Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr has been named a Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) as part of the 2027 class “for her outstanding leadership in advancing women in mathematics through co-directing the EDGE Program, mentoring undergraduate researchers, and creating innovative courses on women in mathematics. Her work fosters belonging through building inclusive communities that elevate overlooked voices, all while empowering women as scholars, researchers, and leaders alike in mathematical sciences.” More information about AWM Fellows can be found here.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura gave a talk titled “Circles and Perspective in Ancient Roman Wall Paintings” and co-led a workshop titled “Developing a Mathematical Art Manifesto” at the Bridges Conference in Galway, Ireland from August 5–9. The Bridges Conference is the world’s largest annual international gathering focused on connections between mathematics, arts, and culture.

The Mathematics and Computer Science Department was well represented at MathFest, the Mathematical Association of America’s (MAA) Annual Summer Meeting, held August 5–8 in Boston. Faculty, students, and an alumna presented research, led professional development sessions, and received national recognition. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Pedagogy, Identity, and Community: A Decade of NExT,” discussing the impact of Project NExT and his progression from participant to leader at the Texas Section NExT level. Mathematics majors Ioana Burlacu ’26 and Ashlyn Cadena ’27 presented “Perimeter-minimizing rectangles using density M|x|^p + N|y|^q” in the MAA Undergraduate Poster Session. Their research was supervised by Ross as part of SURF 2025. Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr co-organized the session “Rewriting Who Counts” and presented “Women Count!,” highlighting courses she has taught at Southwestern. As Chair of the MAA Council on Prizes and Awards, Marr also participated in the Meeting of the MAA Congress and presented several prizes and awards during the conference. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton co-organized the session “Innovative Modeling Approaches to Teaching and Applying ODEs” and presented “Modeling-First DE: Learning to Teach, and Teaching to Learn” with fellow professional development leaders in differential equations. She also participated in an all-day working session for an upcoming book by MAA OPEN Math, a National Science Foundation-supported project focused on improving mathematics instruction through active-learning professional development. Mathematics and computer science graduate Emma Kathryn Groves ’17, now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Military Academy at West Point, was a co-author of the presentation “Teaching to the Surface: Using Physical Models to Move Multivariable Calculus Beyond Formulas.” Finally, Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura and co-authors Annalisa Crannell and Marc Frantz received the Daniel Solow Author’s Award for their 2019 inquiry-based learning textbook, Perspective and Projective Geometry, published by Princeton University Press.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with her co-authors Annalisa Crannell and Marc Frantz, were honored with the Daniel Solow Author’s Award by the Mathematical Association of America for their 2019 IBL textbook, Perspective and Projective Geometry, published by Princeton University Press. Established to recognize excellence in undergraduate mathematics education, this annual award honors the author(s) of outstanding teaching materials. Selection is based primarily on the impact these materials have on undergraduate education in mathematics and related disciplines. More information is available here.

Mathematics and psychology alumna Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 has been named the 2026–2027 American Mathematical Society (AMS) Congressional Fellow, in conjunction with the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Beckelhymer expects to complete her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota this May. The Fellowship is for a year on Capitol Hill to support a congressional committee or a member of Congress by providing a mathematical or technical perspective. More information is available here.

The Southwestern Mathematics and Computer Science Department had a strong involvement at the 105th Annual Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held at Baylor University in Waco on March 27 and 28. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross was honored as the recipient of the 2026 Section Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics. Ross also helped organize sessions as a co-leader of Texas NExT, a professional development service that helps early-career mathematics faculty refine their teaching practices. Atkin Junior Professor and Associate Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave the closing invited address, titled “Using Loops to Make Good Maps.” Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presided over the meeting as the MAA Texas Section Chair. She also sponsored a team of five students in the Math Bowl competition: biochemistry major and math and neuroscience double minor Elizabeth Ayalew ’28, biology and physics double major Linh Nguyen ’29, physics and math double major Brooke Ramey ’27, math major Joshua Rodkey ’29, and biochemistry and math double major CeCe Sullivan ’29. Sullivan also won a book through a raffle. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton and Assistant Professor of Instruction of Mathematics Will Tran also attended. Marr and Ross also attended the Meeting of the Texas MAA Executive Committee, over which Marr presided, and the Meeting of Department Liaisons.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with her collaborator, artist Jiabao Li, gave a talk at The Association for the Study of Play (TASP) 52nd annual conference, organized by Professor of Education Michael Kamen and held at Southwestern University. The talk, titled “Math/Art Collaboration Through Play: A Report From the Triangle Program,” focused on the role of play in our interdisciplinary collaboration, which ultimately culminated in the idea of the math playground.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura gave a talk at the Gathering 4 Gardner 16 in San Francisco, CA, a puzzle/magic/art/math conference to celebrate the popular recreational math writer Martin Gardner. During each day were dozens of six-minute lightning talks given by attendees on projects they are working on. Futamura discussed three projects, updates from the mathematical art manifesto group she has been organizing over the past six months, the math playground funded by the Simons Foundation Triangle Program, and a general audience book on what can be gleaned from understanding the geometry of space in art and other 2D media, to be published by Princeton University Press.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with artist Jiabao Li and art director Ron Berry of Fusebox, have been awarded a $150,000 grant to build a math playground in Austin through the Simons Foundation Triangle Program. Math Playground is an outdoor installation and accompanying exhibition that turns abstract mathematical ideas into playful, embodied, large-scale sculptures. Visitors can climb, slide, swing, and spin on custom sculptures whose forms embody complex math concepts. A Klein bottle slide creates a continuous looping path. A shape called a Boy’s surface becomes a twisting climbing net that flips orientation. The Lissajous swing set draws patterns in the sand through harmonic motion. A merry-go-round zoetrope animates models through rotation and repetition. Math Playground makes math fun and intuitive, inviting people to experience symmetry physically, in their bodies, by moving through shapes usually understood only in theory. For preliminary renderings, visit here. For the announcement, visit here.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer and her collaborators Benjamin Call, Dave Constantine, Alena Erchenko, and Grace Work had their paper “Local product structure for equilibrium states of geodesic flows and applications” published in the Journal of Modern Dynamics on February 10. The article focuses on statistical properties of equilibrium states on non-uniformly hyperbolic surfaces and strategies for working with the geometry there. The article can be read here.

Three faculty and two students joined over 5,000 mathematicians at the largest math gathering in the world, the Joint Mathematics Meetings, in Washington, D.C. from January 4–7. Those attending participated in events sponsored by the American Mathematical Society (AMS), Pi Mu Epsilon (PME), and the Special Interest Group of the Mathematical Association of America (SIGMAA). Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr co-presented “Difference Distance Magic Digraphs” in the AMS special session on research results by mathematicians from the EDGE Program. She also participated in multiple events in her capacity as co-Director of EDGE. Marr stayed an extra day in D.C. to participate in #MathSciOnTheHill Day, joining over 250 mathematicians advocating for mathematics funding on Capitol Hill, where she was joined by SU alumna Daniela Beckelhymer ’20. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Optimizing Under Constraints: Developing a Compact Undergraduate Research Program” in the SIGMAA special session on showcasing undergraduate research experiences. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton organized and co-chaired an AMS special session sponsored by SIMIODE on “Creating, Doing, and Sharing Modeling Approaches to Teaching Differential Equations.” Ioana Burlacu ’26 and Ashlyn Cadena ’27 presented “Perimeter-minimizing rectangles using density M|x|^p + N|y|^q” in the AMS-PME Undergraduate Poster Session. This research was supervised by Ross as part of SURF 2025.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was invited by the Mathematical Association of America SIGMAA – Undergraduate Research group to co-present a webinar with Dr. Elizabeth Reid at Marist University on designing manageable and meaningful undergraduate projects. She talked about her students’ innovative ideas for application projects in Linear Algebra and Geometry and how some of these have led to continued research beyond the semester, presentations at regional and national conferences, and in one case, an award-winning publication.

Computer science and theatre double major Aidan Balakrishnan ’26, computer science and mathematics double major Tanner Klein ’26, and computer science major Matthew Volkin ’26 participated in the Association of Computing Machinery’s South Central USA Regional Programming Contest on November 8, solving seven out of 13 problems. Their team, the pi-rates, placed 4th among the 20 teams in the South Central USA Division. They participated in the competition at the University of Texas at Austin site, but were in competition with teams at other sites throughout the South Central USA Region. Teams in the Mid-Atlantic USA Region and Southeast USA Region competed on the same day, and across the entire conference, the pi-rates placed 17th out of 94 teams. The team was coached by Associate Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.

Five mathematics majors presented preliminary work on their mathematics capstone projects at the 20th Annual Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference held this year at St. Mary’s University on October 17-18. Kristian Duddridge ’26 presented “What’s magical about hexagonal tiling?” Tanner Klein ’26 presented “A Different Type of Circuit: Exploring Graph Theory in Mario Kart World.” Sebastian Loder ’26 presented “Snakes and Snowmen: Exploring new classes of graphs within the Game of Cycles.” Kacy Miller ’26 presented “Path-finding and Patterns in Free Flow.” Avery Weatherly ’25 presented “Pip Pip Hooray! A mathematical exploration of Pips, a New York Times Game.” All five projects are being supervised by Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr, who also attended the conference and moderated a session of talks. Daisy Orozco ’27 and Joshua Rodkey ’29 also attended the conference.

Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr co-organized the successful Applied Mathematical Intersections (AMI) conference (celebrating the work of Dr. Ami Radunskaya) from October 3-5 at Pomona College. The conference kicked off Friday night with a math/music/Ami themed scavenger hunt and concluded Sunday morning with a reflection-based discussion of the weekend’s activities. In between, there was a music jam, an improv workshop, hands-on activities, collaborative problem solving sessions, a poster session, and two dual talks (inspired by our very own Paideia Connections lectures) that each featured one musician and one mathematician. Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer also attended and led the logic puzzles hands-on activity. More information about the conference is available here.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was invited by the Simons Foundation to be a math consultant to botanical gardens for their Math in Bloom program, part of the Infinite Sums initiative that seeks to make the beauty of mathematics accessible to a wide audience through programming initiated by non-mathematicians. Horticulturalists and directors from five botanical gardens around the country gathered at the San Antonio Botanical Garden to brainstorm ideas for a pi day (3/14), infinity day (8/8), and Fibonacci day (11/23) that will take place in 2026. More information is available here.

Three faculty and an alumna participated in the 2025 MathFest, a national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) in Sacramento, CA from August 6–10. Professor and Duncan Chair of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura presented “Linear Algebra Class Projects to Research Projects.” Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Trying, Flailing, Tweaking, Succeeding: A Grading Journey” and served on a Project NExT panel titled “Navigating the Shifting Tides of Academia in 2025.” Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Cholera Models with Pathogen Growth for Student Engagement in Undergraduate Differential Equations and Beyond.” She also co-organized the contributed paper session, “In the Real with Applications of Differential Equations for Learning,” jointly sponsored by SIMIODE and CODEE. Futamura, Marr, and Shelton also each provided professional service in monitoring MAA minicourses. Mathematics and computer science graduate Emma Kathryn Groves ’17 was a co-author on a presentation “Assigning Interconnected Projects in a Dynamical Systems Course.” She also co-organized the contributed paper session “From Theory to Practice – Applying Literature-Based Teaching Practices in the Real Classroom.” Dr. Groves achieved her Ph.D. in 2023 and is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences at the United States Military Academy in West Point, NY.

Professor and Duncan Chair of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura presented a workshop on “Writing a Mathematical Art Manifesto” at the Bridges Math Art Conference in Eindhoven, Netherlands. Attended by artists, mathematicians, and those in between, the exercise prompted interesting discussions that explored the boundaries of what might be considered mathematical art, its reception in the math and art worlds, and its rich connection to feminine and indigenous arts: textiles, weaving, knots, crochet, tiling, quilting, basketmaking, etc.

Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was selected as an awardee of the Simons Foundation Open Interval Program, alongside artist and Assistant Professor of Design at the University of Texas at Austin Jiabao Li and co-director of Austin’s Fusebox arts organization Ron Berry. The trio was one of 15 selected from across the country to embark on seven months of “unbounded exploration.” They gathered with the other artists, scientists, and leaders of arts organizations in upstate New York to brainstorm and collaborate on research around the theme of symmetry. More information is available here.

