Jan 30, 2008 - Claremont, Calif. - Students, faculty and alumni of the Harvey Mudd College Department of Mathematics were out in force at the annual joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), held in San Diego on January 6-9, 2008. 

HMC students Sara Gussin '08, Andy Leverentz '08, David Morrison '08, Greg Minton '08, Parousia Rockstroh '08, Steve Rosenthal '07 and Tia Sondjaja '08, together with math faculty and alumni, enjoyed an exciting conference. Four seniors won $100 prizes for their research posters: Sara Gussin ("Wavelet Sets" with faculty adviser Jon Jacobsen), Andy Leverentz ("An Integrodifferential equation Modeling 1D Swarming" with faculty adviser Andy Bernoff), Greg Minton ("Dot Product Representations of Graphs" with faculty adviser Kimberly Tucker) and Tia Sondjaja ("A Combinatorial Lusternik-Schnirelman-Borsuk Theorem on the d-Cube" with faculty adviser Francis Su).

Three students also presented invited research talks. Parousia Rockstroh presented "Angular-Asymmetric Binary Branching Trees," in the AMS Session on Dynamical Systems. His talk represented work conducted in the summer under David Brown at Ithaca College. Tia Sondjaja presented "A Combinatorial Lusternik-Schnirelman-Borsuk Theorem on the d-Cube," in the AMS Special Session on Undergraduate Research. Her talk was based on research conducted in The Claremont Colleges REU, under the supervision of Francis Su. Steve Rosenthal presented a talk in the same session on "Localized Forcing in Thin Liquid Films," which represented research conducted under Rachel Levy, at the UCLA summer research program in Applied Mathematics.

Several math department faculty presented talks at the conference, including a talk in the special session on voting by Michael Orrison entitled "Voting, the Symmetric Group and Representation Theory" and one by Francis Su entitled "Are Societies Agreeable?" In addition to his talk, Orrison served on two panels for Project NExT, an MAA professional development program for new faculty in the mathematical sciences. Rachel Levy presented a talk in the AMS Special Session on Partial Differential Equations, entitled "Flow of a surfactant-laden thin liquid film down an inclined plane."

Other mathematics department members present at the meeting included Art Benjamin, Andrew Bernoff, Robert Borrelli, Alfonso Castro, Weiqing Gu, Daniel Goroff, Melvin Henriksen, Jon Jacobsen, Francis Su, Kimberly Tucker and Darryl Yong.  HMC Math Department alumni were also well-represented. Sightings of Mudders included Bradley  Forrest '02, Christopher  Hanusa '01, Dylan Helliwell '98, Karl Mahlburg '01, Cameron McLeman '02, Russ Merris '64, Andrew Niedermaier '04, Elizabeth Norton '01, Elisha Peterson '00, Scott Robertson '99, Jeremy Rouse '03, Itai Seggev '99 and David Uminsky '03.

Story by Jon Jacobsen