Formal change awaits the approval by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, but no difficulty in obtaining that approval is foreseen.

Read Keith Devlin's report on this development.

The fact that the NUMB3RS series producers "have worked hard to get the math right," and have made mathematics more engaging to the public by drawing upon real-world mathematics, has generated a lot of enthusiasm among math teachers: more than 25,000 teachers currently download materials linked to each NUMB3RS episode, Roylance reports.

--- Claudia Clark

Local News

Mathematical Competition in Modeling Team gets Meritorious Award

The results of the 2006 undergraduate Mathematical Competition in Modeling are in. This year's team from CU-Denver received a Meritorious Award. This is the highest ranking for CU-Denver since 1989. It places us in the top 18% of the 1000 teams that competed worldwide. Of those who worked on Problem A (one of the two problems that a team could work on), only 6 teams placed above ours (MIT, Harvard, CU-Boulder, Carroll College, and 2 Chinese Schools). Please take a moment to congratulate the undergraduates who competed for us this year. They were Jeremy Noe, Leah Grant, and Michael Morrison. Also, thanks to everyone who helped out with this year's competition.

Undergraduate Committee is still looking for an undergraduate student representative

If you are interested in representing the undergraduate math majors on the department's Undergraduate Committee (meets every other Tuesday from 11³⁰ - 1) please let the chair Bill Briggs (wbriggs@math.cudenver.edu) know.

Awards party coming on May 5^th

Our annual awards celebration for undergraduate and graduate students is scheduled for Friday, May 5th. Keep the date open. More details next issue, but look out for announcements at the end of the April.

Math News

"All Square," by Ivars Peterson. Science News, 11 March 2006, pages 152-153.

Manjul Bhargava (Princeton University) and Jonathan P. Hanke (Duke University) have proved a result in number theory whose history goes back a long way. In 1770, Lagrange showed that every positive integer could be written as the sum of at most four squares. In the early 1900s Ramanujan found 53 other sums involving multiples of squares, called quadratic forms (for example, w² + 2x² + 2y² + 7z²) that can be used to represent every positive integer. One question is if there are other quadratic forms that represent all integers, and another is if there is a way to test if a given quadratic form does represent all positive integers. Bhargava has found other quadratic forms, adding to a list that mathematicians for more than 50 years had thought was complete. In 1993, John H. Conway (Princeton) and his student William Scheeberger found that a certain class of quadratic forms could be tested on numbers no larger than 15 and conjectured that a similar test could be found for a much broader class of quadratic forms. Bhargava and Hanke have now proved that conjecture (which involves a test on numbers no larger than 290). Bhargava presented the result at the International Conference on Number Theory and Mathematical Physics held at SASTRA University in India in December 2005. A sidebar in the article on Bhargava states that his mother, a math professor, encouraged his interest in mathematics and introduced him to the tabla, an Indian musical instrument. Bhargava compared patterns in the two: "The goal of every number theorist and every tabla player is to combine these patterns, carefully and creatively, so that they flow as a sequence of ideas, tell a story, and form a complete and beautiful piece.

--- Mike Breen

Issue 6 : May 2006

Local News

Harvey Greenberg and Rich Lundgren announce their retirement plans

Harvey and Rich have announced that they will be retiring in the next few years. This early announcement gives the department a chance to plan for their replacements, but as we all know, they can not really be replaced. According to their phase-out agreements, Harvey will be teaching a reduced load (1 course a semester) starting in the Fall, and Rich will start his reduced load the following year.

Personnel Changes in the Fall

Barbara Bailey has taken a position at San Diego State University and will be leaving us. Bill Briggs will be taking a leave next academic year. Julian Langou has accepted our offer and will be joining us next Fall as an assistant professor. Julian is coming from the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. He has a Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics from INSA, Toulouse, France.

New Chairs for the Undergraduate and Graduate Committees to take over in the Fall

Steve Billups (see his spotlight in the archives) will be the new chair of the Graduate Committee and yours truly will chair the Undergraduate Committee. These assignments were announced at the Department's monthly meeting in May.

Megan Sawyer to represent UCDHSC at national mathematical competition.

Megan Sawyer (see her spotlight in the archives) was selected to represent UCDHSC at the US National Collegiate Mathematics Championship which is the "finals" of the Problem Solving Competition (Problem of the Month) that we have been holding this year. Megan is being sent to Knoxville, Tennessee in August for the championship competition, which will be one of the activities of the Mathematical Association of America's MathFest 2006 (Annual summer meeting of the MAA). We all wish Megan the best of luck.

Undergraduate Committee is looking for undergraduate student representatives for the Fall semester

If you are interested in representing the undergraduate math majors on the department's Undergraduate Committee (meeting time to be determined in the Fall) please let the chair Bill Cherowitzo (william.cherowitzo@cudenver.edu) know.

Awards party coming on May 5^th

Our annual awards celebration for undergraduate and graduate students is scheduled for Friday, May 5th, 5-9 in 470 CU-Denver Bldg. Food, drink and entertainment (provided by Mike Kawai) as well as recognition awards will make this a rewarding (groan) experience. Please come.

Math News

"Gauss's Day of Reckoning," by Brian Hayes. American Scientist Online, May-June 2006.

