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Joshua Kevin Burr was born October 23, 2016. He was 19.5 inches and weighed 7 lbs. 4 oz. Proud parents are Michael and Meredith Burr. Below is also a recent photo of Joshua.

 

On October 28th, AWM, in conjunction with Math Club, hosted the second annual Halloween Pumpkin Carving Extravaganza! AWM provided the pumpkins and Math Club provided the food. We had a great turnout of undergrads, grad students, faculty, and even some children! Many pumpkins were carved, and much fun was had by all. While carving pumpkins and enjoying the food, we also watched “It’s the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” – a Peanuts classic. We look forward to next year and hope to make this a recurring event.

 

Let’s all Congratulate Jim Brannan on his retirement.

Created in 2015 by Ryan Grove, Calculus Fight Club is taught by students currently enrolled in a MATH1020, MATH1060 or MATH1080 class (as well as PAL leaders for these classes) at Clemson University that volunteer their time to help any students taking these classes prepare for upcoming tests by going over selected problems from previous semesters’ exams on the Monday night of the week of a test.

Calculus Fight Club works closely with the MATH1020, MATH1060 and MATH1080 course coordinators in order to find teachers for each Calculus Fight Club, confirm which material will be relevant to go over for each test, and to get the word out so that students in those classes know about our event.  On average, Calculus Fight Club provides around 400-500 students per event with a chance to spend a night studying calculus with their peers in an environment that is entirely led by their peers.  The current leaders of Calculus Fight Club going into the Spring ’17 semester are (pictured left to right):  Addie Stone (for MATH1020), AJ Miller (for MATH1080), Mary Guest (for MATH1020), Polly Payne (for MATH1060), and Ameilia Casella (for MATH1020).

 

We are proud to announce the 2016 Mathematics Honors and Awards.

 

Freshman Awardees

Hannah Mccall: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Freshman Award

Mary Mell: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Freshman Award

Sloan Nietert: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Freshman Award

Hayden Girard: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Freshman Award

 

 

 

Sophomore Awardees

Jarryd Boyle: Sue King Dunkle Award

Luna Bozeman: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Sophomore Award

Polly Payne: Alice Louise Gray Fulmer Award

Andrew Shore: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Sophomore Award

 

 

 

 

 

Junior Awardees

Patrick Dynes: John Charles Harden Junior Award

Jake Marshall: John Charles Harden Junior Award

Hannah Rollins: John Charles Harden Junior Award

Alexander Stoll: John Charles Harden Junior Award

 

 

 

Senior Awardees

Sarah Hicklin: Samuel Maner Martin Award

Sarah Malick: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Senior Award

Emily Anne Thompson: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Senior Award

Katy Wrenn: Mathematical Sciences Faculty Senior Award

 

 

 

Grad Student Awardees

Nathan Adelgren: Outstanding Graduate Research

Brandon Goodell: Outstanding TA award

Chase Joyner: Outstanding MS Student Award

Fiona Knoll: Excellence in Graduate Teaching

Drew Lipman: Outstanding Citizenship Award

Stefani Mokalled: Outstanding MS Student Award

Stella Watson: Outstanding MS Student Award

Anastasia Williams: Outstanding Graduate Research

Honghai Xu: Excellence in Graduate Research

Yibo Xu: Outstanding MS Student Award

 

 

 

 

Shannon Corcoran was awarded a $5000 STEM Majors Scholarship by the Armed Forces Communications and Electronics Association Educational Foundation for the 2016 — 2017 academic year. Shannon is a junior mathematical sciences major from Londonderry, New Hampshire, whose emphasis area is actuarial science/financial math. She is a member of the Calhoun Honors College, Clemson University Rally Cats Dance Team, and Zeta Tau Alpha sorority. She has volunteered in many capacities, including raising money for the Make-a-Wish Foundation, making blankets for Miles for Smiles, and assisting with the Special Olympics, and she enjoys working with children.

 

Congratulations to Shannon!

 

Congratulations to the Mathematical Sciences 5K Running Team, who won the Third Annual Clemson 5K Fit Run on Saturday, October 22, 2016 at the South Carolina Botanical Gardens!

