Professor Jonathan Forde has been granted tenure at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. With tenure, Forde becomes a permanent member of the faculty of the Colleges and of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. Tenure also carries a promotion from Assistant Professor to Associate Professor.

Tenure marks one of the most important milestones in the career of a professor. It is granted by the Board of Trustees after a careful review and recommendation by the Department, the faculty Committee on Tenure and Promotion, the Provost, and the President of the Colleges. The review generally takes place in the sixth year of teaching.

Steven Brams, Professor of Politics at New York University, will give twp public lectures at Hobart and William Smith Colleges, on October 2 and 3. The lectures will deal with the mathematics of election and of fair division.

The first lecture is titled, "Is There a Better Way to Elect a President?" and will be presented at 7:00 PM on Tuesday, October 7, in the Geneva Room. This talk is based on Professor Brams' recent article of the same name in which he describes the properties of approval voting, where voters can approve as many candidates as they like in a multicandidate election. This system has been adopted by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the American Mathematic Society (AMS) and several other professional societies. Brams argues that this system is a much simpler and more practical option than the plurality U.S. voting system. In addition, he will discuss other systems such as ranking systems and grading systems which have been widely discussed in mathematical fields.

The second lecture is titled, "The Win-Win Solution: Guaranteeing Fair Shares to Everybody" and will be presented in Room Napier 201 at 4:00 PM on Wednesday, October 3. Professor Brams describes this talk as follows: Cutting up a cake, dividing up the property in an estate, determining the border in an international dispute--such problems of fair division are ubiquitous. Beginning with "I cut, you choose," I will illustrate how rigorous methods can be applied to the analysis of a variety of procedures for allocating goods (or "bads" like chores), or for deciding who wins on what issues in a dispute. In particular, I will focus on procedures which provide "envy-free" allocations, in which everybody thinks he or she received the largest portion and hence does not envy anybody else.

The faculty of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science has three new members this Fall.

Professor Yan Hao joins the department in a tenure-track position in applied mathematics. She received her Ph.D. from the College of William and Mary and spent a year in a post-doctoral position at Arizona State University before coming to Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Her interests include Computational Biology and Numerical Analysis.

Professor Eric Nelson and Professor Mark Radosevich join the department as Visiting Assistant Professors of Mathematics for the 2012--13 academic year. Eric Nelson completed his Ph.D. at Colorado State University and is interested in group theory, finite geometry, and mathematics education. Mark Radosevich's Ph.D. is from Brandeis University; his interests include low-dimensional topology and mathematics education.

         

Integrated Circuit, the Department's seven person running team again ran in this year's Seneca 7 Relay Race on April 28. The race is 77.7 miles around around Seneca Lake. Each runner completes three of the 21 different legs of the course which starts and ends in Geneva. The team finished in 10 hours, 41 minutes and 57 seconds (8:15 pace) which was good enough for 54th place out of 154 teams. While other teams from the Colleges competed, ours was the only department at HWS to field an entire team. Running for Integrated Circuit this year were: Top: Nicholas MacDonald (H'12), Trevor Gionet, (H '12), Professors Jon Forde, Stina Bridgeman, and Carol Critchlow. Bottom: Professor Kevin Mitchell and Abigael Blumenthal (WS '14). All of the faculty competed last year as well.

Yaoxin Liu, H'12, has completed an Honors project titled, "A Mathematical Model: Hepatitis B and Hepatitis D Co-infection." An Honors project is a year-long endeavor culminating in a long Honors thesis and an oral examination by a committee of three examiners. Here is a description of his project: "In this honors project, mathematical models are developed to describe the interaction between human liver cells, hepatitis B virus (HBV) and hepatitis delta virus (HDV). HDV is a dependent virus that can only infect patients who are also HBV-infected, and it causes more severe damage to liver cells than HBV alone. This project is an extension of previous research, which focused on analyzing the impact of immune exhaustion on HBV and HDV infections. Shifting the emphasis to the dynamics of the infections, this honors project will shed light on what causes the severe damage to liver cells. Mathematical models of the system are built from a simpler model of a single infection and used to explore the possible outcomes of HBV and HDV co-infection. Computer simulations are also created to support analytical results. Manipulation the magnitude of different parameters has helped in understanding how different host and viral factors affect the severity of disease." Yaoxin's advisor on this project was Professor Jon Forde.