exposition in topology and geometry, he is a versatile and productive designer of computer software for investigating knots, spaces, tessellations, and geometry across all dimensions.
His present research centers on a collaboration with cosmologists to test the shape of the universe using satellite data. His educational activities have led to a multimedia unit for middle schools on geometry and space. The unit uses classrooms activities, computer games, and video to let students explore universes that are finite but have no boundaries.
He is the author of the book The Shape of Space (Marcel Dekker, 1985, second edition, 2002), the unit Exploring the Shape of Space (Key Curriculum Press, 2001), and numerous research and expository articles.
Upcoming Sessions:
Sunday, March 1: 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. 52 Broadway, 6th floor, Conference Room
Sylvain Cappell, according to Wikipedia, is best known for his "codimension one splitting theorem", which is a standard tool in high dimensional geometric topology, and a number of important results proven with his collaborator Julius Shaneson (now at the University of Pennsylvania). Their work includes many results in knot theory (and broad generalizations of that subject) and aspects of low-dimensional topology. They gave the first nontrivial examples of topological conjugacy of linear transformations, which led to a flowering of research on the topological study of spaces with singularities.
More recently, they combined their understanding of singularities, first to lattice point counting in polytopes, then to Euler-Maclaurin type summation formulae, and most recently to counting lattice points in the circle. This last problem is a classical one, initiated by Gauss and the paper is still being vetted by experts.
Saturday April 4, : 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. 52 Broadway, 6th floor, Conference Room
Joseph O'Rourke, according to Wikipedia, is a professor of computer science at Smith College. His main research interests are computational geometry and the philosophy of artificial intelligence.O'Rourke was the first person to publish an algorithm to determine the minimum bounding box of a point set in three dimensions.
Past Sessions:
Wednesday, August 13: 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. Kimmel Center, Room 914
Heidi Burgiel's primary research interests lie in the fields of polyhedra and symmetries. Heidi graduated from the University of Washington in 1995, where she wrote a thesis on the subject of regular polytopes under Branko Grunbaum. While there, she worked for Jim King and the IAS/Park City Program for High School Teachers (formerly the Park City RGI).
Dr. Burgiel's favorite topic in education is the use of computers to teach mathematics. She helped write the textbook for the Technology in the Geometry Classroom course, which teaches the use of high school geometry software through advanced mathematics projects. Currently, she uses computer graphing software to teach transformations of graphs of functions in her precalculus class. She also teaches a class on UCB Logo (a very simple and geometric computer programming language) and Maple for math majors.
Thursday, August 14: 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. Kimmel Center, Room 914
Doris Schattschneider has a Ph.D. in mathematics from Yale University and is Professor Emerita of Mathematics at Moravian College where she taught for 34 years. Her main research interests are in discrete geometry, especially tiling, and in the visualization of mathematical ideas. She was Senior associate on the Visual Geometry Project, which included the development of the software The Geometer's Sketchpad. She has led workshops for teachers at all levels on the use of dynamic geometry software, and been active as co-organizer and presenter in sessions on dynamic geometry. She is author of more than 60 articles and several books, of which her favorites are M.C. Escher : Visions of Symmetry, Harry Abrams, and M.C. Escher Kaleidocycles, Pomegranate Communications.
Friday, August 15: 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. Kimmel Center, Room 914
Tony Phillips is a Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. He has a Ph.D. from Princeton and has held a variety of visiting positions around the world. Most recently, he has been Chair of the Mathematics Department at Stony Brook, a Visiting Fellow at Yale University, the Co-director of the Mathematics Secondary Teacher Preparation Program, and the Associate Dean for Curriculum, College of Arts and Sciences.
Saturday, September 20: 9:00 a.m - 3:30 p.m. Kimmel Center, Room 802
William Zwicker received his Ph.D. in 1976 from MIT, where he received his training in mathematical logic. After early work in combinatorial set theory, he became interested in applications of mathematics to political science. He has published in the areas of voting, fair division, and cooperative game theory, and is on the editorial board of Mathematical Social Sciences and of the International Journal of Game Theory. His current topics of interest are voting systems. He provides research and seminars on voting rules, voting scores, how can dishonest voters use the rubber band method to their advantage, voting and the mathematical connection with Christiaan Huygens (1629 -1695), and the consequences of replacing rubber bands with strings, weights, and pulleys in his voting rules model.