One of the more famous anecdotes about Carl Friedrich Gauss tells of the young schoolboy who astounded his teacher by using a clever trick to sum the numbers from 1 to 100. Writer Brian Hayes developed a few questions about this story, however: how did the teacher know that Gauss's solution was correct, and how did the other students attempt to solve the problem? Hayes's hunt for answers led him through a literature search to a surprising conclusion: Gauss's tale is an accumulation of embellishments on an originally plain story. The earliest version of the anecdote, written just after Gauss died, mentions a quickly solved arithmetic summation, but no details about the numbers involved or Gauss's method of solution. Since then, different authors have inserted their own numbers to make the story interesting and plausible. While Hayes does not criticize embellishment as an important tool of storytellers, he does worry that inaccuracies in the anecdote may discourage future math students. In the absence of a smart, Gauss-style solution, he says, students who must solve problems "the hard way" may doubt their talent and ability to succeed.
--- Lisa DeKeukelaere

Blogs

My name is Sabrina Khan. I am a graduating senior at the University of CO-Denver, majoring in Applied Mathematics and Economics. I was born and raised in Bangladesh and started college here in Denver after finishing high school in Bangladesh. I will be attending graduate school at the Harvard School of Public Health for a master's in Biostatistics this coming Fall 2006.
(we will shortly have a link to Sabrina's blog here - ed.).

Vol. 2 Issue 1 : September 2006

Local News

Several Faculty on Leave ...

the department is stretched a little thin this year with Bill Briggs, Steve Sain and Tolya Puhalskii (until January) all taking leaves and Jan Mandel on sabbatical. To fill in some of the gaps, we are happy to welcome Kathe Bjork (in Statistics) and Nathan Kurtz (not new, but he's in an instructor position this year).

Mathfest 2006 ...

the summer meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) was held in Knoxville, TN this year. Senior Megan Sawyer went to the meeting to participate in the US National Collegiate Mathematics Championship, the finals of the Problem Solving Competition. Megan talks about her experience there in this month's student page. Instructor Mike Kawai also attended the conference ... but has not yet sent me the report he promised (hint, hint).

The Undergraduate Committee ...

held a retreat on September 8. Several things were discussed and the committee identified four major issues to address this year. The issues are

1. Advising,
2. Career Support for Math Majors,
3. Undergraduate Research Opportunities, and
4. Improving Teaching Assistant Training.

Keep posted for news coming out of these initiatives.

Undergraduate Representative to the Undergraduate Committee ...

We wish to thank Megan Sawyer for volunteering to serve as the undergraduate representative to the Undergraduate Committee. If you have concerns that you would like the committee to consider, please contact Megan (or me).

Math News

Coverage of 2006 Fields Medals, August 2006

The startling announcement that Gregory Perelman turned down the Fields Medal made the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians, held in August in Madrid, Spain, into a major news event. The story of Perelman, a reclusive Russian mathematician whose revolutionary work in geometric analysis has confirmed the legendary Poincaré Conjecture, transfixed people the world over and brought mathematics into newspapers, magazines, web sites, and television and radio broadcasts. In many cases the coverage neglected the other three Fields Medalists, Andrei Okounkov, Terence Tao, and Wendelin Werner, although the media in the cities where they work and in their home countries (Russia, Australia, and France, respectively) ran stories about them. The presence at the ICM opening ceremonies of the King of Spain---who attended to present the Fields Medals to Okounkov, Tao, and Werner---ensured plenty of coverage within the Spanish media. For his part, Perelman stayed out of the limelight and was reported by one newspaper to have spent the opening day of the Congress watching television. "I do not think anything that I say can be of the slightest public interest," he told the Telegraph newspaper. "I know that self-promotion happens a lot and if people want to do that, good luck to them, but I do not regard it as a positive thing." Some of the coverage portrayed Perelman as a mad genius, but much of it expressed admiration for his idealism and indifference to worldly gains. The unprecedented amount of coverage of the 2006 Fields Medals contrasts sharply with that for the 2002 medals, which many media outlets passed over with silence.
--- Allyn Jackson

Archimede's Palimpsest

"X-rays uncover hidden writings of Archimedes," by Terence Chea (Associated Press). The Seattle Times, 6 August 2006;
"Archimedes' Ancient Works Deciphered." WBBM News Radio 780 in Chicago, 2 August 2006;
"Revealing secrets of Archimedes," by Lisa M. Krieger. Mercury News 3 August 2006;
"Eureka! Ancient works by Archimedes rediscovered," by Genevieve Roberts. The Independent, 3 August 2006.
"Brilliant X-rays Reveal Fruits of a Brilliant Mind," by Robert F. Service. Science, 11 August 2006, page 744.

Media all over the globe covered the 11-day project in which researchers used Stanford University's Linear Accelerator to uncover with powerful X-ray beams the previously hidden writings and diagrams of the ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. Some of the work was revealed in real time during a San Francisco Exploratorium live event and webcast on 4 August 2006 (done in collaboration with Stanford University and the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore). The technique has revealed portions of the 174-page manuscript known as the "Archimedes Palimpsest," the only copies of his treatises on flotation, gravity and mathematics, written by a scribe on parchment but obscured by scraping and other writings over the centuries. (A review of a recent translation of Archimedes' writings appeared in the May 2005 issue of the AMS Notices.)
--- Annette Emerson

Benjamin Franklin and SUDOKU

"Benjamin Franklin hat's erfunden (Benjamin Franklin's got it)," by George Szpiro. Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 30 July 2006.

This article discusses Benjamin Franklin's version of Sudoku. Apparently the founding father whiled away his time at the Pennsylvania Assembly filling in 8x8 squares with numbers. A recent article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society analyzes Franklin's squares.
--- Allyn Jackson