Newsletter 2024-2025

Recent Events

The Mathematics Department had a fun and busy semester with several visitors. Urchin Colley ‘13, Robert Bonfiglio ‘16, and Jizel Maddouri ‘19 returned for a career preparation panel organized by Zeinab Mohamed and Madison Stamco, our new Administrative Assistant. Chris O’Neill, San Diego University, visited to work with Kevin Woods and gave a talk on numerical semigroups and polyhedral geometry. Jeff Witmer gave an exciting talk on Simpson’s paradox. Kelly McConville, Director of the Dominguez Center for Data Science at Bucknell University, was our Tamura/Lilly Lecturer. Her inviting talk A Cautious Survey Statistician’s Approach to Estimation in the Age of Big Data was accessible and well-attended and hinted at the depth of her work. Rachel Levy ‘89, Executive Director of the NC State Data Science Academy, was a special guest, invited by Susan Colley, for a Department tea for students and faculty.

Many students returned and others joined for SusanFest—a celebration of Susan Colley’s mathematics! The speakers were Urchin Colley ‘13 (Susan’s daughter), Will Bass ‘23, Margaret Nichols ‘13, Patrick Haggerty ‘13, Daniel Berwick-Evans ‘05, Tony Weinstein ‘03, Paulette Cha ‘00, Bob Bosch ‘85, Michael Henle, Gary Kennedy, and Will Colley (Susan’s husband). Gary’s highly entertaining talk Enumerative Colleyology was amazing. Visitors travelled from all across the country to celebrate Susan, which speaks volumes about her.

We look forward to several upcoming events. Our Lenora Lecturer, Pamela E. Harris, University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, will visit at the end of the fall semester to work with Alex Wilson and present her talk How to Choose Your Own Mathematical Adventures. Our Distinguished Visitor in spring 2025 will be Shelly Harvey, Rice University, who will give a series of lectures in Jack Calcut’s algebraic topology class as well as a public lecture. We have four honors students: Aidan Marco, Sam Nieman, Jack Page, and Isaac Viviano. Our honors examiner, Mihai Stoiciu, Williams College, was secured by Chris Marx.

SusanFest. From left to right: Tony Weinstein ‘03, Margaret Nichols ‘13, Patrick Haggerty ‘13, Susan Colley, Daniel Berwick-Evans ‘05, Paulette
Cha ‘00, and Will Bass ‘23

Faculty and Staff Updates

Our Administrative Assistant, Madison Stamco, joined the Department in fall 2023 and has enjoyed her time learning and working within the Department. She has been welcomed with open arms and looks forward to continuing her supportive administrative work! While keeping the Department running and arranging all of our visitors, Madison has also been working hard to transform the Mathematics office and library. She’s gone through giant filing cabinets and documents over 100 years old. The Department is thrilled to have Madison as a part of their team. 

Trevor Arrigoni is a new Visiting Assistant Professor this year. His research interests lie in algebra and algebraic geometry. In particular, he is interested in studying singularities of algebraic curves and surfaces using the structure of positive prime characteristic where one can use tools from discrete optimization, such as integer programming. He is currently writing up his dissertation for publication and has plans for future related projects.

Bob Bosch ‘85 continues to conduct research on using mathematical and computer-science-based optimization techniques to design visual artwork. Recently, Tuan Dung Do OC ‘24 and Bob published the paper Zigzag mosaics and single-line drawings.

Maddie Brown has been working at the University of Auckland as a postdoctoral scholar, where she has continued her research in analysis and partial differential equations. She has been working on a new research project with Melissa Tacy to develop estimates on the L p norm of Laplace eigenfunctions that additionally solve extra equations. She presented her work at the University of Otago and at the Joint Meetings of New Zealand, Australian, and American Mathematical Societies. She has also been enjoying exploring the beautiful scenery of New Zealand and is excited to join the Department of Mathematics at Oberlin in fall 2025. 

Jack Calcut is currently Department Chair and very much enjoys working alongside our new Administrative Assistant, Madison Stamco! Liam Axon ‘21 and Jack published a paper on ends of surfaces. Will Bass ‘23 and Jack submitted a paper on ends and end cohomology. Alexandra Du ‘22 and Jack are preparing their paper on Mazur and Jester 4-manifolds. Jack is co-organizing the 42nd annual Workshop in Geometric Topology to be held at Oberlin June 12–14, 2025 with principal speaker Danny Calegari, University of Chicago. Jack recently gave talks at the University of Maryland, Vanderbilt University, Calvin University, and George Washington University, and is giving a talk at the upcoming Joint Math Meeting in Seattle.

By the time you read this, Susan Colley will have likely taught her last class at Oberlin. She officially retires June 30, 2025, and will thus haunt the halls of the King Building during the spring semester while on a final sabbatical. Plans for this sabbatical involve continuing her research collaboration with Gary Kennedy, Ohio State University, and Corey Shanbrom, California State University, Sacramento. They are currently at work on a paper and a monograph on the monster tower, a construction used in algebra and differential geometry as well as in control theory. Other plans include taking care of her very demanding cats. Susan is profoundly grateful to her students and colleagues for allowing her to share her love of mathematical ideas for so many years; Oberlin has been a wonderful intellectual home.

