Sep 26, 2007 - Claremont, Calif. - Members of the Harvey Mudd College Department of Mathematics faculty recently garnered grants totaling nearly $1 million for a joint theoretic-physical-numerical project and a project to aid in the teaching of ordinary differential equations.

Professor Andrew Bernoff has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) grant for $405,372 in collaboration with an experimental physics group at Kent State University and chemical engineers and mathematicians at Case Western Reserve University. The joint project, titled the “Dynamics of interfacial domains,” investigates the basic physical behavior of lipid layers at the micron scale, one classical example being the lipid bilayer that forms the exterior wall of most biological cells. HMC’s portion of the grant is $54,113.

Bernoff’s expertise in fluid mechanics and numerical methods has allowed precise simulations that almost exactly reproduce the experiments at Kent State. Bernoff and his former thesis student Jacob Wintersmith ‘06 (physics) have published two papers with the experimental group. Wintersmith spent part of last summer with the group at Kent State helping with the experiments and doing data analysis.

Assistant Professor Darryl Yong and Emeritus Professor Robert Borrelli were awarded an NSF grant of $499,792 to support the project entitled “Online Resources to Improve the Teaching and Learning of Differential Equations: Encouraging the Wide-Spread Use of Modeling and Computing.”

The aim of this project is to improve the teaching and learning of ordinary differential equations (ODEs) by facilitating the development, dissemination and wide-spread adoption of modeling projects and computer experiments. By encouraging the wide-spread adoption of innovations in the teaching and learning of ODEs, Yong and Borrelli seek to affect the training of a great number of future scientists, not just mathematicians. Every student at HMC must take the equivalent of a full-semester course in ordinary differential equations, regardless of their major.