LSUS Math Department News, 2001

Mary Ellen Foley attended the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Southern Regional Conference in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, February 21-23. There she presented a workshop for teachers entitled: The Algebra of Transformations in the Coordinate Plane.
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS go to Carmen McLean, who is an LSUS student majoring in Mathematics Education. She attended and gave a presentation at The 4th Annual Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. Carmen's talk was entitled, "The string art problem: discovering the envelope". And speaking of envelopes, Carmen is pushing the envelope here, being the first student in our department (in at least a decade) to give a talk at a national conference.
The Department of Mathematics and the Department of Computer Science have MERGED and are now aptly named the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. We are all located on the 4th floor of Bronson Hall. The chair of the combined department, as of the Fall of 2001, is Dr. Paul Sisson. We extend our congratulations and condolences to Dr. Sisson, in whatever proportions he deems appropriate!
We have hired some great new people!
- Dr. Deborah Shepherd earned her Ph.D. in Computational Analysis and Modeling from Louisiana Tech University in 2001. She joined us during the summer of 2001 and was appointed Assistant Professor in the department as of the fall semester. Welcome, Debbie!
- Ms. Jamie Prince also joined us last summer as Lab Manager for the newly merged department. She immediately made herself indispensible and has our labs humming. Welcome, Jamie!
The Pi Mu Epsilon Journal has published an article entitled "The Sum of the k'th Powers of the First n Positive Integers" by Abolghassem Saleh-Jahromi (LMU) and Julien Doucet (LSU-S) in their Fall 2001 Issue.
Several of our faculty gave talks at the most recent meeting of the Louisiana-Mississippi Section of the Mathematical Association of America. (PDF's of their papers are found on that website.)
- Julien Doucet, Roger's Factoring and Lifting Theorems
- W. Conway Link, Visualizing the Chances of Winning a Lottery
- Louis Blair, Indefinite integrals of products and quotients of trigonometric functions
A reporter from The Times interviewed our very own Christi Tyson and Carmen McLean about the CSEMS grant from NSF. See their mugshots and the article HERE.
Dr. Rick Mabry has returned from his sabbatical. He spent the academic year 2000-2001 in DeLand, FL, and hung out at Stetson University. A short article, "Asymptotic Symmetry of Polynomials", written during this sabbatical, with coauthor Paul Deiermann (formerly at LSUS and now at Southeast Missouri State University) has been accepted for publication in Mathematics Magazine. During his absence, Dr. Mabry was promoted to the rank of Professor.
Dr. Julien Doucet had an article, "Reducing Trigonometric Functions by Using Spokes on a carousel," published in the January-February, 2001 issue of the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Source and Technology.
Paul Sisson, Dr. Rick Mabry and Michael Avidon have had an article entitled "Enumerating Row Arrangements of Three Species" accepted for publication in the April 2001 issue of Mathematics Magazine. (Michael Avidon was a visiting professor at Centenary College when the article was conceived.)
Several members of the department attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans in January, 2000. Judith Covington was an active participant as a panelist in Project NExT discussions, and organized 3 contributed paper sessions entitled, " Courses and Programs That Illustrate Recommendations of the Mathematical Education of Teachers Document." Paul Sisson presented a paper, "College Algebra and Analysis of Stock Market Investing." Mary Ellen Foley presented a paper, "A Methods Seminar for Preservice Secondary Teachers." Carlos Spaht gave an invited presentation on "Programs for Minority Students" as part of a Summa (Strengthening Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement) panel discussion.
Two LSUS math majors, David Fletcher and Brad Weatherly, recently took and passed the new Course 1 Exam of the Society of Actuaries and Casualty Actuarial Society. Less than 34% of the more than 2500 people who took the test passed it. David and Brad are scheduled to graduate this semester.