Morning Speaker

Aparna Mariah Birgen,
Wartburg College

"Calculus in the British Isles: The Rest of the Story"

Everyone knows that Isaac Newton invented Calculus and changed the course of mathematics forever. Many students who have taken Calculus know that his title of Calculus Inventor was challenged by Gotfried Leibnitz of Germany, but that Newton brought his rival's claim before the Royal Society and ultimately prevailed. What most people don't know is that this cross-channel spat about who did it first caused the study of mathematics in the British Isles to stagnate for over a hundred years until some rule-breaking undergraduates at Cambridge University started learning "Continental Calculus."

Mariah Birgen is Professor of mathematics and director of the Scholars Program at Wartburg College. She has been actively involved in creating active learning environments in college mathematics courses for over ten years. She leads undergraduate research in a variety of areas including the mathematics of voting and mathematical modeling. In May 2013 she took a team of students to the United Kingdom to study the history of math in the British Isles. Most recently, she took the lead in creating a radically different calculus curriculum founded on idea that students should learn mathematics through difficult questions for which they are intellectually engaged in seeking answers. By addressing this question, the first calculus course offers students a deep understanding of mathematical modeling to facilitate transference of their knowledge of calculus to courses within any major. Mariah has been actively involved with SENCER (Science Education through Civic engagement and Responsibility) since 2001 and, most recently, is promoting the SENCER approach to the National Collegiate Honors Council community as part of their increasing emphasis on honors education in science and mathematics.



Keynote Address

"Shortest Paths, Soap Films, and Mathematics"




In high school geometry we learn that the shortest path between two points is a line. In this talk we explore this idea in several different settings. First, we apply this idea to finding the shortest path connecting four points. Then we move this idea up a dimension and look at a few equivalent ideas in terms of surfaces in 3-dimensional space. Surprisingly, these first two settings are connected through soap films that result when a wire frame is dipped into soap solution. We use a hands-on approach to look at the geometry of some specific soap films or "minimal surfaces". 		Lukeanderson small Michael Dorff,
Brigham Young University


Michael Dorff is a professor of mathematics at Brigham Young University (BYU) in Utah. He received his PhD in complex analysis from the University of Kentucky. He has received several department, university, and national teaching awards including a MAA's Haimo Teaching Award in 2010 and was named a Fellow of the AMS in 2012. He is the founder and director of the $2.6 million NSF-funded Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (CURM) through which funds professors and students to do undergraduate research and trains professors through a 3-day summer workshop. Also, he runs the BYU "Careers in Mathematics" speaker series and is the current director of the MAA's Regional Undergraduate Mathematics Conferences program which funds conferences like PCUMC - both programs are funded by NSF. Last year, he and some colleagues published the book "Explorations in Complex Analysis" that includes a chapter on soap films and minimal surfaces. He is married with 5 daughters. His interests include reading, traveling (can you guess which 5 U.S. states. he has not been to?), running (even at 2 am in Utah), music, and soccer.


Panelists

Career Opportunities in Mathematics