Please join us for the algebra seminar at 2PM on Fridays in 353 RSS. This week, on Friday February 15th, Oleg Smirnov will continue speaking on Localization of Monoids.
For more information or to sign up for e-mail announcements please contact Oleg at smirnov@cofc.edu.
(Click here for algebra seminar poster in PDF format)
The Math Club will meet on Wednesday, January 30, 2019, at 3:00 pm, in RSS 101 to host two of our own faculty.Professor Martin Jones will talk about the 4+1 program. This is a way to earn your BS and MS in mathematics in only 5 years.Professor Emeritus Mick Norton will share stories from his book Random Tales. Hear about his mathematical adventures as a legal consultant, and a wrestling coach!Snacks will be served.
The Math Department congratulates CofC Math graduate students Emma Collins and Zach Wirszyla on their fellowship awards from the Graduate School. Emma received the Amy T. McCandless Fellowship and Zach received the Principal Fellowship.
Bob Mignone, who has been the chair of the Department of Mathematics at the College of Charleston for the past 12 years, is stepping down from that role. We are all grateful to him for safely “sailing the ship through troubled waters” and wish him luck as he returns to being a “regular professor” with time for math research.
And we also offer our heartiest congratulations to Liz Jurisich, who formerly served as Associate Chair of the Math Department and is currently speaker of the faculty senate, who will be taking over as the department chair this summer.
Join us on November 16th at 3:00 in 252 RSS for a Celebration of Summer 2018 Student Math Research. There will be talks by students who did research this past summer, information for students interested in doing research in the future, pizza and more!
The Eleventh International Conference on Mathematics and Mathematics Education in Developing Countries was held in Laos earlier this month.
Its six plenary speakers included Michael Dorff (president of the Mathematical Association of America), Kenji Ueno (a well-known Japanese algebraic geometer), and the Cofc Math Department’s combinatoricist Dinesh Sarvate!
We just learned about an interesting event this weekend (Sept 23). Ken Ono of Emory University will be at Davidson College speaking about Ramanujan and showing the major motion picture “The Man Who Knew Infinity”.
Do you want to hear about all the amazing things our faculty and students are doing? Check out the Summer 2018 issue of our newsletter!
CofC professors are not just teachers but also practitioners of their fields. Our students learn history from historians, psychology from psychologists, math from mathematicians, and so on. Not only does this guarantee that the instructors are experts with practical knowledge of their discipline, it also means that undergraduates here have a rare opportunity to work on real research with their professors. Here are just two of the research projects being conducted in the math department this summer:
In a project with medical applications, undergraduate Michael Lanier is working with Professor Mukesh Kumar to mathematically analyze wireless capsule endoscopy (WCE) images to identify cancerous polyps automatically. Utilizing deep learning and neural networks,
the team hopes to help doctors combat the third most common cancer in the US through early detection. Lanier and Kumar explain their research this way: “In this project, we will develop an
automated system for polyp detection in WCE images based on deep learning which is an 
improvement to the neural networks that contain more computational layers that allow for higher levels of abstraction and prediction in the data.”
Undergraduates Monique Sparkman and John Cobb along with graduate student Albert Serna and Professor Alex Kasman are studying the particle-like waves called “solitons”,
but instead of the usual real-valued functions, the solitons they are studying are described by 
quaternions, abstract numbers that do not satisfy the familiar commutative property. Since waves and non-commutativity are both fundamental to quantum physics, studying this combination could someday have practical value, but for now this team is happy to simply have made some surprising discoveries about how these two ideas fit together mathematically.
The following undergraduate students received special honors from the CofC Math Department at the SSM Awards Ceremony in 2018:
Outstanding Student Award: Tristan J. Aft, Katherine H. Balcewicz, Gloria R. Burke, Blaine T. Billings, Joseph G. Casagranda, Emma L. Collins, Elyana R. Crowder, Na T. Duong, Katelynn H. Huneycutt, Isabel K. Johnston, Choral P. Linhart, Tea T. Luu, Mahwish M. Rana, Orel R. Robino, Payden L. Shaw, Elaine Todd, Emanuel O. Valencia, and Spencer B. Wilder.
Susan Prazak Endowed Award for Future Teachers: Joseph G. Casagranda, Emanuel O. Valencia, and Zachariah J. Wirszyla.
The Ewa Wojcicka Mathematics Award: Blaine T. Billings
The Scott Ward Award for Excellence in Mathematics: John D. Cobb
Best Undergraduate Research Poster: Grier M. Jones and Daniel A. Rich
Congratulations to all the awardees!