About the Mathematics Department and Mathematics

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Our colleagues from other departments often ask us: What is mathematics about and what do mathematicians do?

We stay busy, both with teaching (this is our immediate duty to society) and with research (this is our responsibility to the future of humankind --- we work in quite a few research areas). Here is a video with a speech by Timothy Gowers on the importance of mathematics given at the 2000 Millenium Meeting in Paris. Mathematics in Carbondale has a long history. Here we want to give you some ideas about who we are and what we do.

If you have heard about us it might possibly be because of one of these:

Carbondale is the birthplace of the MCCCC = Midwest Conference on Combinatorics Cryptography, and Computing.

Picture of Prof. Walter Wallis with a parrot on his shoulder

It was started in 1986 by the efforts of Walter Wallis, and, after a few meetings at SIUC, now moves around the Midwest at various institutions. This year is its 24-th meeting. Currently, Walter is developing a webpage devoted to his book on Designs.

You might have encountered in the bookstore or on library shelves one of over 40 books that were written or edited by members of our department.

The latest is coauthored by Joseph Hundley and concerns the theory of automorphic representations.

Alan Schoen discovered a minimal surface that he named the gyroid. The gyroid is becoming increasingly popular as more and more new occurrences of it in nature are being discovered (google it up!). It has been discussed at Cornell University and John Baez's site at Univ. of California-Riverside and on wired.com's wired science blog. You may purchase a sculpture of it from Bathsheba. Currently Alan is developing an amazing site Geometry Garret. We hope that some day a big gyroidal sculpture will embellish our Math. Department backyard.

And if you are a Little Egyptian, that is a member of the Southern Illinois community, you might have heard about or experienced our efforts to keep mathematics important in local education. Here are two activities that we've undertaken to fight the spread of mathematical debilitation:

Professor and Mrs. Parker at Math Field Day 2010

Math Field Day -- a yearly competition in math skills for high school students -- has been offered by us for 50+ years. George Parker organized the last 35 of them. This year almost 1000 students from 41 schools participated in Math Field Day.

David Kammler's book on Fourier Analysis is one of the finest on the subject. It has been adopted by several universities as the course texbook (including Stanford and Maryland).

For the last 5 years the Math Dept at SIUC has been involved in the Algebra Project -- a revolution in the way mathematics is taught in underprivileged communities. We are currently spending almost a million dollars-- quite a large chunk! -- of a 4 million grant on the Eldorado High School experimental Math program. This video is from the last Summer Institution at Carbondale. See also here (for more info, contact Greg Budzban).

Here are some statistics about how we spend our time:

We publish about 50 papers per year (papers published)
About 40 books have been authored or edited by the members of our department in recent years.
We participate in conferences (see the recent years: conferences attended)
We are active in keeping contact with other Institutions.
- We visit other institutions and universities to conduct research.
- Here are researchers who visited us recently to give talks and start or continue collaboration.
We run a number of weekly seminars where we share our research ideas, problems and solutions.
Mathematicians are among the recent recipients of our university Outstanding Scholar Awards:
Salah E. A. Mohammed (2006) and Scott J. Spector (2000).
We are not bad teachers -- a number of us have received these teaching awards in recent years.
See also selected opinions from our student's class evaluations.
We also write textbooks and Class Notes for some of our courses when we find that the available textbooks are not to our expectations
Here are some other research highlights of our department.

Main (broadly understood) research groups:

algebra and number theory (Dubravka Ban, Andrew Earnest, Robert Fitzgerald, Joseph Hundley, Don Redmond, Mary Wright, Joseph Yucas)
combinatorics and graph theory (Lane Clark, John McSorley, Thomas Porter)
geometry and topology (Jerzy Kocik, Mike Sullivan)
logic and complexity (Wesley Calvert)
probability theory and stochastic systems (Greg Budzban, Philip Feinsilver, Randy Hughes, Salah-Eldin Mohammed, Henri Schurz)
statistics (Bhaskar Bhattacharya, Sakthivel Jeyaratnam, Abdel-Razzaq Mugdadi, David Olive)
applied mathematics (Edward Neuman, Kathleen Pericak-Spector, Scott Spector, Issa Tall, MingQing Xiao, Dashun Xu, Jianhong Xu, Marvin Zeman)

Here are some other bits and pieces:

Our past graduates.
Our PhD program ranks as 22-41 in the ranking privided by phds.org if the main priorities are (1) research productivity, (2) placement rate (finding a job), (3) faculty-student ratio, (4) low tuition and (5) NCR survey-based quality.
Some retro bits and pieces: 1. Ernie Shult, famous for his contributions to the theory of finite groups, studied and worked for a while at SIUC (see p.4)..
Centers where our faculty have collaborative ties: Philip Feinsilver at Nancy, France.
One of our colleagues, Lane Clark, has Erdös Number 1. Most of our faculty have Erdös Number 2 or 3, while the worldwide mean Erdös Number among mathematicians is about 5. (More on this piece of mathematical folklore).

Our offices are always open for discussion on Mathematics, and life's other persistent questions---please stop by for a chat! When in the Student Center, we are always ready to spend some time with you over coffee -- after all we turn it into theorems...

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