John H. Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was invited to give two talks at Indiana University Indianapolis (formerly IUPUI). She was the keynote speaker at the award ceremony for the IU Indianapolis High School Math Contest, and also gave a talk at the mathematics department colloquium. Both talks were on her research using mathematical perspective and projective geometry to analyze art.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave a plenary talk on April 11 at the Infinite Possibilities 2025 conference held at the Institute for Mathematical and Statistical Innovation at the University of Chicago. Her talk was titled “It Takes a Village(r)” and called for the audience to examine who is in their lives, who they are responsible for, and to think about adding to their community.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the local invited speaker at the Math For All Austin conference on April 5. She spoke about how we can find interesting geometry all around us if we keep our eyes open for cone points in a talk titled “Embracing Hyperbolicity.”

Three faculty and eight students participated in the 2025 meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America, which took place March 28–29 at Prairie View A&M University. Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr served on the Executive Committee as the section’s chair-elect. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross also served on the Executive Committee, in the role of Digital Media Editor. Ross also serves as a co-leader of Section NExT, a professional development program for early-career mathematicians. As part of his work for NExT, he led “Inquiry without Overhaul,” a session on introducing inquiry-based learning into mathematics classes in easy-to-digest pieces. Three students presented. Clay Elliott ’26 presented “Linear Algebra Behind Satisfactory,” which featured work done in his Linear Algebra class with Lord Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura. Georgia Micknal ’25 and Avery Weatherly ’25 presented “Antimagic Polydominoes,” which featured research done with Marr. Assistant Professor of Instruction of Mathematics Will Tran also attended, as did students Caytie Brown ’27, Ashlyn Cadena ’27, Camille James ’26, Robert Karcher ’27, and Dash Puentes ’27. All eight students competed in the Math Bowl as part of two different teams on Friday. Both teams finished in the top half of all teams competing.

Three faculty and an alumnus participated in the 2025 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle, WA from January 8-12. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Fast-flipping a Calculus 3 Class using AI help” in the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Contributed Paper Session on “Using AI in Mathematics Instruction.” This was sponsored by the MAA special interest group on artificial intelligence. Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr served on a panel to talk about the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Summer Program (edgeforwomen.org). The panel was sponsored by IGEN, the Inclusive Graduate Education Network, which is a part of the National Science Foundation’s INCLUDES alliance: Inclusion across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science. Marr has been Co-Director of the EDGE Summer Program since 2020. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “ODEs and the Flu” in the American Mathematical Society (AMS) Special Session on “Modeling Matters in Teaching and Learning Differential Equations,” sponsored by SIMIODE. Computational mathematics and psychology alumna Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 co-organized the AMS Special Session on “Math Research Community Climate Science at the Interface between Topological Data Analysis and Dynamical Systems Theory.” Beckelhymer has completed the M.S. in Mathematics and is working towards a Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Minnesota.

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science had a good showing at the Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC) at the University of Texas at Tyler on November 9. Six mathematics majors presented preliminary work on their mathematics capstone projects under the supervision of Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton. Yasmine Soto ’25 presented “Spinning Stories: A Mathematical Model of Rumor Dynamics.” Christopher Garza ’25 and Leo Schoch-Spana ’25 presented “Developing Models for Lung Cancer in the United States.” Assistant Professor of Instruction in Statistics Jean Remy Habimana is a statistics consultant on the project and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura is a consultant on the software implementation. Isabella Robinson ’25 presented “Modeling Monarch Butterfly Populations.” Cole Thomson ’25 presented “Analysis of Music retention and popularity on Billboard’s 100.” Jadyn Rhodes-Cruse ’25 presented “Comparing Maternal Mortality.” Shelton and Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross attended and helped the group of students. Ross also co-led sessions in the Mathematical Association of America’s (MAA) Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) program, providing support for faculty in their first few years of teaching. Biochemistry major Daisy Orozco ’27 also attended.

Ashlyn Cadena ’27, Olive Forrest ’26, Andres Garza ’27, Amanda Mejia ’27, Olivia Johnson ’26, and Professor of Chemistry Emily Niemeyer attended the 2024 National Science Foundation (NSF) S-STEM Scholars and Principal Investigator Meeting in Chicago, IL. In addition to interacting with other S-STEM Scholars from around the country and attending workshops and professional development sessions, three Scholars presented their research in conference sessions. Garza’s poster, titled “Laser induced synthesis of cobalt oxide oxygen evolution catalysts,” described work he completed during a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program at Texas State University. Mejia presented a poster, “Granular hydrogel synthesis for comparable in vitro model of brain parenchyma tissue,” which is based on her ongoing research with Assistant Professor of Physics Cody Crosby. Cadena’s poster, “Perimeter Minimizing Rectangles in R2 with density M|x| + N|y|,” described her collaborative research with other Southwestern math students, Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross, and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics Lauren Ross.

Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr, Adjunct Professor of Mathematics Lauren Ross, SU alumni Kathryn Altman ’24, Lauren Calzado ’23, Emma Lewis ’23, Rowan Via ’23, and two additional co-authors published the paper “Difference Distance Magic Oriented Graphs” in Research in the Mathematical Sciences. The print version of the paper will appear in a special issue of the journal, titled “Cutting EDGE Mathematics: Celebrating the 25th Anniversary of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Program.” The online version is available here. 

Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr was one of four invited speakers at the Midwest Conference on Combinatorics and Combinatorial Computing held in Duluth, MN from October 18-20. Her 50-minute Friday afternoon address, titled “Three Puzzles I’m Pondering Presently,” also served as an undergraduate colloquium for math majors at the University of Minnesota-Duluth.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the American Institute of Mathematics’ Invited Speaker at the Modern Mathematics Workshop at the SACNAS NDiSTEM conference in Phoenix, AZ on October 30. She presented “Unique Equilibrium States for Geodesic Flows.”

Mathematics and biochemistry major Brian Armijo ’25 presented “A Hidden Markov Model for Parkinson’s Disease Progression” at the Texas-Louisiana Section Meeting of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). His poster presents preliminary work on his mathematics capstone under the supervision of Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton. Armijo is also a Dixon Scholar and Southwestern’s first Goldwater Scholar in 30 years.

Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr, along with colleagues she met while presenting on a panel at MathFest 2019, published an article titled “Domino Antimagic Squares and Rectangles” in Recreational Mathematics Magazine. The article can be found here.

Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Duncan Chair and Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura presented at the 2024 Fall Central Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in San Antonio, TX. Dr. Marr presented her talk, “Domino Antimagic Configurations,” in the Special Session on Enumerative Combinatorics, and Dr. Futamura presented her talk/workshop, “Drawing in Geometry Students with Drawing Puzzles,” in the Special Session on Inquiry Oriented Learning in the Mathematics Classroom.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer co-organized the hybrid conference, Big Ideas in Dynamics and Geometry. The event was held at University of Illinois Chicago (UIC) and on Zoom on September 27-29, and was co-organized with Benjamin Call and Laura Schaposnik at UIC. Big Ideas in Dynamics and Geometry focused on the intersections of dynamics and geometry and exposing early career mathematicians to future research directions. Additionally, the conference served as the kickoff event for the fourth semester of the reading program for early career mathematicians, Big Ideas in Dynamics, also organized by Benjamin Call and Noelle Sawyer.

Professor of Mathematics and John H. Duncan Chair Fumiko Futamura signed a book contract with Princeton University Press for a general audience book tentatively titled Projecting Spaces. The book is primarily about 2D art and how artists set the stage for their visual stories by playing with oblique and linear perspectives (this is where she sneaks in a little mathematical analysis), enhanced and impossible realities (more math), flatness and depth (math), and movement and still snapshots (physics?). The artwork explored in the book ranges from Renaissance paintings to 3D billboards and Radiohead t-shirts, and artists range from Leonardo da Vinci and Albrecht Dürer to Hokusai and Njideka Akunyili Crosby. The book will likely come out in 2027.

The Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America recently held officer elections and finalized positions for the Executive Committee. Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr has been elected to serve in the three year Chair role (Chair-Elect, Chair, and Past-Chair). Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross has also been appointed as the Digital Media Editor.

Four faculty members were active at MathFest, the national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), on August 7-11, in Indianapolis, IN. Associate Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Turning a Geometry Project into a Geometry Festival” in the contributed paper session on “Building Community in Mathematics Departments.” Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Difference Distance Magic Oriented Graphs” in the MAA invited paper session (aligned with an MAA invited address) on “Matching and Labelings in Graphs.” Marr also served on the panel “Creating Successful Study Abroad Programs in Mathematics” to discuss the mathematics courses she offered as part of Southwestern’s London program. Professor and Lord Chair of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a workshop, “Geometric Puzzles and Brain Teasers in Perspective Art,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College and Marc Frantz of Indiana University. This was sponsored by the MAA special interest group “Mathematics and the Arts.” Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Student Modeling Projects in Sports” in the contributed paper session on “Math and Sports.” She also co-organized the contributed paper session “Differential Equations Student Activities and Projects, Big and Small” with Brian Winkel of SIMIODE, Rosemary Farley and Patrice Tiffany of Manhattan College, and Pushpi Paranamana of St. Mary’s College.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the Keynote speaker at the inaugural Mid-Atlantic Regional Math Alliance Conference. Her talk was titled “I am not a Mathematician” and contained a guide to current issues in the field of mathematics, current issues in academia, recent student arrests on US campuses at protests, and some advice for faculty who want to do better. The talk was intended to guide some discussion and goals of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Math Alliance.

From a pool of more than 5,000 applicants, biochemistry/mathematics junior and Dixon Scholar Brian Armijo ’25 was selected as a 2024 Goldwater scholar - SU’s first ever! The Goldwater Scholarship Program, one of the oldest and most prestigious national scholarships in the natural sciences, engineering, and mathematics in the United States, seeks to identify, encourage, and financially support college sophomores and juniors who show exceptional promise of becoming this nation’s next generation of research leaders in these fields.

Four Mathematics faculty and five students participated in the 2024 Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held March 22-23 in San Marcos, TX. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Mathematical Modeling Projects.” Shelton also performed administrative duties as past Representative of the Texas MAA to the association level MAA Congress, and she served as the Department Liaison. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross participated in Project NeXT sessions. Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr and Professor and Lord Chair of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura attended. Alley Koenig ’24 presented “Subtractive Edge Magic Labelings” resulting from the capstone project supervised by Marr, and Kathryn Altman ’24 presented “​​Difference Distance Magic Oriented Graphs,” also supervised by Marr. ​​Amanda Mejia ’27, Camille James ’27, and Kate Dennis ’27 participated in the Calculus Bowl. 

Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr and Associate Professor at the University of Minnesota-Duluth Bryan Freyberg published the paper “Neighborhood Balanced Colorings of Graphs” in Graphs and Combinatorics. The article can be read here.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer recently published a review in Nature of the documentary Journeys of Black Mathematicians: Forging Resilience. The review can be read here.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in January in San Francisco, where she spoke about the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Summer program as an invited panelist in the AMS Committee on Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Panel Discussion: Successful Programs that Support Equity, Diversity and Inclusion.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr gave the keynote address titled “The Edges of my Mathematical Life” at the Yellowhammer Network of Women in the Mathematical Sciences Workshop at the University of Alabama.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave two invited talks in February. On February 7th, she spoke at the University of Illinois Chicago about geodesic currents and how to use them as a tool. On February 12, she spoke at the University of Wisconsin-Madison about a work in progress with her collaborators on statistical properties of CAT(0) spaces.

Kathryn Altman ’24 and Alleen Koenig ’24 gave a poster presentation at the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM). Their poster was on the summer research they performed in which they used mathematical modeling to study the effects of gravitropism on the structure of tomato plant root system architectures.

Assistant Professor of Math Noelle Sawyer is a Mathematically Gifted and Black 2024 Black History Month honoree. You can find the profile here.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was featured in a video interview in the Meet a Mathematician series on December 30th, 2023. The mission of Meet a Mathematician is to share stories of mathematicians from different backgrounds, especially from historically excluded groups, with the aim of introducing students to role models and fostering a sense of community. Watch the video here.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura wrote a grant proposal on behalf of the Japan-America Society of Greater Austin (JASGA) for the Japan Foundation’s Japan-America Society Capacity Building Grant Program. She currently serves as a board member of JASGA, a non-profit organization that provides Japanese classes, cultural programming, and events in the Austin area. She learned a great deal about grant writing through this process and valuable conversations with the associate program director. The proposal was accepted, and JASGA received $26,625 to support its programs and staff.

