Front Page News

Congratulations to our Putnam team (Jude Melancon, Nickolas VanMeter and Daniel Whitman), and thanks to the Putnam coach (Professor Jacek Cygan), and to Suat Namli (who gave seminars on problem solving prior to the Putnam Exam). This year the LSU team finished 21st! There were 402 colleges and universities that entered teams. A total of 3640 students from 508 colleges and universities participated in the competition. Daniel Whitman scored 31.7 and ranked 196.5. Nick VanMeter scored 30 and ranked 239. The median score was 1 out of a possible 120.

Susanne C. Brenner has been re-appointed to the editorial board of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. This is her third term.

Michael Malisoff, assistant professor in mathematics, participated in the 45th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control (IEEE-CDC), where he chaired one session, presented three original research papers, and received the award for the best presentation in the Stability session. The IEEE-CDC is the primary international conference in the field of control theory and includes several hundred paper presentations annually. Malisoff has 40 publications in the field.

A K-theory vanishing result, which was previously a conjecture of Weibel, has been proved by Guillermo Cortinas, Christian Haesemeyer, Marco Schlichting, and Charles A. Weibel. The result will appear in the paper “Cyclic homology, cdh-cohomology and negative K-theory” in the Annals of Mathematics.

Dick Anderson, Boyd Professor Emeritus and 39th president of the Mathematical Association of America, was inducted into the Icosahedron Society at the Silver and Gold Banquet during this year's MathFest. The complete story is in the November issue of the MAA Focus Magazine.

An art exhibit “Quantum Connections” of a local artist Marion Drenner is on display at the Shaw Center for the Arts in downtown Baton Rouge until January 27, 2007. On January 5, from 6:00 to 8:00 pm, the gallery will host a Questions and Answers session with LSU Mathematics Professor James Madden.

"Beyond partial differential equations: A course on linear and quasi-linear abstract hyperbolic evolution equations" by Horst Beyer will be published by Springer Verlag in the Lecture Notes in Mathematics series.

"Mathematics Magazine" is one of the journals of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). Its predecessor "National Mathematics Magazine" was published at LSU in Baton Rouge. JSTOR incorrectly gives the publisher of "National Mathematics Magazine" as the MAA but now gives an explanatory note.

College Algebra, Trigonometry, and Precalculus are changing at LSU. The redesign has been under development since Fall 2003. One aspect of the change was an experiment comparing the new Roadmap to Redesign method, the traditional classes, and large lectures classes. A report appears in the August/September issue of the Mathematical Association of America magazine FOCUS: “College Algebra Redesign at Louisiana State University” on pages 34–35.

Robert Lipton represented the AMS at the Coalition for National Science Funding exhibition, highlighting his recent work on "Mathematics for Advanced
Composites Technology." The AMS report (PDF) is in the August Notices of the American Mathematical Society page 809.