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Math Department spring picnic 2004 / Math Club picnic 2004 / Awards 2004

 

 

Awards were presented at the annual Math Department picnic in April 2004.

 

 

 

Outstanding Senior Math Majors, Newcomb College - Sage Briscoe, Birka Wicke,

Kimberly Worthington

 

 

 

 

Outstanding Senior Math Majors, Tulane College - Tim Daley, Darren McCarley, Mike Naaman, Kirk Soodhalter

 

 

 

 

Outstanding Senior Math Majors, School of Engineering - Rob Blake,

Leah Broussard, Michelle Hewlett.

 

All of the above students maintained a GPA in their 300+ level math

courses of A- or above.

 

 

 

Buchanan Award,Outstanding Sophomore math student, Tulane College:

Colin Young

 

 

 

 

Outstanding Sophomore math student, Newcomb College:

Megan Shuler

 

 

Outstanding Sophomore math student, School of Engineering:

Alex Fink

 

 

(Students winning the sophomore award have a history of repeating as seniors. Sage Briscoe and Tim Daley each won sophomore awards two years ago.)

 

 

 

The Honors Programs awards for Senior Scholar in Mathematics:

Sage Briscoe

Darrent McCarley

 

 

 

Awards to the winning team from Tulane in the Louisiana Math Skirmish:

Sage Briscoe

Tim Daley

Rob Blake

Matt Smith

Colin Sherrill

Tom Cleveland

Alex Wiener

Aliska Gibbins

 

 

 

Five graduate student won awards for Excellence in Teaching:

 

Joel Webb

Miguel Amadis

Chris Duncan

Jaime Kirsch

Patrick Vernon

 

(These awards were based both on recommendations of supervising faculty

as well

as their extremely high teaching evaluations.)

 

 

On the recreational front:

The Math Club team soundly beat the

faculty/grad student team. The faculty/grad student team did narrowly win

the volleyball game which preceded the soccer game.

 

We thank Colin Sherrill of the Math Club for arranging for all of the soccer and volleyball equipment and Joel Webb and Dante Manna for getting the food and drink .

 


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Grad student news

·        There will be 7 new graduate students starting in the fall 2004 semester, 4 of whom will be VIGRE students. Jim Rogers is the new chair of the Graduate Studies Committee.

·        In May 2003, Felicia Morris and Tamara Singleton attended the Women in Mathematics Conference at the Institute for Advanced Study. They attended daily lectures on topics in mathematical biology.

·        In June 2003, Tamara Singleton worked for the third summer as a research assistant at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder,CO. The first two summers she conducted research in the Atmospheric Chemistry Division. Tamara writes,

o       The first research topic was entitled Optimal Representation of Spectral Lines as a Linear Combination of Lines of Fixed Width. We improved the computation of atmospheric transmission by performing least squares analysis that resulted in a general method that determined the distribution of spectral line intensity among a set of fixed spectral line widths.The second research topic was Investigating Carbon Monoxide in the Strosphere using Infrared Spectroscopy. Here, we used data collected by the Fourier Transform Infrared Spectrometer in the lower stratosphere and wrote computer programs to determine the levels of carbon monoxide in the lower stratosphere. My current research is Comparision Temperature Variations in the Mesopause. Here we compare sodium LIDAR temperature measurements in the mesopause collected by Colorado State University with NCAR Thermosphere-Ionosphere-Mesosphere-Electrodynamics General Circulation Model (TIME-GCM) temperature predictions. Our goal is to assess the performance of the TIME-GCM. We do this by visualizing these variations using IDL programming language and performing Fourier decomposition.

 

 

 

 

 

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Senior projects

                                                                                                      Xuefeng Wang supervised Birka Wicke’s (see photo at left) senior project. Birka will be attending graduate school in the Netherlands in an environmental science program related to modeling done in the project.

 

 

 

STUDENT

ADVISOR

PROJECT TITLE

Luke Bienvenu

Yang

From Newton to Einstein

Michael Naaman

Malueg

A Game-Theoretic Defense

Of Welfare

Stacy Taylor

Lacey

A Statistical Model of Evolution

Birka Wicke

Wang

Effect of Domain Size on Persistence

Of Populations

Kimberley Worthington

Kwasik

Alternative Proof of Brouwer Fixed Point Theorem

 

Increase in number of majors  The number of math majors has increased 50% from 2003 to 2004. We now teach  3 sections of analysis.

 

 

Darren McCarley,  who graduated with honors in Spring 2004, spent his Junior year studying mathematics at Darmstadt University of Technology in Germany.

 

INCOMING GRADUATE STUDENTS, FALL 2004:

 

Benjamin Dribus,

Univ. of Oklahoma

Loretta George,

Southeastern

Audry Herbert,

Loyola University

Derrick Lee,

TU Darmstadt, Germany

Sarah Lukens,

Univ. of Pittsburgh

Michael Naaman,

Tulane University

Juan Carlos Trujillo,

Univ. of California-Berkeley