Five students presented four talks at the Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC), and four more students attended. The conference was held at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas, on October 27-28, 2023. Adrianna Flores-Vivas ’24 presented “Wolf Reintegration in Yellowstone National Park.” Ashley Odell ’24 and Madison Williams ’24 presented “Does Money Really Buy Happiness?”. Blue Goodson ’24 presented “The Mathematical Artistry of Portrait Making.” Johanna Campbell ’24 presented “To the Heart of the Milky Way.” The speakers gave preliminary presentations of their mathematics capstone projects under the supervision of Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton. Associate Professor of Physics Mark Bottorf co-supervised Cambell’s. Shelton also moderated two sessions of student talks. Zoe Kincaid ’24 attended, and first-year S-STEM/EQUIP students Amanda Mejia ’27, Juliana Elizondo ’27, and Alyanna Martinez ’27 also attended. The TUMC is partially supported by the National Science Foundation grant DMS-2226539. The Atkin Junior Professorship in Mathematics for Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer provided funding.

In her role as co-director of the EDGE summer program, Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr attended and co-organized EDGE25: Mobilizing the Power of Diversity at Bryn Mawr College from October 12-14. She co-MCed the Thursday night reunion of over 150 EDGE alumna. One of the tasks involved in this role was creating a slideshow of 25 years of EDGE photos and a 20-minute video compilation of 25 years of EDGE talent shows. She also MC-ed the closing session on Saturday, introducing the final three talks of the conference. SU and EDGE alumna Elyssa Sliheet ’19 and Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 were also in attendance. The full schedule of dynamic speakers across multiple disciplines can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer accepted an invitation to join the Human Resources Board of the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM). The board advises AIM in supporting its goals of increasing the participation of traditionally under-represented groups in mathematics and junior researchers and researchers at primarily undergraduate institutions in AIM programming.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross has had a paper accepted for publication in the Annals of Global Analysis and Geometry. The paper, “Solution to the n-bubble problem on R with log-concave density,” extends the results of his work with his SCOPE students (mentioned above) in two meaningful ways: it allows for configurations of any number of bubbles (not just 3 or 4), and it relaxes the restrictions on the density function being considered

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross, in collaboration with students Emily Burns ’21, Zariah Whyte ’21, Jesse Stovall ’22, and Evan Alexander ’22, now Coordinator of Student Activities, published an article titled “Isoperimetric 3- and 4-Bubble Results on R With Density |x|.” The paper looks at a mathematical space called a dense number line and explores the geometry of 3- or 4-bubble configurations in this space. The results presented in this article are the result of SCOPE summer research in the summers of 2020 and 2021 and is published in the PUMP Journal of Undergraduate Research.

Professor of Mathematics and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr published an article, “Collaboratively Re-envisioning Calculus for the Modern Student,” with co-authors Joel Kilty and Alex McAllister from Centre College in the MAA Notes series “Justice Through the Lens of Calculus: Framing New Possibilities for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion.” The article discusses the collaborative work Southwestern and Centre’s mathematics faculty did in creating our new Modern Calculus sequence. Read the article here.

Three faculty members presented at MathFest, the national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America, on August 2-7, 2023, in Tampa, FL. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Using R Projects to Explore Regression” in the Contributed Paper Session on Activities in Statistics and Data Science. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a four-hour Professional Enhancement Program, “Visualizing Projective Geometry Through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Resources for Faculty and Students” in the Contributed Paper Session on Teaching and Learning of Differential Equations.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton co-led an intense four-day virtual workshop, “Active Learning in Differential Equations Inspired by Modeling,” in June 2023 for 26 faculty participants from diverse institutions and backgrounds. In its second year, this workshop is part of the Online Professional Enhancement and Capacity Building for Instructional Practices in Undergraduate Mathematics (OPEN Math) program. OPEN Math is a collaborative project between the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) and the University of Colorado, Boulder (CU-B). Support for OPEN Math is provided by the National Science Foundation: MAA Award DUE-2111260 and CU-B Award DUE-2111273.

Southwestern had a great showing at the 2023 Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America, held March 24-26 in Stephenville, TX. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr received the 2023 Ron Barnes Distinguished Service to Students Award, given in recognition of faculty who have distinguished themselves through service and support of undergraduate students within the Texas Section. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton received the 2023 Distinguished Service Award in recognition of faculty who have demonstrated exceptional service to the Texas Section. Shelton also served as Departmental Liaison and participated in the Business Meeting. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross participated in the Project NeXT session. President Emeritus of Southwestern University and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics Edward Burger presented an invited plenary talk, “Paper folding for the organically challenged: Uncovering beauty and structure through effective thinking.” We had eight student presentations, one of which won an award, by 13 students and one alum. This was the most student presentations by far of any institution besides the host institution. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura supervised the following student talks: Zek McCormick ’24: “Applying Linear Algebra to Penrose Tilings” won an award for Best Student Paper Within a Session, Oliver Johnson ’24: “How accurately did Van Eyck paint the chandelier in the Arnolfini Portrait? A geometric analysis contributing to a decades-old debate,” and Isabella Robinson ’25, Oliver Johnson ’24: “Solving Sudoku Puzzles Through Linear Algebra.” Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr supervised the following student talks: Anderson Johnson ’24, Paige Thompson ’26, Kyla Gorman ’21: “Domino Antimagic Configurations,” Alley Koenig ’24, Casandra Nunez ’26: “Subtractive Edge Magic Labelings,” Kathryn Altman ’24, Lauren Calzado ’23: “An Exploration of Difference Distance Magic Graph Labelings,” and Aaron Garza ’26, Kaiden Salaz ’26: “What is the smallest area? A parabolic parable.” Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton supervised the following student talk: Emma Lewis ’23, Jillian Reese ’23: “An ODD Look at Theorems in Differential Equations.” This work was funded with a grant from the Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics, collaborating with a student team at the University of North Texas-Denton, supervised by Joe Iaia. A team of four students competed in the Math Bowl: Altman, Calzado, Koenig, and Jess Kazmir ’23, Yasmine Soto ’25, and Adrianna Flores-Vivas ’24 also attended the meeting.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the invited faculty speaker at the Underrepresented Students in Topology and Algebra Research Symposium (USTARS) on March 18-19. She gave a presentation called “Rigidity in Math and Mathematicians,” covering her work in marked length spectrum rigidity and the rigidity mathematicians force upon each other to conform to the field’s norms.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave two invited talks on her work, “Unique Equilibrium States for Geodesic Flows on Translation Surfaces,” last week. Once at a conference called A Dynamical Weekend at Wesleyan on March 4 and once at the University of Houston’s Dynamics Seminar on March 9.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, with co-authors Bonnie Henderson ’18 and Michael Gebhardt ’16, published a chapter, “Acrobatics in a Parametric Arena,” in Mathematics Research for the Beginning Student. The volume is part of the book series, Foundation for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (FURM), which is devoted to increasing access to undergraduate research opportunities. Parts of Gebhardt’s and Henderson’s Mathematics capstone projects supervised by Shelton were included in this chapter. Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean aided in data collection from video capture software generated by Henderson’s juggling of flower sticks in the fall of 2017. Research Assistants for this project included E. Wilson Cook ’22, Audrey Schumacher ’23, and Emily Thompson ’22

Three faculty members and a student joined over five thousand mathematicians at the largest math gathering in the world, Joint Mathematics Meetings, in Boston, MA, January 4-7, 2023. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the undergraduate mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) were among the fifteen partner professional organizations. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Isoperimetric solutions to a 1-dimensional problem within regions and log-concave density” in the AMS Contributed Paper Session on Topics in Analysis and Control Theory. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a four-hour Professional Enhancement Program, “Visualizing Projective Geometry Through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Distance Magic Labelings of Directed Graphs” in the AMS Special Session on The Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Program (EDGE): Pure and Applied Talks by Women Math Warriors. She also participated in multiple events in her capacity as Co-director of EDGE. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Cars, Competition, and Cholera” in the AMS Special Session on Stimulating Student Engagement in Differential Equations through Modeling Activities. Oliver Johnson ’24 presented “Perspective Analysis of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait” in the PME Contributed Session on Research by Undergraduates. This research was supervised by Futamura.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with students Sarah Friday ’21, Jordan Smith ’21, and Aaron Waclawczyk ’21, published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications. The paper “Powers of Defective Matrices From Diagonalizable Dilations” resulted from research started during SCOPE in the summer of 2019. The article can be found here.

Three faculty members and a student joined over five thousand mathematicians at the largest math gathering in the world, Joint Mathematics Meetings, in Boston, MA, January 4-7, 2023. The American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the undergraduate mathematics honor society Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) were among the fifteen partner professional organizations. Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Isoperimetric solutions to a 1-dimensional problem within regions and log-concave density” in the AMS Contributed Paper Session on Topics in Analysis and Control Theory. Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura co-led a four-hour Professional Enhancement Program, “Visualizing Projective Geometry Through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Distance Magic Labelings of Directed Graphs” in the AMS Special Session on The Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education Program (EDGE): Pure and Applied Talks by Women Math Warriors. She also participated in multiple events in her capacity as Co-director of EDGE. Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Cars, Competition, and Cholera” in the AMS Special Session on Stimulating Student Engagement in Differential Equations through Modeling Activities. Oliver Johnson ’24 presented “Perspective Analysis of Van Eyck’s Arnolfini Portrait” in the PME Contributed Session on Research by Undergraduates. This research was supervised by Futamura.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with students Sarah Friday ’21, Jordan Smith ’21, and Aaron Waclawczyk ’21, published a peer-reviewed article in the journal Linear Algebra and its Applications. The paper “Powers of Defective Matrices From Diagonalizable Dilations” resulted from research started during SCOPE in the summer of 2019. The article can be found here.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer and Benjamin Call (University of Illinois Chicago) applied for and won funding from the American Institute of Mathematics to organize a research community called Big Ideas in Dynamics in 2023. They will have 3-5 experts in dynamical systems give talks on one of the “big ideas” that underlies one of their papers. These talks will serve as jumping-off points for graduate student reading groups centered on the associated papers. Each paper will have an assigned mentor for graduate students to reach out to. Sawyer and Call hope to have the reading groups culminate in graduate students giving expository talks at a conference on the details of the paper and discussing related open problems.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer and Benjamin Call (University of Illinois Chicago) applied for and won funding from the American Institute of Mathematics to organize a research community called Big Ideas in Dynamics in 2023. They will have 3-5 experts in dynamical systems give talks on one of the “big ideas” that underlies one of their papers. These talks will serve as jumping-off points for graduate student reading groups centered on the associated papers. Each paper will have an assigned mentor for graduate students to reach out to. Sawyer and Call hope to have the reading groups culminate in graduate students giving expository talks at a conference on the details of the paper and discussing related open problems.

A wonderful interdisciplinary group from Southwestern participated in the 17th Annual Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC), held this year at the University of Texas at Austin on October 29. Carson Vogel ’23 presented “Modeling Heat Transfer.” This project is a continuation of the 2021 and 2022 SCOPE projects under the supervision of Professor of Physics Steven Alexander and Associate Professor of Physics Mark Bottorf. This work is part of ongoing efforts for the eventual development of a solar energy storage cell; a problem brought to Southwestern by Coordinator of Science Facilities and Equipment Oscar Lee Fellows. Melanie Richey ’23 presented “Rats on the Run: Modeling of Hippocampal Cell Activity Using Plasticity.” Her project is a continuation of a 2022 Research Experience for Undergraduates at Southern Methodist University under the supervision of Dr. Katie Hedrick in collaboration with Dr. Brad E. Pfeiffer, Department of Neuroscience, UT Southwestern Medical Center. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton also attended the conference. Marr chaired a student presentation session. Shelton supervised Vogel’s and Richey’s current work, preliminary results for their mathematics capstone projects. Jillian Reese ’23 and Emma Lewis ’23 joined with their counterparts from the University of North Texas-Denton in research with Shelton and Dr. Joe Iaia, funded through the Council for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. Other students also attended: Oliver Johnson ’23, Jess Kazmir ’23, Lauren Calzado ’23, Rowan Via ’23, Kathryn Altman ’24, and Aidan Bujanda-Moore ’23. Majors and minors among our student attendees included Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Education, Spanish, and Political Science.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, with co-authors Bonnie Henderson ’18 and Michael Gebhardt ’16, published a chapter, “Acrobatics in a Parametric Arena,” in Mathematics Research for the Beginning Student. The volume is part of the book series, Foundation for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (FURM), which is devoted to increasing access to undergraduate research opportunities. Parts of Gebhardt’s and Henderson’s Mathematics capstone projects supervised by Shelton were included in this chapter. Professor of Kinesiology Scott McLean aided in data collection from video capture software generated by Henderson’s juggling of flower sticks in the fall of 2017. Research Assistants for this project included E. Wilson Cook ’22, Audrey Schumacher ’23, and Emily Thompson ’22.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer gave an invited talk titled “Geodesic Currents and the Boundary at Infinity” in the Geometry Seminar at George Mason University on Monday, November 14th.

