It reminded me of the time I was trying to give an invited lecture in Australia over the din of an engineering experiment in an adjacent lab.  My hosts, skeptical that anything could be done, followed me into the lab, where I was greeted by two former calculus students, who immediately shut down the experiment.

ROSENBURG PRIZE for excellent senior: Carlos Dominguez and James Wilcox.

GOLDBERG AWARD for best colloquium:
Erich Trieschman ”Lost in a Forest”

WYSKIEL AWARD in Teaching: Will Speer

MORGAN PRIZE in Applied Math:  Carson Eisenach

MORGAN PRIZE in Teaching:  Martin Clarke

ROBERT M. KOZELKA AWARD in Statistics:  Faraz Rahman

OLGA R. BEAVER PRIZE for department service:  Zane Martin

BENEDICT PRIZE for outstanding sophomore:
1^st prize:   Benjamin Demeo
2^nd prize:  Samantha Petti

WITTE PROBLEM-SOLVING PRIZE: Carlos Dominguez, Jared Hallett   (twice Putnam teams top 20)

COLLOQUIUM ATTENDANCE: Joy Jing and James Wilcox

Prof. Johnson honored our late colleague Ollie Beaver, thanked visitors Matt Gardner Spencer, Andrey Glubokov, and Mark Mixer, and recognized SMASAB, the student math advisory board:

Phil Tosteson, Alec Greaves-Tunnell, James Wilcox, Joy Jing, Zane Martin, Katy Golvala, Sandra Shedd, Craig Corsi, Jared Hallett, Kirk Swanson, Philippe Demontigny, Samuel Tripp.

Prof. Adams presented Prof. Burger, newly appointed as President of Southwestern University, with a solid crystal image of Barth’s sextic as a parting gift from the department.

Following tradition, seniors gave advice, for example:

“Start a 24-hour exam in the early afternoon.” —Zane Martin

“Triple check your take-home.” —Jackson Lu

“Take some stats and comp-sci.” —Carlos Dominguez

“Take a professor to Lyceum.” —Kyle Bolo     [editor's note: or Dodd-ceum]

What’s great is the diversity of both the types of organizations and where they’re located. It probably doesn’t surprise you to know that the country with the most organizations participating is the US with over 250. But, what country is in second place? India? (no, they’re third with 84). China? (nope, 34^th with 10). The UK? (7^th with 53). It’s… Bulgaria with 91!

What the International Year means, among other things, is that there’s a lot of buzz about Statistics in the press. You may have seen the WSJ article Data Crunchers Now the Cool Kids on Campus.

Personally, it’s meant a lot of travel for me. Since January 1 I’ve logged over 30,000 miles giving over a dozen keynote addresses about statistics in the US and internationally. I was also the subject of a televised webinar at SAS headquarters in Cary NC last month. I talked about my research on aging in sports performance, doing statistical consulting for the Grateful Dead and what’s hot in statistics.

For the sports performance, here are 40 years of Master’s swim times in freestyle events by length and gender. I used log of time for the event so that we can see very different events in the same plots. Notice that for every age group, times came down fairly rapidly in the first half of the plot and have been leveling out – especially for the older age groups. That’s the participation effect. So many more people are staying competitive longer that the models for aging are all dated.  The other thing to notice is that 60 year olds now are swimming at about the speeds 40 years old swam 40 years ago. So when someone says that 60 is the new 40, they aren’t kidding! Over the summer I hope to build a model that accounts for age, distance, gender and participation. I recently met Dottie Dorian, (wife of  George Dorian ’51) who has participated in over 300 (!) triathlons and holds the 80+ female erg record of 8:49 for a 2k erg (!). She said “Hurray, finally someone will know how to handicap me.” So, stay tuned….

I was on a Spring Break trip down to Honduras to go scuba diving off the island of Roatan. It was on our second to last day that we decided the time had come to go in search of sharks. There actually was a shop on the island that advertised “Shark Dives”.  We headed out about twenty minutes from shore to a part of the reef known for its population of Caribbean Reef Sharks. I rolled over the side of the boat into the water and began the descent down to 80 feet, where the sharks live.  Check out this video to see what we found.

1. Vanderbilt University
2. Williams College
3. Chinese University, Hong Kong
4. Notre Dame
5. Chicago
6. Cornell
7. Denver
8. Bucknell
9. Delaware
10.Michigan
11.Carnegie Mellon
12.UCLA
13.Washington
14.Illinois, Chicago
15.Wesleyan

Williams News Release on Burger as Southwestern President.

Burger’s book with Starbird on “The 5 Elements of Successful Thinking” has been named 2013 Silver Medal Winner in the Independent Publisher Book Awards, Self-Help category.

Precalculus and Courses for non-majors: 
Math 100- Math 129

Calculus:
Math 130             Calculus I
Math 140             Calculus II
Math 150             Multivariable (with series)
Math 151             Multivariable (with Stokes)

Bridge Courses:
Math 200             Discrete Math
Stat 201                Statistics
Math 209             Differential Equations
Math 250             Linear Algebra

Pre-Core Electives (not requiring Analysis or Algebra):
Math 300 – Math 349

Math Core:
Math 350             Real Analysis
Math 351             Applied Real Analysis
Math 355             Abstract Algebra

Post-Core Electives (requiring Analysis or Algebra):
Math 360 – Math 399

Senior Seminars:
Math 400-490

We hope you enjoy the new numbers!

 The Story of our Numbers

Long ago in days of yore in a land that was, well, right here, we had a rock solid system for numbering our prized collection of mathematics courses.

The first of the three digit number was level:  1 for first-year, 2  for sophomore, and so on.

The middle digit represent the subfield of mathematics to which the course belonged:   0=calculus/analysis, 1=algebra/number theory, 2=geometry/topology, 3=applied, 4=probability, 5=discrete, 6=logic, 7=actuarial, 8=miscellaneous.

The last digit could distinguish between courses in an area, and was selected so that Fall courses were odd numbered and Spring courses were even numbered.

And everyone was happy for many years.

Then came a time when Williams’ students, being the clever people they are, discovered what an absolute blast it was to do math.

This naturally led to an increase in the number of courses we offered, leading more students to discover the joys of math, which led to more courses in an exponential feedback loop.

Pretty soon all these courses began bickering over numbers (of all things!). Oddly, some even courses were taught in the Fall.  Even some odd courses were taught in the Spring. Some courses had to adopt a middle digit that had nothing to do with their field! And don’t even get me started on Statistics.

“ENOUGH OF THIS!” a wise and gentle soul finally shouted hysterically, and all the professors scrambled to make a New System.