1988 – Milton D. Cox
On August 10, 1988, at the Pi Mu Epsilon National Meeting in Providence, Rhode Island, Dr. Milton D. Cox, was honored by Pi Mu Epsilon with the C. C. MacDuffee Award for Distinguished Service. This prestigious recognition, first bestowed in 1965 upon J. Sutherland Frame is awarded “often enough to be recognized and seldom enough to be meaningful,” according to the Pi Mu Epsilon Governing Council.
As Faculty Advisor of the Ohio Delta chapter at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, for at least eighteen years, as Councilor of Pi Mu Epsilon from 1975 to 1981 and National President from 1984-87, Dr. Cox has continually contributed to the achievement of Pi Mu Epsilon’s goal “to promote scholarship in mathematics.” A sort of mathematical “pied piper,” he journeyed over the years with many Miami University students – by van, auto, and train, to the annual Pi Mu Epsilon National Meetings at college and university campuses across the United States. His untiring efforts to stimulate student interest in mathematics have been rewarded both by an active Pi Mu Epsilon chapter on his home campus and by a substantial increase in the number of student papers presented at national meetings during his presidency of Pi Mu Epsilon.
Not content to wait for just one summer opportunity for Pi Mu Epsilon students to present papers, Dr. Cox has organized and directed fifteen consecutive Pi Mu Epsilon Student Conferences at Miami Univerity. The sixteenth is scheduled for Fall 1989. These successful conferences continue to serve as models which have been successfully replicated on other campuses.
A graduate of DePauw University, the honoree received his masters’s and doctoral degrees from Indiana University, speicalizing in abstract algebra and field theory. At Miami Univeristy, he currently divides his time teaching as an Associate Professor of Mathematics and Statistics and serving as the Associate Provost for Teaching Effectiveness Programs. In addition, Dr. Cox coordinates the departmental honors program and chairs the Committee on Student Sections for the Mathematical Association of America’s Ohio Section of which he is a past-president.
A member of Phi Beta Kappa, Dr. Cox has lectured on topics ranging from the theory of tiling to the ingredients of an undergraduate mathematics curriculum. He has brought to Pi Mu Epsilon and to its students a contagious enthusiasm for mathematics.
Pi Mu Epsilon is proud to add the name of Dr. Milton D. Cox to the list of recipients of the C. C. MacDuffee Distinguished Service Award.