 

Front Row Left to Right: Sarah Hicklin, Hugh Geller, Michael Black

Back Row Left to Right: Allen Guest, Mark Cawood, Martin Schmoll

It seems that an appropriate theme these days is ‘change happens’. As of July 1st, the twenty year residence of our department in the College of Engineering and Science will be over, and we will be (back) in the College of Science.  And even if Clemson’s upper administration hadn’t announced a plan for growth in enrollments over the next several years, the building program underway on and surrounding the campus indicates that we will soon see more students in our midst.

 

In this period of university restructuring, our department is examining its own organizational structure. The Math Sciences Council had some interesting discussions in the latter part of Spring 2016, which led to a survey that will be distributed to the faculty around July 1^st to get feedback on how we can best organize ourselves administratively as we move forward.  That feedback will help guide the discussions that we’ll have in the fall.

 

Professor ‘TK’ Khan showed me the report ‘The Mathematical Sciences in 2025’ published in 2013 by the National Academies Press. If you do a web search using the title, you’ll find a free download of this document that runs about 220 pages.  This report both challenges us and affirms that we’re doing quite a few things right.  A takeaway for me is that Clayton Aucoin, who spearheaded the remodeling of our graduate program in the 1970’s, was a true visionary.

 

Change is often accompanied by stress. We welcomed the news that the College of Science administrative offices would be in Long Hall, just a few steps away from Martin Hall.  However, with relatively short notice, we had to move most of our emeritus faculty out of the Long Hall offices they were sharing to make room for administrative (CoS and other) offices.  We hope to secure, in the near future, more office space for those emeritus faculty members who are maintaining ties with us.  We value their collective wisdom.  Some, like Dr. Renu Laskar, are quite active.  She regularly meets with graduate students to mentor their research, and even continues to chaperone a group that attends the ‘Boca’ conference each spring.

 

Changes are occurring along the administrative hallway of our department, in particular at the north end. Julie McKenzie is our new Student Services Program Coordinator, and this summer Leo Rebholz is learning the ropes involved with being Coordinator of Undergraduate Studies from Eliza Gallagher until Eliza takes a position in August as assistant professor in the Engineering and Science Education Department.

 

This has been a good year for our department. We’ve met a huge teaching load with tight resources.  Our research productivity, including articles, conference presentations, and grants, is strong and well-distributed across the subfaculties.  The biggest grant hit this year is a $2.1 million dollar NSF RTG (research training groups), with PI Jim Brown and co-PI’s Shuhong Gao, Kevin James, Felice Manganiello, and Gretchen Matthews.   Also worth noting are the extra time and effort that department members put into outreach events, including the Clemson Calculus Challenge (see the article on the 2016 CCC in this newsletter), the AP Statistics Practice Exam, led by Christy Brown, that drew 220 students, and several conferences (see the separate article) hosted by department faculty and graduate students.

 

One of the many things I appreciate about working in a university environment is that stagnation rarely occurs. We’re challenged on a daily basis (or nearly so) to learn and grow, knowing that students are looking to us as models of that process.  In this regard, change is good.  I believe that changes in the college structure will bode well for our department.  I’m excited about the variety of opportunities in the coming year that will both challenge us and allow us, as a department, to keep growing.

 

This past spring the department website was upgraded (with a few tweaks still to come) and also donating to any of the nine CU Foundation funds associated with the department, including the Mathematical Sciences Enhancement Fund, has been made easier. There’s a link to the giving site on the department home page.

 

Thank you for all of the ways that you participate in and support the work of this department.

-Chris

 

Neil Calkin was elected secretary of the Faculty Senate for its 2016-17 term during the March 7 Faculty Senate meeting. The mathematical sciences professor joined Clemson in 1997. In his three years on the senate, Calkin said that he enjoyed being part of the conversation and bringing issues to the forefront. Calkin plans to work closely with Faculty Senate leadership to address issues such as the status of special faculty, Clemson’s college reorganization and the university’s planned child care center.

 

See more about the new Faculty Senate leadership here:

https://blogs.clemson.edu/inside-clemson/inside-news/lawton-rauh-calkin-elected-to-lead-roles-in-faculty-senate/.