A wonderful interdisciplinary group from Southwestern participated in the 17th Annual Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC), held this year at the University of Texas at Austin on October 29. Carson Vogel ’23 presented “Modeling Heat Transfer.” This project is a continuation of the 2021 and 2022 SCOPE projects under the supervision of Professor of Physics Steven Alexander and Associate Professor of Physics Mark Bottorf. This work is part of ongoing efforts for the eventual development of a solar energy storage cell; a problem brought to Southwestern by Coordinator of Science Facilities and Equipment Oscar Lee Fellows. Melanie Richey ’23 presented “Rats on the Run: Modeling of Hippocampal Cell Activity Using Plasticity.” Her project is a continuation of a 2022 Research Experience for Undergraduates at Southern Methodist University under the supervision of Dr. Katie Hedrick in collaboration with Dr. Brad E. Pfeiffer, Department of Neuroscience, UT Southwestern Medical Center. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton also attended the conference. Marr chaired a student presentation session. Shelton supervised Vogel’s and Richey’s current work, preliminary results for their mathematics capstone projects. Jillian Reese ’23 and Emma Lewis ’23 joined with their counterparts from the University of North Texas-Denton in research with Shelton and Dr. Joe Iaia, funded through the Council for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics. Other students also attended: Oliver Johnson ’23, Jess Kazmir ’23, Lauren Calzado ’23, Rowan Via ’23, Kathryn Altman ’24, and Aidan Bujanda-Moore ’23. Majors and minors among our student attendees included Mathematics, Computational Mathematics, Physics, Economics, Education, Spanish, and Political Science.

On October 20th, Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer was the speaker at the  University of Toronto’s Department of Mathematics Equity Forum in a talk she called “Abstracting  People out of Mathematics.” The goal of the Equity Forum is to create a space and time that  invites people to think about underserved students, marginalized colleagues, and postdocs, take  a serious look at the mathematical culture we promote and propagate to math majors, graduate  students, and colleagues. In particular, Sawyer spoke about how math culture and community are  harmful to us and the ways that we are still perpetuating the harm that was done to us. The  conversation focused on and reminded the audience that people will always be more important  than math.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer coauthored a paper titled “Unique Equilibrium States for Geodesic Flows on Flat Surfaces with Singularities” that has been accepted for publication by International Mathematics Research Notices.  The paper, written with Dave Constantine of Wesleyan University, Benjamin Call of the University of Illinois Chicago , Alena Erchenko of the University of Chicago , and Grace Work of the University of Illinois, is the result of three years of work that was partly sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented research titled “The Isoperimetric Problem on the Number Line with a Log-Concave Density” at MathFest, a conference hosted by the Mathematical Association of America, held August 3–6 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura  gave a talk titled “Curious Invariants in Projective Geometry, and Where to Find them in Art and Music” at the Rice University Undergraduate Colloquium in Houston, Texas, on April 5. 

Members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science attended the 2022 Annual Meeting of the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America (Texas MAA), held March 31–April 2 at the University of North Texas, the first in-person Texas MAA meeting since 2019. 

• Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “An n-bubble Result on a Dense Number Line.” Ross also participated in the professional development program of the Texas New Experiences in Teaching (NExT), held in conjunction with the Texas MAA meeting. 
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “From Cars to Competition to Cholera: Math Models in Differential Equations.” As section representative to the national governing body, the MAA Congress, Shelton also led events at the executive committee meeting, the business meeting, and more.
• Emily Thompson  ’22 presented “Using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) to Create Models of Complex Curves,” which was the result of her mathematics capstone from fall 2022, supervised by Shelton. 
• Mel Richey ’23 and Kevan Kennedy ’24 attended the conference. 

Professor and Garey Chair of Mathematics Alison Marr coauthored an article titled “D-Magic Oriented Graphs” that was published in a special edition of the journal Symmetry, “Graph Labelings and Their Applications.” The paper was written with Rino Simanjuntak from the Bandung Institute of Technology.

Senior computational mathematics major Emily Thompson’22 presented “Using Neural Ordinary Differential Equations (NODEs) to Create Models of Complex Curves” at the 16th Annual Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference, held virtually October 30. The work is from her ongoing mathematics capstone project supervised by Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer  was one of four mathematicians quoted in a Scientific American  article about the mathematics community titled “ Modern Mathematics Confronts Its White, Patriarchal Past .”

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura cotaught a virtual minicourse for instructors along with her colleagues Annalisa Crannell (Franklin & Marshall College) and Marc Frantz (Indiana University). The minicourse, titled Gaining Perspective on Geometry: IBL Activities That Use Art in Projective Geometry, ran June 8, 15, 22, and 29 through the Mathematical Association of America virtual programming and covered perspective drawing, Desargues’s Theorem, the cross ratio, and perspective collineations.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton led a week-long virtual workshop, Model Instructors in Differential Equations (MINDE), with coleaders Rosemary Farley and Patrice Tiffany (Manhattan College) and Brian Winkel (SIMIODE). This work was supported by a grant (#1940532) from the National Science Foundation.

Physics and mathematics major Gerardo Gonzalez ’22 gave a talk at the 2021 spring meeting of the American Physical Society (Texas Section) titled “Transition Probabilities for a Relativistic One-Electron Atom.” Most of the research presented during this talk resulted from a 2019 SCOPE project that Gonzalez completed with Professor of Physics Steven Alexander. They are currently working on a paper that will describe their calculations.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton has a peer-reviewed paper, “Mathematical Modeling Projects: Success For All Students,” published in the journal PRIMUS: Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies. DOI: 10.1080/10511970.2016.124932. The paper appeared online in February 2017 and will appear in the April 2018 print issue (Volume 28, Number 4).

Associate Professor of Math and Computer Science Jacob Schrum has had two peer-reviewed submissions accepted to the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, which will be held virtually in July 2021. Both submissions were written by undergraduate coauthors who participated in SCOPE during the summer of 2020: Benjamin Capps ’23 had a full paper, titled “Using Multiple Generative Adversarial Networks to Build Better-Connected Levels for Mega Man,” accepted for publication in the proceedings and will present the paper orally at the conference. Kirby Steckel ’21 had a poster paper accepted to the conference. A two-page extended abstract of his paper, “Illuminating the Space of Beatable Lode Runner Levels Produced by Various Generative Adversarial Networks,” will appear in the companion to the proceedings and will be presented at the conference’s virtual poster session.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton and Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross had a peer-reviewed paper, “Supermarkets, Highways, and Natural Gas Production: Statistics and Social Justice,” published in the journal PRIMUS: Problems, Resources, and Issues in Mathematics Undergraduate Studies. This work began with a 2016 ACS Workshop on Math for Social Justice.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton is a co-principal investigator with a newly awarded three-year grant from the National Science Foundation. This will support the mission of the mathematical community SIMIODE to encourage and support faculty in using modeling to motivate learning of differential equations in context. The award will fund faculty development, practitioner workshops, and more.

Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was a faculty scholar at the National Science Foundation RESET (Re-Enter STEM through Emerging Technology) 2021 Conference March 4–6, 2021. The conference focused on supporting the re-entry of women in STEM, especially in emerging technology fields, such as cybersecurity, data science, mobile development, and cloud computing.

Miryam Galvez ’23 presented at the 124th annual meeting of the Texas Academy of Sciences, which was held virtually February 26–27, 2021. The poster in the Mathematics and Computer Science section, titled “Using Python to Question Sincerity in Doodle Polls,” is the result of collaborative work with Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony and Chris Ojonta ’23 and was made possible by Southwestern’s Research Assistant funds and Sam Taylor Fellowship funds. A video describing the poster can be found here.

Elyssa Sliheet , class of 2019, won an award for an Outstanding Poster in the Student Poster Session of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) in San Diego, Calif. Jan. 9–13, 2018. Her work, “Shift Operators on Directed Infinite Graphs,” was conducted at an NSF-funded summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) with several other undergraduates under advisor Ruben Martinez-Avendao of Universidad Autónoma Del Estado De Hidalgo. There were over 500 posters in 16 topical categories at the JMM poster session. Awards were given for the top 15% in each category. Her travel was funded by the Southwestern Student Travel Fund, the MAA Student Travel Fund, and the NSF.

President Edward Burger was an invited speaker at an American Mathematical Society Special Session on Diophantine Approximation and Analytic Number Theory in Honor of Jeffrey Vaaler on Jan. 12 at the national Joint Mathematics Meetings held in San Diego, Calif. There he spoke on “Applications of orthogonality within non-archimedean and human contexts.” On Jan. 23, he delivered a public address on the future of undergraduate education at Johns Hopkins University as well as met with their president and engaged with their Commission on Education to assess their plans for the future.

Members of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science joined the virtual 2021 Joint Mathematics Meetings, with national meetings of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and more:

• Zariah Whyte ’21 and Evan Alexander ’22 presented the poster “Isoperimetric Problems on the Real Number Line with Prescribed Density” in the MAA Student Poster Session on Geometry. The presentation was based on work with Assistant Professor of Mathematics John D. Ross in SCOPE 2020.  
• Assistant Professor of Mathematics John D. Ross presented “On Curves That Generate Symmetric Lambda-Hypersurfaces” in the AMS Special Session on Analysis and Differential Equations at Undergraduate Institutions. 
• Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer presented “Marked Length Spectrum Rigidity with Partial Data” in the AMS–AWM Special Session on Women of Color in Topology and Algebra.
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “Student Engagement in Modeling Drugs, Disease, and More.” 
• Shelton co-organized the AMS Special Session on Adopt, Adapt, Assign Modeling Activities in Differential Equations.
• Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr also attended.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics Noelle Sawyer co-organized Black in Math Week, November 8–13, a social-media event to promote visibility and community among Black mathematicians. In one of the events for the week, Sawyer cohosted an episode of the podcast Relatively Prime about Black math educators. Black in Math Week is a part of a series of ‘Black in X’ weeks, which began with Black Birders Week to normalize Black people as a part of science communities after someone called 911 to report a Black birdwatcher in Central Park. You can find the Twitter account here and the podcast episode here.

Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented their paper “Directed Zagreb Indices” at the (virtual) 18th Cologne–Twente Workshop on Graphs and Combinatorial Optimization (CTW 2020). The presentation and slides are available here . Their paper will be published in the AIRO Springer Series  CTW 2020 Proceedings  in March. 

Professor of Mathematics Kendall Richards and Jordan Smith  ’20 coauthored the article “A Concavity Property of Generalized Complete Elliptic Integrals,” which has been accepted for publication in the journal Integral Transforms and Special Functions.  This collaboration began in an independent study last spring and continued into the summer. This fall, Smith began his graduate studies in mathematics at Baylor University.

Garey Chair and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr has been named the codirector of the Enhancing Diversity in Graduate Education (EDGE) Summer Program. EDGE was founded in 1998 and is a program for women about to enter Ph.D. programs in mathematics; it has now supported more than 100 women in earning their Ph.D.s. Marr is a proud member of EDGE 2002 and will codirect the program with fellow EDGE 2002 member Raegan Higgins, from Texas Tech University. Learn more here.

