Advisor and Officers

Advisor: Dr. Zsuzsanna M. Kadas

Officers: Daniel Lewis and Zachary Pratt.

Number of New Members Inducted:

12

Vermont Alpha Chapter members and Mathematics faculty pose with the PME flag after the Induction Ceremony.

Number of Continuing Members:

6

Describe the two most interesting or unusual chapter activities this year:

The Induction Ceremony was held on October 2, 2009, with a reception for parents and friends afterward. Our own Professor Jo Ellis-Monaghan gave a lecture on “Graph-Theoretical Design Strategies for DNA Nanostructures”, using Zometools to illustrate DNA self-assembly. The talk included results obtained by past and present PME members working with her on undergraduate summer research grants. MacArthur Fellow, Dr. Jeffrey Weeks, made a two day visit to Saint Michael’s. His activities included a very interactive public lecture on “The Shape of Space”attended by enthusiasts from around the region, a workshop on “Visualizing Four Dimensions”, class visits, and dinner with PME members and other students.

Do any of your chapter members plan to attend or present a paper at the 2009 PME national meeting at MathFest in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania?

Not at this time.

Do you have any news about current students or recent graduates, for example, scholarships or other awards, acceptances to graduate school, paper presentations at conferences?

Conferences, Undergrad Research, and other news: Brittany Baker ’11 spent the summer of 2009 at the University of Georgia REU on “The Mathematics of Paper Folding” funded by the NSF; she spent Spring 2010 at the Budapest Semester in Math program. This summer (2010) she will attend The Summer Mathematics Program for Women at George Washington U. Daniel Lewis ‘10 and Andrew Gilbert ‘11 spent the summer of 2009 at SMC working on developing strategies for self-assembling DNA nanostructures with rigidity constraints, under the direction of Prof. Jo Ellis-Monaghan. Dan was supported by NASA-VT-Space Grant Consortium funding, Andrew by a NIH-VT Genetics Network grant. Kaiti Tuthill ’11 will participate in the REU at Northern Arizona University Sixteen Saint Michael’s College students presented papers at the seventeenth annual Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference held at Keene State College in Keene, NH, including PME chapter Co-President Dan Lewis, and several prospective PME members. Photo and story are posted at:http://www.smcvt.edu/admission/news/news_story.asp?iNewsID=1422&strBack=/news/Default.asp Daniel Lewis received the Outstanding Math Major award at graduation. Graduate School News: Class of 2010: Katelyn Billings will attend Yale and Dominic Perroni will attend the University of Wisconsin, both pursuing Ph.D.’s in Chemistry. Zach Pratt will attend law school at the University of Iowa. Allie Levesque ’08 completed the M.S. in Statistics from the University of Southern Maine in May, 2010; Kate Morrow’08 completed the M.S. in Statistics at the University of Vermont in May 2010.