In Fall 2015 and Spring 2016, Clemson’s Graduate Program in Mathematical Sciences awarded six Ph.D. degrees and eleven M.S. degrees. Some graduates of the program will apply their knowledge and skills to positions in academia and industry, while others will continue their studies at a higher level. These degrees are the culmination of years of hard work, unyielding determination, intense mathematical ability, and excellent faculty advising.

 

The graduates’ names, advisors’ names, and disquisition titles are listed below. Photographs and current/future positions are also included where available.

 

Please join us in congratulating our newest graduates for their outstanding accomplishments!

 

PhD Fall 2015

 

Hewa Arachchige Anuradha Priyadarshani

Advisors: Dr. R. Lund and Dr. Y. Li

Dissertation title: Bayesian Minimum Description Length Techniques for Multiple Changepoint Detection

Current position: Senior lecturer grade II, University of Kelaniya, Dalugama, Sri Lanka

 

Shiyi Tu

Advisor: Dr. X. Sun

Dissertation title: Objective Bayesian Analysis on the Quantile Regression Advisor

Current position: Financial Analyst at Bank of America

 

PhD Spring 2016

 

Michael Dowling

Advisor: Dr. S. Gao

Dissertation title: Exponder Graphs and Good Codes

 

Rachel Grotheer

Advisor: Dr. T. Khan

Dissertation title: Hyperspectial Diffuse Optical Tomography using the Reduced Basis Method and Sparsity Constraints

Fall position: Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Goucher College in Towson, MD.

 

 

 

 

Jason Hedetniemi

Advisor: Dr. K. James

Dissertation title: Problems in Domination and Graph Products

 

Honghai Xu

Advisor: Dr. W. Goddard

Dissertation title: Generalized Colorings of Graphs

 

 

MS Fall 2015

 

Kevin Wayne Dettman

Advisor: Dr. M. Wiecek

Thesis title: Bi-Objective Quadratic Optimization with Application to Portfolio Selection

 

Haodong Li

Advisor: Dr. M. Mitkovski

Thesis title: Multiplier Operators on Framed Hilbert Space

Current position: Clemson Mathematical Sciences PhD program

 

Monica Deni Moralex-Hernandez

Advisor: Dr. L. Rebholz

Thesis title: Some new Results for Leray -x discretization

Current position: Clemson Mathematical Sciences PhD program

 

 

 

 

 

 

MS Spring 2016

 

Travis Baumbaugh

Advisor: Dr. F. Manganiello

Thesis title: Results on Common Left/Right Divisors of Skew Polynomials

Current position: Clemson Mathematical Sciences PhD program

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Rebecca Knoll

Advisor: Dr. L. Rebholz

Thesis title: On the Optimal Parameter Choice of Steady NSE with Grad-Div

Current/future position: Mathematics instructor, Rockbridge Academy in Millersville, MD

 

 

 

 

Michael Lamoreux

Advisor: Dr. A. Brown

Thesis title: Empirical Null Estimation via Central Matching with Application to Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging

 

 

Matthew Menard

Advisor: Dr. C. Williams

Thesis title: Study of the Fisher-Tippett Theorem with Applications to Problems in Actuarial Science

Current position: Clemson Mathematical Sciences PhD program

 

 

Stefani Mokalled

Advisor: Dr. C. McMahan

Thesis title: Estimating Biomarker Distributions via Pooled Assessments

Current/future position: Research Assistant in biostatistics, Faculty of Public Health at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon.

 

 

 

 

Lee Phillips

Advisor: Dr. W. Adams

Thesis title: Solvable Cases of the QAP Explained by the Level – 1 RLT

 

 

 

Sijun Shen

Advisor: Dr. X. Sun

Thesis title: Evaluating an Individuals use of the Internet and Online Chat rooms to learn about Health Information

 

 

Camille Zerfas

Advisor: Dr. L. Rebholz

Thesis title: Sensitivity of the Filtering Radius of the rNS Turbulence Model

Current position: Clemson Mathematical Sciences PhD program