Rachel Diethorn joined Oberlin as an Assistant Professor in fall 2023. Her research on homological methods in commutative algebra has a particular focus on free resolutions as a tool for learning about commutative rings and their modules. Recently her article Resolutions of differential operators of low order for an isolated hypersurface singularity was accepted for publication in the Michigan Mathematical Journal. She also completed the paper Powers of edge ideals with linear quotients, joint with Mario Stinson-Maas (OC) along with collaborators Basser and Miranda. Rachel was invited to present her work at the Cleveland State Mathematics Colloquium and at two American Mathematical Society sectional meetings. She has another paper in progress and was awarded a significant grant from the National Science Foundation to support her current and upcoming research projects and her research with students.

Ian Gossett is a new Visiting Assistant Professor this year. His research interests are in combinatorics and graph theory. Lately, he has been thinking about the relationship between orientations of graphs and certain variants of graph colorings. One of his articles on that topic recently appeared in Graphs and Combinatorics and another will soon appear in Discrete Mathematics. 

Benjamin Linowitz gave an invited lecture at the International Centre for Theoretical Sciences in Bengaluru, India. Emilio Lauret, Universidad Nacional del Sur in Argentina, and Ben published the paper titled The spectral geometry of hyperbolic and spherical manifolds: analogies and open problems in the New York Journal of Mathematics. Recently, Ben finished his first book, an introduction to group theory. He is currently excited about beginning to work on a second book project, this one an exposition of the geometry underlying certain geometric motifs which frequently appear in Islamic art.

Chris Marx has been continuing to work on his book Harmonic Analysis—An Introduction Through Music. His book explores how phenomena in music can be used to motivate developments in the field of mathematical analysis. It originated from the course Math 357 (Harmonic Analysis) that Chris developed. This academic year, Chris received a one-year internal grant which allows him to work with a current math and musical studies major (Sam Thiel) on the final touches of the manuscript. Chris is very happy to report that a first version of the manuscript was submitted to the publisher at the end of November 2024. He is currently waiting on the decision from the editorial board of the publisher (fingers crossed!).

Zeinab Mohamed joined Oberlin as an Assistant Professor in fall 2023. She organized a career preparation panel for our students, bringing in alumni to share their career journeys and advice. Over the summer, she worked closely with her student Tobi Bui, who presented his research Survival Analysis, Causal Inference And Machine Learning For Lung Cancer at the 4th Penn Conference on Big Data in Biomedical and Population Health Sciences. She is currently mentoring Jack Page on his honors project in spatial data analysis for air quality measurements. Recently, she was invited to give a seminar on her research in lung cancer at the Center for Computational Life Sciences at the Cleveland Clinic, and she presented her research at the Women and Data Science Conference.

Elizabeth Wilmer is in her third year as a Program Director in the Probability program of the National Science Foundation and expects to return to Oberlin in the fall of 2025.

Alex Wilson has been a Visiting Assistant Professor since fall 2023. He primarily works in the field of combinatorial representation theory and recently had papers appear in Algebraic Combinatorics, Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science, and the Electronic Journal of Combinatorics. He currently has a manuscript under review in Combinatorial Theory and is working remotely with a team of nine other mathematicians on a new project.

Jeff Witmer had a pair of papers appear in 2024 in the Journal of Statistics and Data Science Education: Can You Trust Your Memory? and What Should We Do Differently in STAT 101?. He received the 2024 Chauvenet Prize from the MAA for his paper on Simpson's paradox. As a diversion, he wrote a short article, Hall of Fame Vagabond Blues, about how the chances of a player being elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame go down if he plays for several teams, which appeared in the newsletter By The Numbers.

Kevin Woods has continued his research in combinatorics, geometry, and logic. Ask him about the Chicken McNugget problem! He has several co-authors who have recently visited Oberlin and given talks, including Obie alum Tristram Bogart ‘01, who is now an Associate Professor at Universidad de los Andes. In his spare time, he does a lot of hiking, including long trips along the coast of Ireland (summer 2023) and through central Italy (summer 2024), and crossed the Grand Canyon from rim to rim (twice! fall 2024).

Student Awards and Prizes 2023-2024

The Rebecca C. Orr Memorial Prize is awarded to the student who demonstrates strong scholastic achievement and promise for future professional accomplishment.

2024 Winner: Shuran Zhu 

The John D. Baum Memorial Prize is awarded to the Oberlin College student who obtains the highest score on the Annual Putnam Mathematical Exam.

2024 Winner: Deron Lessure

The Edward T. Wong Memorial Prize is awarded to a graduating Oberlin Mathematics major in recognition of their scholastic achievement and contributions to the Department.

2024 Winner: Jake Berran
 

We welcome Alumni to submit comments, pieces of your own research, or life updates to include in our upcoming newsletter. Submissions should be sent to mathematics@oberlin.edu.