Head Way by Dale Alspach, Department Head
Last year we did not assemble articles for a newsletter so we are including a few items that could have appeared last year. In case you are wondering who received the departmental scholarships and awards last year we did publish an article on those.
Faculty Directions
With the budget problems we were unable to open searches for new permanent faculty. We were fortunate to have two Visiting Assistant Professors, Loretta Bartolini, who has been here for three years and Alan Sola, who came in the fall of 2010. Dr. Bartolini was central to the organization of the Jacofest, a conference in honor of Professor William H. Jaco last June. Dr. Sola works in complex analysis and did his doctoral work at KTH in Sweden. He will be returning there in the fall for a special research program.
Next year we will have no visiting faculty and a smaller regular faculty. Enrollments are predicted to increase substantially so class sizes will increase and some students may be forced to delay taking mathematics classes.
Climbing Upward
Two faculty members were promoted in 2010. Anthony Kable was promoted to professor. Dr. Kable received his Ph.D. from OSU and did postdoctoral work at Cornell before returning here. His research interests cover parts of number theory, representation theory and invariant theory. Mahdi Asgari was promoted to associate professor. His research is in automorphic forms and L-functions which are part of number theory.
This year Mathias Schulze and A. Raghuram are being promoted to associate professor (final approval is pending). Dr. Schulze does research in algebraic geometry and in singularities in particular. He also has worked on computer algebra systems to create packages to do computations for his research and that of others. Dr. Raghuram works in the same part of number theory as Dr. Asgari and has interest in obtaining special values of L-functions.
Relocation and Renewal
The department finally acquired the space of the fifth floor of the Mathematical Sciences building. Some faculty and graduate students moved to new offices and three rooms in the center section of the fifth floor were combined to make a new computer classroom. Unlike our previous computer classroom this room was designed with flexibility in mind. Laptops are brought into the room when computers are needed and the room has multimedia capabilities that can be used for classes and for presentations by guest lecturers.
In addition to the renovations for the computer classrooms some other smaller improvements and maintenance are in progress. These include the installation of additional bookcases for our growing collection of mathematics books and some mathematically related art to decorate the walls. Dr. Lisa Mantini has been instrumental in development of the plans for these changes and has shepherded the implementation.
The MLRC remains for a sixth year in a temporary location on the fourth floor of the Classroom building. We were able to secure approval of using the basement of the Classroom building in the future. Currently that area is being used by some offices that were displaced by the renovation of the Student Union. Because funding for renovation of basement is still uncertain, there is no target date for moving to the new location. Private funding would undoubtedly help move the project forward, but so far no donor has stepped forward to assist.
Back Again
We have instituted a new web-based placement exam for calculus that is providing useful guidance for advisors. Depending on the outcome of some campus initiatives the department is considering expanding the use of placement exams to a larger group of entry level courses.
Members of the department and a university committee have been formulating proposals for providing additional help for students in lower division mathematics classes. Many students arrive at OSU unprepared for the demands of university mathematics courses. This is, of course, not really a new problem. What is different is that OSU is looking for ways to reduce the failure rate and is at least talking about putting some resources into addressing the problem. We are waiting to see what actually happens.