He is the inventor of the hypergame paradox, and is the author, with Alan D. Taylor, of Simple Games (Princeton University Press, 1999). His entire career has been at Union College, where he is currently the William D. Williams Professor of Mathematics. Bill's hobbies include cooking, classical music, travel, and reading escapist fiction of dubious worth.
Davide Cervone received his B.A. from Williams College in 1984. His undergraduate thesis concerned short cycles and graph coloring on the torus. After graduating from college, Dr. Cervone was hired as a consultant at the User Services division of the University of Rochester Computing Center and was promoted to VAX/VMS Group Leader and then Consulting Group Leader before he left the Computing Center to attend graduate school. He received his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1993 under the direction of Thomas Banchoff, and wrote a thesis investigating polyhedral immersions of surfaces with a minimum number of vertices. He joined the Geometry Center as a postdoc in the fall of 1993, where he was heavily involved in producing materials for the World-Wide Web. In the fall of 1996, Dr. Cervone was hired as an Assistant Professor by the Mathematics Department of Union College, in Schenectady, New York, where he has been teaching ever since. In the fall of 2001, Dr. Cervone passed his tenure review. In addition to his teaching and research, Dr. Cervone has been active in developing methods of communicating mathematics electronically, and in developing mathematical artwork.
Saturday, October 25: 9:00 a.m. - 3:30 p.m. 52 Broadway, 6th floor, Conference Room
Daina Taimina and David Henderson are mathematicians at Cornell University. They are co-authors of Experiencing Geometry a classic text on Euclidean and non-Euclidean space.
David Henderson's current work in educational mathematics pertains to aspects of mathematics that impinge on the teaching and learning of mathematics -- the emphasis is on the mathematics not on education. This work includes changing (and developing new) curricula at the university level, including new approaches to teaching and learning of mathematics. His work in this area has resulted in more than 25 articles (or chapters) and 3 editions of Experiencing Geometry. In 2005 he accepted an invitation to join the core curriculum development team of the Algebra Project, which is led by Robert Moses.
Daina Taimina's graduate work was in Theoretical Computer Science, and she is actively interested in the history of mathematics, geometry, and mathematics education. She has been a member of the Department of Mathematics at Cornell University since 2006. Prior to that, she wrote tutorials and biographies for the Kinematic Models for Design Digital Library, and developed several projects in area schools. In 1997 Daina worked out how "hyperbolic" space could be modeled by crochet. Since then, she and David have used her woolen models to further explore this peculiar topology.
Wednesday, November 19: 5:00 p.m. - 8:00 p.m. 52 Broadway, 6th floor, Conference Room
George W. Hart is an interdisciplinary sculptor, scholar, mathematician, engineer, writer, computer scientist, and educator. His geometric sculpture is recognized around the world for its mathematical depth and creative use of materials. He is a pioneer in using computer technology and solid freeform fabrication in the design and fabrication of sculpture. Examples of his artwork can be seen at major universities, such as M.I.T., U.C. Berkeley, and Princeton University. He has received praise and awards in numerous exhibitions, including a New York State Council for the Arts Individual Artist's Award. He has been invited to lecture and show his art across the country and around the globe, including many major universities.
Hart's educational activities reach students at all levels. He has developed innovative workshop activities which use art-related ways to engage students in thinking mathematically about patterns, structure, and relationships. He is especially known for workshops he has led around the world constructing very large models of four-dimensional polytopes. These extraordinary activities expose participants to important conceptual ideas they might never experience otherwise. His online teaching materials have a significant impact on mathematics education and result in an enormous amount of email contact to him from teachers and students around the world. His alternative introductions to mathematical topics are often effective for engaging students who are not attracted to traditional mathematics teaching.