Eric Oden ’16 and coauthors Sanaz Aliari Kardehdeh, Bruce Golden, and Eric Oden received the Trevor Evans Award of the Mathematical Association of America for their article “ Experimental Graph Theory, ” which is accessible to undergraduates and was published during the preceding year in the journal Math Horizons  (2019). Oden majored in mathematics and physics at Southwestern and is currently in the Ph.D. program in applied mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, with coauthor Brian Winkel, professor emeritus of the U. S. Military Academy at West Point, developed a peer-reviewed classroom module, published by SIMIODE. The module implements mathematical modeling in differential equations. “3-034-S-CarSuspensions” is the student version, and “3-034-T-CarSuspensions” is the teacher version. This work was supported by National Science Foundation grant #1940532.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr coauthored a paper with colleagues from India, Slovakia, and Indonesia that is now online as part of the Journal of Discrete Mathematical Sciences and Cryptography. The article, “Note on In-Antimagicness and Out-Antimagicness of Digraphs,” was written at the 2014 International Workshop on Graph Labeling in India.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthon y coauthored a paper with Christine Chung from Connecticut College that will appear in a June 2020 volume of Theoretical Computer Science . The article, “ Equilibria in Doodle Polls under Three Tie-Breaking Rules ,” considers price of anarchy and price of stability in approval voting scenarios such as Doodle polls.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton has joined the editorial board for the CODEE Journal. The CODEE Journal is a peer-reviewed, open-access publication distributed by the CODEE (Community of Ordinary Differential Equations Educators) and published by the Claremont Colleges Library. It features original materials that promote the teaching and learning of ordinary differential equations.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross has joined the editorial board for the MAA Reviews. This outlet publishes reviews of undergraduate and graduate texts in mathematics and is hosted by the Mathematical Association of America. Ross joins the board as an associate editor of analysis.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony had a poster accepted to the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE ’20). While the March 2020 presentation in Portland, OR, was cancelled day-of because of COVID-19, the poster is now displayed in the revised virtual conference. The peer-reviewed work on “Introducing Parallelism to First-Year CS Majors” (with coauthors D. Cenk Erdil, Sacred Heart University; Olga Glebova, Georgia State University; and Robert Montante, Bloomsburg University) resulted from work begun at a weeklong training in August 2019 by the National Science Foundation–supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum has had two peer-reviewed papers accepted to appear in the proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Both papers were sparked by research collaborations with coauthors that began at the 2017 Dagstuhl Seminar on AI-Driven Game Design . SU computer science major Jake Gutierrez  ’22 later contributed to this line of research as part of SCOPE 2019, and major work finalizing the projects occurred as part of the 2019 Dagstuhl Seminar on Revolutions in Computational Game AI .

• “Interactive Evolution and Exploration within Latent Level–Design Space of Generative Adversarial Networks” was written along with Gutierrez and four other collaborators: Vanessa Volz, Jialin Liu, Simon Lucas, and Sebastian Risi. It presents a method for interactively designing video-game levels for Super Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda  using techniques that emulate the style of levels from the original games.
• “CPPN2GAN: Combining Compositional Pattern–Producing Networks and GANs for Large-Scale Pattern Generation” was written with Vanessa Volz and Sebastian Risi and focuses on a way of scaling up the levels generated by our method to very large spaces. This particular approach to encoding game levels still emulates levels from Mario and Zelda but can generate content of arbitrary size that is connected in a cohesive way.

Computer science major Jake Gutierrez ’22 and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum have had their peer-reviewed paper “Generative Adversarial Network Rooms in Generative Graph Grammar Dungeons for The Legend of Zelda” accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 2020 IEEE (Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers) Congress on Evolutionary Computation, which will be part of this year’s World Congress on Computational Intelligence. This research started as part of SCOPE 2019 and continued into fall 2019 with a human-subject study, which involved members of the SU community evaluating video-game dungeons created by the artificial-intelligence methods developed for the paper.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross and Professor of Mathematics Kendall Richards ’ book Introductory Analysis: An Inquiry Approach  was released by Taylor & Francis–CRC Press. The text is an inquiry-based exploration of the real number line, seriously examining fundamental topics in the field of real analysis. Beyond the main content, the text features an extended prologue that introduces readers to inquiry-based proof writing, as well as a suite of extended explorations into advanced special topics in the field. An early version of this text was read by SU math majors Morgan Engle  ’18 and Elyssa Sliheet  ’19, and improvements were made based on their suggestions.

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science was active at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, with national meetings of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), and more. It is the largest meeting of mathematicians in the world. The meetings were held in Denver, CO, January 15–18, 2020.

• Sarah Friday ’21 and Jordan Smith ’20 presented “Diagonalizing the Undiagonalizable,” research based and expanding on a 2019 SCOPE project with Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura. Aaron Waclawczyk ’21 was a coauthor who helped extend the SCOPE work. The presentation was in the AMS contributed-paper session on algebra and algebraic geometry.
• Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 presented her mathematics capstone project titled “The Costs and Rewards of Pursuing Different Postsecondary Degrees“ as part of the undergraduate poster session. Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr supervised the project.
• Marr presented “Choose Your Own Adventure: An Analysis of Interactive Gamebooks Using Graph Theory” in the MAA contributed-paper session “Tell Me a Story: Connections between Mathematics and Performed or Print Narrative.” D’Andre Adams ’21 and Beckelhymer are coauthors.  The presentation was based on their 2017 SCOPE research and their subsequent publication.
• Marr  coorganized the MAA contributed-paper session on re-envisioning the calculus sequence with coorganizers Robin Cruz, College of Idaho; Tom Halverson, Macalester College; Joel Kilty, Centre College; Alex M. McAllister, Centre College; and Chad Topaz, Williams College.
• Marr  was a coauthor of the talk “Calculus: Origins, Reforms, and New Directions” with Robin Cruz, College of Idaho; Tom Halverson, Macalester College; Joel Kilty, Centre College; Alex M. McAllister, Centre College; and Chad Topaz, Williams College.
• Marr and Assistant Professor of Mathematics John D. Ross presented the preliminary report “A Re-Envisioning of the Calculus Sequence for the Modern Student” with coauthors Joel Kilty, Centre College, and Alex M. McAllister, Centre College.
• Ross  presented “Exploring Big Ideas in Calculus 1 through Bite-Sized IBL Lessons” in the MAA contributed-paper session on inquiry-based learning and teaching.
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton copresented “Building Community through Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations (SIMIODE)” in the MAA poster session on projects supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) Division of Undergraduate Education. Her coauthors were the coprincipal investigators of their NSF grant: Brian Winkel, SIMIODE and emeritus professor from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point; Richard C. Harwood, Newberg University; Audrey Malagon, Virginia Wesleyan University; and Patrice Tiffany, Manhattan College. The NSF grant partly funded Shelton’s attendance. Shelton served on the SIMIODE Board of Contributing Advisors, as well as participated in a meeting of her NSF grant coprincipal investigators.
• Shelton  coorganized the AMS special session “Wall-to-all Modeling Activities in Differential Equations Courses.” Her coorganizers were Janet Fierson, La Salle University, and Brian Winkel, SIMIODE.
• Shelton  participated in the meeting of the national MAA Committee on Sessions of Contributed Papers.
• Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Safia Chettih presented the preliminary report “A Combinatorial Model for an Honest ∞-Operad” in the AMS special session on computational and categorical methods in homotopy theory. Her coauthors were L. Bonatto, University of Oxford; A. Linton, University of Southampton; S. Raynor, Macquarie University; M. Roberston, University of Melbourne; and N. Wahl, University of Copenhagen.
• Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics John M. Osborn also attended.

Computer science majors Anna Krolikowski ’20, Sarah Friday ’20, and Alice Quintanilla ’20 coauthored a peer-reviewed paper with Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum that was accepted to the EvoMUSART: International Conference on Computational Intelligence in Music, Sound, Art, and Design. Their paper, “Quantum Zentanglement: Combining Picbreeder and Wave Function Collapse to Create Zentangles,” presents a computational approach to generating art reminiscent of Zentangles. Examples of generated art are available here.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura coauthored an IBL-style textbook titled Perspective and Projective Geometry  (Princeton University Press, 2019), with her colleagues Annalisa Crannell, of Franklin & Marshall College, and Marc Frantz, of Indiana University. The textbook introduces students to geometry through perspective drawing, leading students to discover ideas through hands-on activities, including drawing, analyzing Renaissance paintings and photographs, and GeoGebra constructions. The textbook also guides students to develop rigorous proofs for their conjectures and can be used as an introduction to proofs course for undergraduate math majors.

Computer science major Sara Boyd ’20 has been selected as a finalist of the Computing Research Association’s (CRA) Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Award for 2020. This award program recognizes undergraduate students in North American colleges and universities who show outstanding potential in an area of computing research. Boyd’s award recognizes published work she has done with Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony, an REU at the University of Texas at Arlington, as well as project work in several computer science courses.

Computer science alumna Kathryn Reagan ’16 was named as the November spotlight member of the global organization Women Who Code. Read the profile here.

Devon Fulcher ’19, Sara Boyd ’20, and Anna Krolikowski ’20 represented Southwestern University at the Association for Computing Machinery’s International Collegiate Programming Competition’s South Central USA Regional Competition between schools in Texas, Louisiana, and Oklahoma, on November 9 at the University of Texas–San Antonio. There were 60 teams of three students each trying to solve 12 problems as quickly as possible. SU’s team, the Pirates, solved four problems this year, beating 18 other teams. It has been over a decade since a team from Southwestern has solved that many problems in the competition.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Computer Science Pedro Diaz Gomez, Hazel Hedrick ’20, Joe Roybal ’21, Matt Sanford ’20, Kirby Steckel ’21, and Thomas Zschiesche ’22 participated in the cybersecurity workshop and competition at the 9th Texas Security Awareness Week, November 1–2, organized by the University of Texas at Dallas. Two teams competed in the competition, with Sanford and Hedrick winning first place and Steckel and Roybal winning third place. The students credit their preparation for doing so well in the competition. Congratulations to our students for their teamwork, professionalism, dedication, and effort in getting this exciting result!

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was the inaugural speaker at the newly formed Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) Club at Anderson High School in Austin, TX. She shared her experiences and reflections on getting her Ph.D. in mathematics as a Japanese woman and spoke about her research in math and art.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, along with coauthors Annalisa Crannell of Franklin and Marshall College and Marc Frantz of Indiana University, published an article “An (Isometric) Perspective on Homographies” in the Journal for Geometry and Graphics (vol. 23, no. 1, pp. 65–83).

Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 was selected by the American Statistical Association to present “Tingle Therapy: An Analysis of ASMR Users’ Subjective Relief” at StatFest at the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston on September 21, 2019. Beckelhymer received a scholarship for travel and lodging. In addition to presenting, Beckelhymer was able to network with undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty in statistics, as well as interview with recruiters from numerous Ph.D. programs around the country. 

Professor of Mathematics Kendall Richards and coauthors Elyssa Sliheet ’19 and Roger Barnard had the article titled “On Sharp Bounds for Ratios of K-Balanced Hypergeometric Functions” accepted for publication in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society (https://doi.org/10.1090/proc/14751; the hard-copy publication will appear in 2020).

Computational mathematics and psychology major Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 and computer science major Sara Boyd ’20 recently attended the ACM Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in San Diego, CA. Each received full scholarships, from IBM and Two Sigma respectively, to support their attendance in recognition of their accomplishments in computer science. Along with meeting Dr. Richard Tapia, they got to interact with numerous undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, researchers, and professionals in computing from all backgrounds and ethnicities, exploring career and graduate-school opportunities.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony presented a paper titled ““Maximizing the Number of Rides Served for Dial-a-Ride” at ATMOS 2019, the Symposium on Algorithmic Approaches for Transportation Modeling, Optimization, and Systems, in Munich, Germany, as part of ALGO 2019, the major European event for researchers, students, and practitioners of algorithms. The paper, which will be published in the Dagstuhl Open Access Series in Informatics, has as coauthors Sara Boyd ’20; Christine Chung from Connecticut College and her students Ricky Birnbaum, Patrick Davis, and Jigar Dhimar; Ananya Christman from Middlebury College; and David Yuen.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum attended the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Conference on Games in London, U.K., to present the paper “Desirable Behaviors for Companion Bots in First-Person Shooters,” coauthored with Adina Friedman ’19. Friedman started this research as part of her 2018 SCOPE experience. The full paper has been published in the conference proceedings.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross published an article titled “On the Existence of a Closed, Embedded, Rotational Lambda-Hypersurface” in the Journal of Geometry.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was the recipient of a $5,000 grant from the National Science Foundation–supported Center for Parallel and Distributed Computing Curriculum Development and Educational Resources. The Center helps faculty incorporate parallel and distributed computing into courses for students in their first two years of undergraduate study. As part of the grant, she spent a week with faculty members from around the country at the University of Maryland, College Park, receiving training on parallel and distributed computing content and educational evaluation methodology.

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science was active at MathFest, a national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held this year in Cincinnati, OH, July 31–August 3, 2019.

• Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 led an activity titled “Domino Antimagic Squares” in the MAA Workshop Create and Recreate: A Celebration of Women in Recreational Mathematics.
• Marr copresented “Beyond Leaky Pipes: Fostering Pathways and Persistence in the Mathematical Sciences” with Joel Kilty and Alex M. McAllister, of Centre College, and Ranthony A.C. Edmonds, of Ohio State University, in the session “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Mathematics,” which they also coorganized.
• Beckelhymer participated in the Mentoring Workshop for Women.
• Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura organized and led a minicourse, “Visualizing Projective Geometry through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with her collaborator Annalisa Crannell, of Franklin & Marshall College. This was the sixth offering of the highly successful national expert class, sponsored by the MAA special-interest group on Mathematics and the Arts.
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “DE and Social Justice: A Cholera Model with Bacterial Reservoir,” coauthored by Emma Kathryn Groves ’18 and Associate Professor of Education Sherry Adrian, in the session “Showcase of Modeling to Motivate Differential Equations,” coorganized with Patrice Tiffany and Rosemary Farley, of Manhattan College, Riverside, NY.  Shelton and Tiffany are among the coprincipal investigators on a grant from the National Science Foundation that sponsored the session.
• Shelton participated in the full-day meeting of the national governing body, the MAA Congress, as the new representative from the Texas Section of the MAA. Shelton was elected as recorder for the MAA Congress (2020–2022), and she participated in the MAA Section Officers Meeting.
• Shelton coorganized the general contributed poster session with Steven McKay, of Brigham Young University, Provo, UT, as members of the national MAA Committee on Contributed Paper Sessions.

D’Andre Adams ’21, Daniela Beckelhymer ’20, and Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr had their paper “Choose Your Own Adventure: An Analysis of Interactive Gamebooks Using Graph Theory” published in the July edition of the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics. This research was conducted as part of SCOPE 2017. The article is available here.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton was interviewed for a post of the Mathematical Association of America Blog for work under a grant from the National Science Foundation, NSF Award no. 1724796 under IUSE: EHR 15-585 for 2018–2021. The coprincipal investigators in the grant are Brian Winkel, director of SIMIODE (Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations); R. Corban Harwood, George Fox University in Newberg, OR; Audrey Malagon, Virginia Wesleyan University, Virginia Beach, VA; and Patrice Tiffany, Manhattan College, Riverdale, NY. Rosemary Farley from Manhattan College has also been integral to this work. In the second year of the grant, Shelton coorganized and coled a faculty-development workshop, held at George Fox University, July 22–27. Twenty-seven participants from across the U.S. became MINDE (Model Instructors in Differential Equations) Fellows to enhance their teaching of undergraduate differential equations in a modeling-first approach. The workshop was sponsored by SIMIODE , a nonprofit 501(c)3 organization, and Manhattan College.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was a participant in the WeTeach_CS Summit 2019, a three-day event that educates, empowers, and inspires K–12 computer science teachers, advocates, administrators, professional-development providers, university instructors, and policy makers to advance the goal of computer science for all in Texas and beyond.

In June, recent graduate Will Price ’19 and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum attended the Congress on Evolutionary Computation in Wellington, New Zealand. 

• Price presented research on his coauthored paper with Schrum, “Neuroevolution of Multimodal Ms. Pac-ManControllers under Partially Observable Conditions,” based on his SCOPE 2018 research, which resulted in a first-place entry in the Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghost Team Competition.
• Schrum presented a paper coauthored with SCOPE 2018 student Bryan Hollingsworth ’20 titled “Infinite Art Gallery: A Game World of Interactively Evolved Artwork.”

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was participated in the 2019 Synthetic Biology: Engineering, Evolution & Design (SEED) workshops at Syracuse University, training faculty to use SEED labs to demonstrate cybersecurity exploits and countermeasures. She can be seen in the local video coverage here.

Daniela Beckelhymer ’20 was selected to participate in The Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications/Math Alliance Workshop on Career Paths in the Mathematical Sciences June 6–8, 2019, at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis–Saint Paul, MN.  Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr nominated Beckelhymer for the program.

Professor of Mathematics Kendall Richards recently published an article titled “A Note on Inequalities for the Ratio of Zero-Balanced Hypergeometric Functions” in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society  (series B, vol. 6, May 2019).

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum attended the Summit of the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT), in Nashville, TN, May 14–16, as part of their ongoing work with NCWIT’s Extension Services Learning Circles. In keeping with the theme of the summit, “Where Conversations Lead to Change,” they met with change leaders at other schools, participated in interactive workshops designed to help interrupt bias, and heard from plenary speakers from multiple disciplinary backgrounds on improving diversity and inclusion in computing.

Computer science major Adina Friedman ’19 and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum have had a peer-reviewed publication accepted to the IEEE Conference on Games, to take place in London, U.K., August 20–23. The publication, “Desirable Behaviors for Companion Bots in First-Person Shooters,” describes research that began as part of SCOPE in summer 2018 and was followed up in fall 2018 with a human-subject study involving 30 members of the SU community. The videos, code, and other content associated with the study are available online.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr received a $6,000 Mathematical Association of America’s Tensor Program for Women and Mathematics grant that will fund the Hidden No More lecture series for the 2019–2020 academic year. This grant (and some support from the Mathematics and Computer Science Department) will bring six women from underrepresented groups with doctorates in mathematics and computer science to campus over the academic year for a lecture series in which each speaker will tell her journey to math or computer science and also share the type of research she does.

Computer science major Adanna Court  ’19 was selected and funded by Facebook to attend their 2019 Data Challenge on May 3–4, in Menlo Park, CA. Ten teams of three to four participants each were tasked with determining the optimal location and type of business for San Francisco based on the data set provided. Using R  and Python , they were able to manipulate the data and create graphs to support the recommendations they provided, which they presented to the judges. In addition, teams made recommendations to Facebook about how to use that data set to improve one of their products. Court’s team focused on WhatsApp.

Sara Boyd ’20, Devon Fulcher ’19, and Daniel Maldonado ’19 received an honorable mention for their submission in the 35th annual COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling, advised by Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony. During the contest, they spent five days working on a problem that required them to elect, configure, optimally pack, geoposition, deploy and operate a set of midsize unmanned aerial vehicles that would supplement existing relief medical supply chains on Puerto Rico. Their honorable mention designation put them in the top quarter of the 14,108 teams that participated. Learn more.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton has been elected as representative of the Texas Section of the Congress of the Mathematical Association of America. This three-year national leadership position will begin in July 2019.

A paper coauthored by Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, Associate Professor of Education Sherry Adrian, and Emma Kathryn Groves ’17, titled “A Model of the Transmission of Cholera in a Population with Contaminated Water,” which was accepted for publication in November 2018, has been published in the CODEE Journal, vol. 12.  The article was downloaded across 15 countries in its first 25 days of online availability.

Lauren Gillespie  ’19 has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship that will finance three years’ worth of graduate school attendance. Gillespie will be using the funds to seek a Ph.D. in computer science at Stanford University.

Southwestern had strong representation at the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges South Central Conference at the University of Texas at Dallas on April 5. Students presented the following posters:

• “Voluntunity: Building a Volunteer Opportunity Website with Django” by TaylorAxtell ’19, SaraBoyd ’20, LaurenGillespie ’19, Danielle Orbach ’19, and Colin Scruggs ’19, part of their computer-science capstone work with Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony.
• “Creating a User-Friendly System to Facilitate Tracking and Entry of Internship Hours” by Adina Friedman ’19, William Price ’19, Elyssa Sliheet ’19, Isabel Tweraser ’19, and Jacob Yager ’20, also part of the computer-science capstone.
• “Verification of Welfare Transactions on the Blockchain” by Adanna Court ’19, Devon Fulcher ‘19, Bobby Garza ‘19, Alexander Hoffman ‘20, and Daniel Maldonado ‘19, also part of the computer-science capstone.
• “Project Pen and Paper: Operations Research for Prospective Students” by Katie Dyo ‘19, Devon Fulcher ‘19, Alexander Hoffman ‘20, Daniel Maldonado ‘19, and Greg O’Brien ‘19, work that originated in the Operations Research course in Fall 2018 taught by Anthony.
• “Desirable Behaviors for Companion Bots in First-Person Shooters” by Adina Friedman ‘19, based on her SCOPE 2018 summer research with Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.
• “Evolving Custom Convolutional Neural Network Architectures in SZ-Tetris” by Devon Fulcher ‘19, also based on SCOPE 2018 research with Schrum. This poster won fourth place in the undergraduate poster competition.
• “Infinite  Art Gallery: A  Game World of Interactively  Evolved Artwork” by Bryan Hollingsworth ‘20, also based on SCOPE 2018 research with Schrum. This poster won third place in the undergraduate poster competition.

Students Boyd, Court, Friedman, Fulcher, Garza, Hoffman, Hollingsworth, and Orbach, as well as Schrum, attended the conference.

Southwestern University had a strong showing at the 2019 Texas Section Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held March 28–30 at Tarleton State University, in Stephenville, TX.

• Katie Dyo ’20 presented “Women’s Golf: An NCAA Comparison Using Mathematical Modeling,” preliminary results from her signature work with Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton. Dyo is a mathematics major and data-science minor, and she is a member of the SU Women’s Golf Team.
• Claire Harding ’19 and Madison Godleski ’19 presented “Rocket Projections,” supervised by Associate Professor of Physics Mark Bottorff. Harding is a physics major, and Godleski is a physics major with a mathematics minor.
• Daniela Beckelhymer ’20, Charlie Ellison ’20, Hannah Freeman ’20, and Gerardo Gonzalez also attended the meeting.
• President and Professor of Mathematics Edward Burger gave the invited address, “Making up Your Own Mind through Practices of (Mathematical) Effective Thinking.”
• Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr co-led and participated in the Mathematics Learning by Inquiry organizational meetings, held in conjunction with the Texas MAA meeting.
• Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross attended the professional-development program of Texas New Experiences in Teaching (NExT), held in conjunction with the Texas MAA meeting. Ross also supported the student attendees.
• Professor of Mathematics Kendall Richards and Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Osborne participated in the Texas MAA meeting.

Student lodging, registration, and meals were provided by the Fleming Student Travel Fund and the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Southwestern students accounted for five of the 57 presentations, along with 20 other colleges and universities.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross was invited to speak at Trinity University’s mathematics seminar on March 19, 2019. His talk, “Isoperimetry and Geometric Optimization,” discussed recent research as well as general strategies for solving geometric optimization problems using the calculus of variations.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum has had two peer-reviewed publications accepted to appear in the 2019 Congress on Evolutionary Computation, each with student coauthors. Will Price ’19 is the primary author on “Neuroevolution of Multimodal Ms. Pac-Man Controllers Under Partially Observable Conditions,” which describes his first place entry in the international Ms. Pac-Man vs. Ghost Team Competition in 2018. Bryan Hollingsworth ’20 is the primary author on “Infinite Art Gallery: A Game World of Interactively Evolved Artwork,” which describes a game that was part of a human-subject study at Southwestern last fall.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony ,  Christine Harbour  ‘16, and Jordan King  ‘15 published an article in the February 2019 issue of Journal of Combinatorial Mathematics and Combinatorial Computing  titled “Greedy Is Good: An Empirical Evaluation of Three Algorithms for Online Bottleneck Matching.” This paper is a culmination of work that was begun in 2014–15 with support from the Collaborative Research Experience for Undergraduates program of CRA-W, the Computing Research Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony and Associate Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Barbara Owens attended the 50th SIGCSE, the ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, in Minneapolis, MN, Feb. 27–March 2, 2019. Anthony was a discussion leader for a birds-of-a-feather session on “Modernizing the Mathematics Taught in Computer Science,” an associate program chair, and the chair of a session on physical computing. Owens presented “The SIGCSE Story: Getting the Scoop,” about the ACM History Committee, as well as the Computing Educators Oral History Project.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton coauthored a paper, “Pharmacokinetic Models for Active Learning of Differential Equations,” which was published online by the journal PRIMUS. Shelton’s coauthors are Beulah Agyemang-Barimah ’17, currently a graduate student in computational biology at Cornell University, and Theresa Laurent, of St. Louis College of Pharmacy. This peer-reviewed paper will appear in a print version of a special issue on modeling in differential-equations courses. Some of the work that led to this paper was funded by Southwestern’s grant from the W. M. Keck Foundation.

Professors of Mathematics Alison Marr and Fumiko Futamura coauthored and published a paper titled “Taking Mathematics Abroad: A How-to Guide” in the journal PRIMUS. This paper fills a gap in the literature on developing and teaching mathematics abroad, with examples and advice from the authors’ experiences teaching a variety of interdisciplinary courses in the SU London semester program.

