Advisor and Officers

Advisor: Zsuzsanna Kadas

Co-Presidents: Katelyn Berry and Claudette Foisy

Vice President: Paul Jarvis

Number of New Members Inducted:

10

This year’s new inductees into the Vermont Alpha Chapter.

Number of Continuing Members:

9

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

The annual induction ceremony and PME lecture were held on October 24, 2008 with a reception for PME members and parents/friends of new inductees. The lecture by Prof. John Voight of the University of Vermont, entitled “Escher and the Droste Effect”, described how elliptic curve theory can be used to “fill in” the blank center of M.C. Escher’s lithograph “Print Gallery”.

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

No.

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?

Five St. Michael’s students presented papers at the Hudson River Undergraduate Math Conference held in April at Union College in Schenectady, NY including PME members Jonathan Kaptcianos ’09, Claudette Foisy ’09, and Nicholas Rizzo ’10. Jon Kaptcianos ’09 had a research article “A Graph Theoretical Approach to DNA Fragment Assembly” appear in The American Journal of Undergraduate Research in 2008; at graduation, Jon received the “Saint Michael’s Award”. Daniel Lewis ’10 was awarded a NASA-VT Space Grant summer undergraduate research grant and spent the summer at SMC working on developing strategies for self-assembling DNA nanostructures with rigidity constraints, under the direction of Prof. Jo Ellis-Monaghan. Paul Jarvis ’09 received the Outstanding Senior Award in Mathematics; a double major in math and biology, he will be attending medical school at the University of Vermont. At graduation, Whitney Hine ’09 won the 2009 Donald Sutton Community Service Award. Katelyn Berry ’09 received the Outstanding Senior Award in Computer Science; she will be attending graduate school in CS at Northeastern. Claudette Foisy ’09 will pursue graduate work in Statistics at Clarkson. Katelyn Billings ’10, a double major in math and chemistry spent the summer doing chemistry research at the University of Utah. Further details about some of these accomplishments are available at http://www2.smcvt.edu/marcom/MAJORS/Mathematics/Summer2009/index.html