Eleven mathematics students and four professors attended the Texas section meeting of the Mathematical Association of America held in Tyler, Texas, April 14-16. Five students gave talks: First-year student Phuong-Hieu Nguyen and sophomore Zoe Pham gave a joint talk on the Fibonacci sequence and its relationship to minimal selfish sets. Senior Madeline Bailey gave a talk titled “Staying Sane with Instant Insanity,” based on a project done in professor Allison Marr’s special topics class on Combinatorics. Senior Matt Wladyka gave a talk about his capstone project on the mathematics behind the Black-Scholes Option in finance that he did with professor Therese Shelton. And senior Kayla Comeaux gave a talk about her capstone project on the statistical analysis of the work she did during a summer internship at NASA. Comeaux received an award for the best undergraduate talk that focused on statistics and modeling.

Richard Denman, professor of mathematics and computer science, gave an invited lecture at Temple College on March 31 titled “How Do I Know That?”

Four faculty members and four students went to Dallas for the SIGCSE 2011 International Conference for Computer Science Education. Senior Computational Mathematics major Matthew Flatau presented a poster titled `”Implementing Ruppert’s Algorithm for Generic Curves in 2D,” a result of his honors thesis work with Barbara Anthony, assistant professor of computer science. Suzanne Buchele, associate professor of computer science, moderated a panel on CS Fulbright Experiences Abroad. Students Erick Bauman, Leigh Daniel, Matt Flatau and Alex Parris volunteered with the conference. Rick Denman, professor of mathematics, and Barbara Owens, associate professor of computer science and past president of SIGCSE, also attended.

Barbara Anthony, assistant professor of computer science, presented a poster at the INFORMS (Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences) Annual Conference in Austin Nov. 8 titled “Operations Research in a Liberal Arts College.”

Richard Denman, professor of mathematics and computer science, had an article published in the November 2010 issue of the College Journal of Mathematics, a publication of the Mathematical Association of America. The article, titled “The Tower and Glass Marbles Problem,” was co-authored by Michael Rothenberg and Southwestern alumnus David Hailey.

Suzanne Buchele, associate professor of computer science, is serving on the Peer Review Committee for Fulbright Scholar grants to West and Central Africa Nov. 4-5 in Washington, D.C. This is the last of a three-year appointment on the committee, which is administered by the Council for the International Exchange of Scholars (CIES).

Matt Flatau, a senior computational math major, presented “Implementing Ruppert’s Algorithm for Generic Curves in 2D” at the 19th International Meshing Roundtable in Chattanooga, Tenn., Oct. 5. The research note, co-authored with Barbara Anthony, assistant professor of computer science, was a product of their summer 2010 faculty-student research project.  

Barbara Anthony, assistant professor of computer science, together with three co-authors (Vineet Goyal from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Anupam Gupta from Carnegie Mellon University and Viswanath Nagarajan from the IBM T.J. Watson Research Center), had a paper published in the February 2010 issue of Mathematics of Operations Research. The paper is titled “A Plant Location Guide for the Unsure: Approximation Algorithms for Min-Max Location Problems” and can be read here.