Matt Boelkins

Randy Pruim

The annual meeting of the Michigan Section–MAA and MichMATYC (the Michigan Mathematical Association of Two-Year Colleges) will be held on Friday and Saturday, May 5–6, at Calvin College in Grand Rapids. Our program this year offers a wide range of invited talks devoted to mathematics, its applications, and its teaching. In what follows, we offer a brief preview of the planned events.

This year we are delighted to welcome Dan Mulligan of Project SEED to give the Friday luncheon address. Project SEED is a nonprofit organization that works in partnership with all levels of education and industry with the goal of increasing the educational options of urban youth. Now over four decades old, the program carries a national reputation for excellence and maintains a cutting edge approach. The Project employs highly-trained mathematicians and master teachers to work with low-achieving students and bring them socratically into the world of higher mathematics.

Friday afternoon, Joan Birman, Research Professor Emeritus at Barnard C, will deliver the plenary address “Permutations, the Braid Group and Garside Groups”. Frank Garside was the headmaster in a boys’ school in Oxford when he began the work that became his 1968 Oxford Ph.D. thesis, where he uncovered hitherto unknown structure, which has since had wide applications and generalizations that reach far beyond his thesis topic. For example, there are ongoing applications to public key cryptography, and there is a large class of infinite groups that are called “Garside groups”. In this talk, Prof. Birman will describe Garside’s discoveries and some of their subsequent generalizations.

Following dinner and the Friday evening awards ceremony, Mike Moody, Dean of the Faculty at the Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering, will entertain us with “An ODE to Toys: Motivating Mathematics with Physical Models and Demonstrations”. Using ropes, chains, tuning forks, chemical reactions, pendulums, and other objects, Prof. Moody will lead a discussion of problems from physics, chemistry, and engineering and their mathematical analysis.

Mathematical biology has recently emerged as one of the fastest-growing areas of applied mathematics. On Saturday morning, Trachette Jackson of UM-Ann Arbor will deliver a plenary address on her work in mathematics that is related to the fight against cancer. Prof. Jackson is particularly interested in applications of mathematics (involving partial differential equations) to tumor biology, chemotherapeutic strategies, and cell signaling.

Do you remember Riemann’s Theorem from your analysis class? A conditionally convergent series can be rearranged to sum to any number. During the Saturday luncheon address, Carl Cowen, Dean of the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis School of Science, will use the alternating harmonic series and show how to actually find the sum of any rearrangement in which the positive terms and the negative terms are each in their usual order. Participants will leave the talk with ideas for examples and exercises for use in calculus, advanced calculus, and real analysis courses.

In addition to the plenary talks, we are excited to add the new class of “local invited” talks to this year’s conference. Jonathan Hodge (GVSU), Melinda Koelling (WMU), Kristen Moore (UM-AA), Nathalie Sinclair (MSU), and Jennifer Zhao (UM-Dearborn) will be giving 30-minute presentations on topics related to their research. More details about these talks (including titles and abstracts) can be found at www.michmaa.org/section2006/abstracts.php.

In addition, as always we will have a variety of contributed talks on topics of interest from various areas of mathematics and on pedagogical issues related to particular courses. There will also be sessions devoted to talks by undergraduate and graduate students as well as book exhibits from the MAA and other publishers. Details about the schedule (including abstracts), registration, and accommodations are contained in the Program for the Annual Meeting, which is included with this Newsletter. Information may also be found online at www.michmaa.org/section2006/.

Please note that advance reservations for all meals must be made by April 21 and that reservations for rooms in the Prince Conference Center must be made by April 4 in order to receive the conference rate ($70 per room, 1–4 people). See the Web page for descriptions and photographs of these rooms.

In November of 2005, the Michigan MAA lost one of its prized members and major contributors. Janet Andersen, the Four-Year College Vice Chair of the Section and Professor of Mathematics at Hope College, died in an automobile accident. She was 47. Janet’s loss will be deeply felt by all of the professional colleagues who enjoyed the privilege of working with her.

At the time of her death, Janet was leading the program committee in the development and organization of the schedule of speakers for the 2006 Section Meeting. The remaining members are Matthew Boelkins (GVSU), Randall Pruim (Calvin C), and Mark Naber (Monroe County CC). The local arrangements committee consists of Gerard Venema (chair), Sharon Gould (administrative assistant), Michael Bolt, Earl Fife, Thomas Jager, Randall Pruim, and George VanZwalenberg.

We look forward to seeing you at Calvin the first weekend in May!

Matt Boelkins and Randy Pruim, Four-Year College Co- Vice Chairs