Computer science and chemistry double major Lauren Gillespie ’19 has been awarded an Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher award from the Computing Research Association. Only students in North American universities may compete for the award, and only four such awards were given, with other awardees coming from such prestigious universities as Columbia, Harvard, and Yale. Gillespie’s award recognizes work she has done in the field of evolutionary computation since 2016, first as a SCOPE student under Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum and most recently as part of a Research Experience for Undergraduates at Michigan State University under Dr. Charles Ofria. In addition to the recognition, this award will provide Gillespie with $1,500 to attend a research conference of her choice.

Art generated by the interactive evolution system AnimationBreeder was featured on the cover of SIGEVOlution (volume 11, issue 4), the newsletter of the Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation. AnimationBreeder is a system developed by Southwestern University students Isabel Tweraser ’19 and Lauren Gillespie ’19 as part of SCOPE summer research supervised by Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum. Also in the newsletter is a short description of the art, as well as a reference to the publication describing this research, which was cowritten by Tweraser, Gillespie, and Schrum.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony presented a paper on the “Inefficiency of Equilibria in Doodle Polls,” coauthored with Christine Chung of Connecticut College, at the 12th Conference on Combinatorial Optimization and Applications. She also chaired a session on combinatorial optimization at the conference.

President Edward Burgerand Professor of Art Victoria Star Varner presented an invited joint lecture in the Bridges Lecture Series at the University of Waterloo, Canada, on the connections between their original research in math and art on Nov. 21. The Bridges Lecture Series “aims to rediscover points of affinity among academic disciplines…and to bring them back into productive dialogue; to raise questions that are essential to scholars in Arts, Science, and Mathematics; and to provide specialists and non-specialists alike with compelling and enriching information that uncovers the possibilities and opportunities that exist on the bridge between disciplines. Our guiding goal is to coax audiences out of their intellectual comfort zones, and to transcend narrow discipline-specific avenues of academic inquiry.”

Computer science majors Bobby Garza, class of 2019, and Sabin Oza and Matt Sanford, both class of 2020, competed in the 2018 ACM ICPC South Central USA Regional Programming Contest at Baylor University. In this competition, students work together in teams of three to solve challenging programming puzzles for five hours. Though the team did not advance to the World Finals, they are proud of their performance. Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was the coach for the team.

Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross participated in the professional-development program of the Texas New Experiences in Teaching (NExT) project, held at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, TX, Nov. 2–3, 2018. Texas NExT is sponsored by the Texas section of the Mathematical Association of America.

Five math majors presented at the Texas Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (TUMC), held at Stephen F. Austin State University, in Nacogdoches, TX, Nov. 2 – 3, 2018.

• Aiden Steinle, class of 2020, presented “Staying in Shape with Real-World Mappings.” Steinle’s work was supervised by Professor of Mathematics and Chair of Mathematics and Computer Science Fumiko Futamura.
• Gillian Glover , class of 2019, presented “Make Money with Linear Algebra: A Model of Portfolio Analysis.” Glover’s math capstone is an extension of work supervised by Dr. Futamura.
• Stan Kannegieter , class of 2019, presented “The Kissing Disease and Differential Equations.”
• Will Price, class of 2019, presented “Ms. Pac-Man Eats AI for Breakfast.” Price’s math capstone is an extension of his SCOPE 2018 research under Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.
• Mercedes Gonzalez, class of 2021, presented “Restrictions on HOMFLYPT and Kauffman Polynomials Arising from Local Moves.” Gonzalez presented work from a National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduates program, supervised by Dr. Sandy Ganzell from St. Mary’s College of Maryland.
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton supervised the math capstone work of Glover, Kannegieter, and Price, and she moderated a session of presentations at the TUMC.  
• Other attendees included Zariah Whyte, class of 2021, and Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross.
• Student lodging, registration, and meals was provided by National Science Foundation award no. DMS-1834888 for 2018. Additional funding was provided by a Faculty–Student Project award, the Fleming Student Travel Fund, and the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Southwestern students accounted for five of the 57 presentations given by students representing 21 colleges and universities.

Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented a talk titled “Envisioning a New Calculus Sequence”  in the “Innovation/Ideation” session at the Association of American Colleges & Universities’ Transforming STEM Higher Education Conference, held Nov. 8–10, in Atlanta, GA. This talk was based on work that has taken place over the last year as part of an ACS grant titled “Supporting Diversity and Inclusion in Mathematics and the STEM Disciplines,” which is a joint project with Joel Kilty and Alex McAllister at Centre College.

Computer Science and Chemistry double major Lauren Gillespie, class of 2019, received a Student Presentation Award for her poster “Comparing Direct and Indirect Encodings Using Both Raw and Hand-Designed Features in Tetris” at the 2018 SACNAS National Diversity in STEM conference organized by the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. The poster was based on SCOPE research with Gabriela Gonzalez ’16 and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton led two sessions at the Student Contest Using Differential Equations Modeling (SCUDEM) on Oct. 27, 2018, at the local host site for this international competition, the Highland Campus of Austin Community College. Shelton supervised all participants in inquiry-oriented learning with a modeling scenario that she recently had published in the repository at Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations (SIMIODE). She gave a faculty development session for the coaches, sharing two more of her published modules.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton, Associate Professor of Education Sherry Adrian, and Emma Kathryn Groves’s ’17 coauthored paper, “A Model of the Transmission of Cholera in a Population with Contaminated Water,” has been accepted for publication in the special issue Linking Differential Equations to Social Justice and Environmental Concernsof the Journal of the Community of Differential Equations Educators(CODEE). Groves and Shelton worked on the mathematical model in SCOPE 2015. Adrian and Shelton worked on the connections with social justice.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony presented a paper coauthored with Valentin Cantu Jr. ’18 at the 27th Annual Rocky Mountain Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges held Oct. 12–13, 2018, in Socorro, NM. The paper, “Modernizing the Mythical Man-Month,” provides an alternative way of presenting concepts from a classical reading in the field: while the software engineering ideas are still relevant, the authors suggest using language that is more inclusive and examples that are more relatable to students in the 21st century. It will be published in the December 2018 issue of the Journal of Computing Sciences in Colleges.

Computer Science major Adina Friedman, class of 2019, attended the Texas Advanced Computing Center (TACC) Symposium for Texas Researchers (TACCSTER) at the Pickle Research Campus in Austin, Texas, Sept 20–21. TACC is home to four supercomputer clusters, including Stampede2m, the most powerful supercomputer at any U.S. university. TACC collaborates with thousands of researchers across the country using applied high-performance computing to enable scientific discovery. Friedman was exposed to talks, panels, and posters from researchers currently using TACC resources in the areas of machine learning, cloud computing, and others.

Elyssa Sliheet, class of 2019, and Sara Boyd, class of 2020, attended the Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing in Houston, Texas, Sept. 26–28. The Grace Hopper Conference is the largest meeting of women technologists in the world. The program included inspiring talks by female leaders in industry as well as talks by academic researchers and educators. There was also a massive Career Fair allowing women to seek jobs with tech companies, including some of the biggest names in industry (e.g., Google, Microsoft, and Amazon). Both students had all travel expenses funded by competitive travel scholarships. Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum also attended the conference, as did alumna Kathryn Reagan ’16.

Current Math and Computer Science double-major Elyssa Sliheet, class of 2019, attended the Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing in Orlando, Fla., Sept. 19–22. Sliheet attended several sessions on topics such as the importance of diversity and inclusion in the field of computer science and ethics in the applications of machine learning and artificial intelligence. Sliheet’s travel was funded by a competitive travel scholarship.

Associate Professor of German Erika Berroth, serving as President of the South Texas Chapter of the American Association of Teachers of German, hosted the Association’s annual convention at Southwestern University on Saturday, Sept. 15, 2018. Collaborating with Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum, she taught hands-on workshops on integrating STEM and German. Welcoming high school and college German teachers from the region to SU’s campus is a community outreach initiative that supports articulated curricular development, mentoring, and resource sharing while increasing the visibility of our campus and our programs in Modern Languages and Literatures. Recognized for her outreach initiatives and appointed as an Ortslektorin (local lecturer) for Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD, German Academic Exchange Service), a professional network of 850 members worldwide, Berroth recently received a $600 resource grant from the DAAD and the German government to build a collection of contemporary German literature.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton published three peer-reviewed classroom modules with coauthors Theresa Laurent of St. Louis College of Pharmacy and Beulah Agyemang-Barimah ’17. The modeling scenarios are differential equations models of absorption and elimination of aspirin, caffeine, and digoxin in the human body. Systemic Initiative for Modeling Investigations and Opportunities with Differential Equations (SIMIODE) published teacher and student versions for each of the three models.

Sara Boyd, class of 2020, Bobby Garza, class of 2019, Alexander Hoffman, class of 2020, Stan Kannegieter, class of 2019, Daniel Merritt, class of 2020, and faculty sponsor Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony participated in the Binance Dexathon decentralized exchange coding competition to improve on Binance’s current blockchain implementation this summer. Along with learning more about the blockchain and practicing their software skills, the students also gained valuable experience in project management and working with teammates in remote locations. For their submission, Binance awarded the team a 10,000 BNB grant.

Though not in attendance, Southwestern faculty and students won two awards at the 2018 Conference on Computational Intelligence and Games held August 14 – 17 in Maastricht, The Netherlands.

• Computer Science and Math double-major Will Price, class of 2019, won 1st place in the Ms. Pac-Man track of the Ms. Pac-Man Vs. Ghost Team Competition. This competition allows individuals to program controllers for both Ms. Pac-Man and the Ghosts in a challenging, partially observable version of the classic video game. Price’s winning Ms. Pac-Man entry was developed as part of SCOPE 2018 under the supervision of Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum, and is an extension of Dr. Schrum’s own dissertation research on Ms. Pac-Man.
• Schrum and collaborators from around the world won 1st place in the Short Video Competition for their video describing work on their recent paper, “Evolving Mario Levels in the Latent Space of a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network.” The purpose of the competition is to describe interesting research relevant to the conference in an informative and watchable manner.

The Department of Mathematics and Computer Science was active at MathFest, a national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) in Denver, Colo., Aug. 1 – 4, 2018.

• President and Professor of Mathematics Edward Burger gave the invited plenary talk, “Think. Create. Connect: To Make Meaning and Make a Difference” to Project NExT, New Experiences in Teaching, a professional-development program for new or recent Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences.
• Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura and Robert Lehr ’15 received the Carl B. Allendoerfer Award for expository excellence for their article “A New Perspective on Finding the Viewpoint,” published in the October 2017 issue of Mathematics Magazine.
• Lehr won an award for his presentation “Perspective Drawing: How to Find the Immersion Point,” in the Pi Mu Epsilon (PME) student session.  He will begin his first year at the University of Texas School of Architecture this August. PME funded his attendance at the meeting.
• Futamura copresented an expert class, the MAA Minicourse “Visualizing Projective Geometry Through Photographs and Perspective Drawings,” with Annalisa Crannell of Franklin & Marshall College.
• Futamura was a panelist for the Project NExT panel discussion on “Building a Diverse and Inclusive Mathematics Major.” She discussed the EQUIP program and shared her experiences in cobuilding and coteaching in the program.
• Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr presented “Hidden No More Lecture Series,” based on her minigrant from the National Science Foundation.
• Marr coauthored “Re-Envisioning the Calculus Sequence,” based on her grant from the Associated Colleges of the South with Alex M. McAllister, of Centre College, and Joel Kilty, of Centre College.
• Marr served as a moderator for the Town Hall “Shaping and Fostering an Equitable Community in Our Departments.” The results of this Town Hall discussion will be published in the Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter, MAA FOCUS, and Notices of the American Mathematical Society.
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton and Emma Kathryn Groves ’17  copresented “Incorporating Biology Topics Into Mathematics Undergraduate Experiences.” Groves just completed her first year in the Mathematics graduate program at North Carolina State University. She began work on mathematical models of cholera during her HHMI-funded SCOPE in 2016 with Yinlin Dai ’16, supervised by Shelton. Shelton also shared some of her work funded under the W. M. Keck grant at Southwestern.
• Shelton participated in a Data Science Workshop and joined a focus group of the MAA Committee on Faculty and Departments by invitation.
• Shelton participated in events for SIMIODE, including a meeting of the coprincipal investigators of their grant from the National Science Foundation, which partly funded Shelton’s attendance.
• Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross presented “Implementing Mastery-Based Quizzes and Tests in a Calculus Course.”

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton was active in two workshops under the grant through the National Science Foundation for which she is a co-principal investigator. The workshops were held at Manhattan College in the Bronx, N.Y., July 15–28, 2018.

Isabel Tweraser (Computer Science and Music double major) and Lauren Gillespie (Computer Science and Chemistry double major), both class 2019, travelled to Kyoto, Japan, with Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum to attend the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. Several notable events occurred at the conference:

• Dr. Schrum and coauthors from other institutions won the best paper award in the Digital Entertainment Technologies and Arts track for their paper “Evolving Mario Levels in the Latent Space of a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network.” This paper has also garnered much attention from several media outlets, such as The Register, Science Magazine, and Fast Company.
• Tweraser presented the paper “Querying Across Time to Interactively Evolve Animations,” co-authored with Gillespie and Dr. Schrum.
• Dr. Schrum presented the paper “Evolving Indirectly Encoded Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Tetris with Low-Level Features.”
• Dr. Schrum addressed the entire conference as a representative of SparkCognition, Inc., in a short talk titled “AI Is Not Just Evolution; It’s Revolution.”
• Tweraser was recognized at a recipient of an ACM-W scholarship, which provided her with free registration and paid for a portion of her travel costs to the conference.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony had a publication accepted for the 17th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems, which was presented in Stockholm, Sweden, in July 2018. The extended abstract on “How Bad is Selfish Doodle Voting?” was co-authored with Christine Chung of Connecticut College.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was a panelist at the Google Faculty Institute held at Google’s Sunnyvale, Calif., campus in June 2018. The institute brought together approximately 200 faculty members and numerous Googlers to learn about changing cloud technology and discuss its incorporation into the classroom. This year’s institute had a particular focus on Machine Learning, including considerations about fairness in machine learning.

Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura gave an invited talk titled “Perspectives of a Mathematician Artist” to around 90 high school students at the Mathworks Honors Summer Math Camp at Texas State University on July 13, 2018.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton presented “An Undergraduate Mathematical Modeling Capstone” at the SIAM Conference on Applied Mathematics Education (ED18), July 9–11, 2018, in Portland, Ore.

Two Southwestern students will present posters at SACNAS 2018, the national diversity in STEM conference organized by the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science. Computer Science and Chemistry double major Lauren Gillespie ’19, who has been awarded a travel scholarship to attend the conference, will present her poster “Comparing Direct and Indirect Encodings Using Both Raw and Hand-Designed Features in Tetris,” based on SCOPE research with Gabriela Gonzalez ’16 and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum. Ian Orantes-Orellana ’19 will present a poster titled “Photobleaching Lifetimes of Cy5-Alkyne and Cy-5 Alkyne Fluorescence” co-authored by Gillespie, Mauro Garcia ’18 and Visiting Professor of Chemistry David Cooper.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Chad Stolper co-authored a state of the art report (STAR) “State of the Art of Sports Data Visualization” with researchers from around the globe which he presented at EuroVis 2018 in Brno, Czech Republic. The report will be published in the journal Computer Graphics Forum. The survey covers past work in sports visualization in both research and journalism categorized by the type of data (box score data, tracking data, and meta-data) and addresses future research in sports visualization research including new forms of sports data, the growth in volume of sports data, the rise of non-competitive sports data, and the ethics of studying sports data.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr and her 11 co-authors had a piece published in the May 2018 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society about their experiences at the Workshop on Increasing Minority Participation in Undergraduate Mathematics this past summer in Park City, Utah. The piece is available here.

Elyssa Sliheet, Class of 2019, and Daniela Beckelhymer, Class of 2020, attended the Infinite Possibilities Conference for Women of Color in Mathematics and Statistics in Washington, D.C., April 14–15, 2018. Sliheet presented a poster on her REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) research “Shift Operators on Directed Infinite Graphs” and Beckelhymer presented a poster on her SCOPE research with Associate Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr “Choose Your Own Adventure: An Analysis of Interactive Gamebooks using Graph Theory.” Beckelhymer won a prize for Best Undergraduate Poster Presentation at the conference.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was invited to give two talks, one on April 13 at Texas State University in San Marcos, Texas, titled “How to Mathematically Immerse Yourself in Art,” and the other on April 17 at the Phi Beta Kappa event (En)Lightning Talks Houston titled “When Artists Become Mathematicians.” The (En)Lightning Talk was a 5-minute talk, complete with a countdown clock and an M.C. ready to hit a gong when time ran out. Futamura finished her talk in 4 minutes and 58 seconds.

Music and Computer Science double-major Isabel Tweraser, class of 2019, has been awarded a $1,200 ACM-W scholarship to help her travel to Kyoto, Japan, to present her peer-reviewed conference paper “Querying Across Time to Interactively Evolve Animations” at the upcoming Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference. The paper was co-authored with Lauren Gillespie, class of 2019, and Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum. ACM is the Association for Computing Machinery, and ACM-W scholarships are specifically aimed at helping female students attend research conferences in hopes of encouraging them to pursue further research opportunities in the future.

Thirteen students and four faculty traveled to Dallas, Texas, April 5 – 7 to attend and give talks at the 98th Annual Meeting of the Texas Section Mathematical Association of America held at El Centro College.

• Associate Professor of Mathematics Alison Marr co-presented “Starting Inquiry-Based Learning Consortia”
• Associate Professor of Mathematics Gary Richter presented “Revisiting a Limit as X approaches 0, the limit of sin(x)/x = 1”
• D’Andre Adams, class of 2020, and Daniela Beckelhymer, class of 2018, presented their SCOPE 2017 research with Dr. Marr titled “Choosing Your Own Adventure: An Analysis of Interactive Gamebooks Using Graph Theory”
• Morgan Engle, class of 2018, presented her SCOPE 2017 and capstone research supervised by Associate Professor of Mathematics Therese Shelton and Visiting Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies Becca Edwards titled “Influence of ENSO on United States Gulf Coast Ozone Using a Surface Ozone Climatology”
• Sam Vardy, class 2018, presented a pedagogical talk supervised by Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics John Ross titled “Taking on Statistics with R(Our) Power”
• Taylor Axtel, class of 2019, Alan Carr and Charlie Ellison, both class of 2020, presented research supervised by Associate Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura, “3-D Matrices: How Do They Work?”
• Music major Jacob Wilson, class of 2020, presented a musical composition from Dr. Futamura’s Explorations in Mathematics course “Frieze Patterns in Music”
• Aiden Steinle,  class of 2020, presented research supervised by Dr. Futamura, “Staying in Shape with Real World Mappings.” Aiden won an award for Best Presentation in Geometry.
• The other four student attendees were Keyshaan Castle, class of  2020, Katie Dyo and Elyssa Sliheet, both class of 2019, and Bonnie Henderson, class of 2018. Dr. Futamura and Dr. Ross also attended the meeting, with Dr. Ross participating in the Texas Section Project NeXT meeting.

Senior Physics and Computational Math double-major Yash Gandhi, class of 2018, has been awarded an H. Y. Benedict Fellowship from Alpha Chi National Honor Society. Alpha Chi is a national honor society that was founded at Southwestern University in 1922, and is only open to the top 10% of juniors and seniors. Furthermore, only two Alpha Chi members from each university may be nominated to be awarded one of 10 fellowships awarded nationwide. The $3,000 in fellowship money will be used to help Yash attend graduate studies in Computer Science next year. Full press release here.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Chad Stolper, along with co-authors at Microsoft Research and Georgia Tech, had a book chapter titled “Data-Driven Storytelling Techniques: Analysis of a Curated Collection of Visual Stories” published in the edited volume Data-Driven Storytelling published by AK Peters/CRC Press. The chapter details design patterns that data-driven journalists have been using to present their work.

Nine Computer Science and Computational Math majors traveled to present research posters at the South Central Regional Conference of the Consortium for Computing Sciences in Colleges held April 6 at Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.

• Valentine Cantu, Yash Gandhi, Marissa Madrid-Ortega,and Kolton Noreen,all class of 2018, won 2nd place in the poster competition for their research “Looking AHEAD: Developing an Advising Hub for EQUIP And DRAFT,” which was done as part of their senior capstone in software engineering along with students Kristen McCrary and Angus Strickland,both class of 2018, under the supervision of Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony.
• Will Price,class of 2019, and Matt Sanford,class of 2020, won 3rd place in the poster competition for their research “Dynamic Graph-Level Operations (DGLOs),” which was done as part of SCOPE 2017 under the supervision of Assistant Professor of Computer Science Chad Stolper.
• Bobby Garza,class of 2019, presented “Encryption Using Nonlinear Dynamics,” which was also done as part of SCOPE 2017 under the supervision Dr. Chris Curry, former Coordinator of FIrst-Year Physics Labs.
• Sarah “Darwin” Johnson,class of 2020, presented “Evolution of Board Game Playing Agents,” which was done as part of SCOPE 2017 under the supervision of Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum.
• Alice Quintanilla , class of 2020, presented “Evolving Artificial Intelligences to Compete in Real-Time Strategy Games,” which was done as part of SCOPE 2017 under the supervision of Dr. Schrum.
• Assistant Professors of Computer Science Jacob Schrum and Chad Stolper also attended the conference.

Assistant Professor of Computer Science Jacob Schrum has had four full-length peer-reviewed papers accepted to appear in the proceedings of, and be presented at, the 2018 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO), to take place July 15-19 in Kyoto, Japan. The four papers are:

• “Querying Across Time to Interactively Evolve Animations,” written with Music major and Computer Science minor Isabel Tweraser, and Computer Science/Chemistry double-major Lauren Gillespie, both class of 2019. This work deals with the simulated evolution of artistic animations, and includes the results of a human-subject study conducted at SU. The various pieces of art generated by users can be seen on here. This research will also be presented at this year’s Research and Creative Works Symposium.
• “Evolving Indirectly Encoded Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Tetris With Raw Features,” written solely by Schrum, but extends previous research conducted as part of SCOPE 2016 with students Lauren Gillespie, class of 2019, and Gabriela Gonzalez ’16. This previous work was presented at GECCO last year. Though both papers evolve artificial agents to play Tetris, the new results are a vast improvement, due to the use of Convolutional Neural Networks.
• “Evolving Mario Levels in the Latent Space of a Deep Convolutional Generative Adversarial Network,” joint research with several researchers in the area of Artificial Intelligence and Games from around the world. The work began as part of a research seminar on AI-Driven Game Design held at the Castle Dagstuhl Leibniz-Center for Computer Science. One session at the seminar focused on “Game Search Space Design and Representation.” Schrum joined several researchers from this group to explore interesting ways of generating new levels for the game Super Mario Bros. based on existing game levels.
• “Divide and Conquer: Neuroevolution for Multiclass Classification,” joint research with Data Scientists as SparkCognition, Inc., an AI-startup in Austin where Schrum works as a part-time consulting scientist. The paper is associated with a product called Darwin, which uses simulated evolution to solve various types of Data Science problems. The paper specifically explores how Darwin can solve classification problems using ensembles.

Associate Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura organized students and faculty to create a hyperbolic crochet coral reef for a table at the Hot Science Cool Talks event on coral reefs at the University of Texas on Feb.16. To prepare for the event, she gave talks on hyperbolic geometry and crochet at SU for the 107 Lecture in Mathematics and for the Art Association, and taught students, faculty and staff how to crochet hyperbolic planes that incidentally look like coral. Nine students, faculty and alumni contributed: Kari Darr ’19, Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics Linda DiLullo, Christi Ho ’18, Abigail Jendrusch ’19, Jacob Jimerson ’19, Chris Nissen ’18, Aiden Steinle ’18, Natalie Young ’19. Christi, Jacob and Aiden attended the event, teaching the public about hyperbolic geometry and how to crochet. The coral reef will be on display in the entrance to the Smith Library from March 20 to the end of the semester.

Associate Professor of Computer Science Barbara Anthony was a panelist on the “Teaching with the Cloud” panel at Special Interest Group for Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) 2018, the 49th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, in Baltimore, Md., in Feb. 2018.

Visiting Assistant Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science John Ross presented an exhibit titled “Geometric Bubble Surfaces” at the Thinkery’s Strength in Numbers event. The presentation encouraged the audience to engage with mathematics through soap films. Southwestern alumni Christi Ho ’16, Robert Lehr ’15, and Julia Sykora ’16 also presented. Associate Professor of Mathematics Fumiko Futamura was a consultant for the event.