Recent LSUS Math Department News

News from 2005:
- Dr. Judith Covington, associate professor of mathematics, has been selected as the editorial panel chair for the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics’ publication, Mathematics Teacher. Read more in the summer edition of LSUS News.
- The transformation is complete! Dr. Paul Sisson has left his dual role as chair of the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science and is now Dean of the LSUS College of Sciences. In his place, Dr. Deborah Shepherd has taken over as chair of the math department. (Well, she hasn't "taken over" in the sense of a coup or anything.) Read more in the summer edition of LSUS News.
- The math department welcomes Mr. Joseph Andary, who is teaching several sections of statistics for us this academic year. Having many years of experience in statistics and biostatistics, in senior and supervisory roles in the pharmaceutical and health care industries, Mr. Andary brings a wealth of practical knowledge to the classroom. Most recently, he was Vice President and co-owner of Red River Statistics, Inc.
- Wanda Moseley has just been elected as State Historian for Kappa Kappa Iota. Wanda was also voted by the LSUS student body as one of the "Top 20 Professors" this year. She recently finished serving two terms on the LSUS Faculty Senate. Read more in the summer edition of LSUS News.
- Neu gets first publication! Keith Neu, Instructor in the Department of Mathematics, has had an article accepted for publication in the College Mathematics Journal. The title of the article is "Using Random Tilings to Derive a Fibonacci Congruence" and is co-authored with Dr. Paul Deiermann, at Southeast Missouri State University. Paul taught at LSUS from 1989 until 1996 and Keith was one of his students before Keith went off to grad school in 1993. According to Dr. Deiermann, "The mathematics in the article is all Keith's. My role as co-author was to assist in the writing, checking and streamlining of the proofs, since this was Keith's first full length article." In fact, Keith does have another publication, the solution to a problem posed in the Mathematics Magazine. This was done in 1990 while he was a student at LSUS! That solution is here (Problem 1381) on p. 270). Other mentions of Keith's undergraduate work are here (Problem 10212, p. 579) and here (Problem 470, p. 99). Keith has a Masters Degree from the University of Kentucky.
- Dr. Aurel Stan gave an invited talk at the 26th Conference on Quantum Probability and Infinite Dimensional Analysis, February 20-26, 2005 in Levico Terme (Trento), Italy. Dr. Stan's talk was entitled, "Moments and commutators of probability measures" and is joint work with Professors Luigi Accardi from Vito Volterra Center, Rome, Italy, and Hui-Hsiung Kuo, from LSU (Baton Rouge). Dr. Stan also gave a Math Department Colloquium on this same topic. Here, Dr. Stan gives a few remarks about the conference.
- An article by Dr. Rick Mabry has the title, "No nontrivial Hamel basis is closed under multiplication" and will appear in the journal Aequationes Mathematicae. Dr. Mabry also presented the results of this paper as part of a Math Department Colloquium.
News from 2004:
- The LSUS Math Department welcomes new faculty member Dr. Aurel Stan and re-welcomes Dr. Francis Hanna!
- LSUS ranks No. 3 in BORSF grants and our Dr. Debbie Shepherd is on four of them!
- AND Dr. Shepherd is also now the book review editor for the journal, Quality and Reliability Engineering International.
- AND Dr. Shepherd was selected for the George and Regina Khoury Professorship in Sciences.
  
  AND, speaking of professorships, Dr. Judith Covington has received the Elmer and Barbara Simon Professorship for Excellence in Teaching, which is a three year award. Dr. Carlos Spaht II retains the AEP SWEPCO LaPREP Professorship. A list of all the Professorships (complete with photos) is found HERE on the LSUS News pages.
- AND, speaking of editorships, Dr. Covington is now on the Editorial Panel for the journal, Mathematics Teacher.
- Dr. Covington also attended the recent Mathfest in Providence, RI, where she worked with Project NExT, giving a four-hour short course on Teacher Prep.
- Wanda Moseley, an instructor of mathematics, was awarded a commendation from the Louisiana House of Representatives for her work with Kappa Kappa Iota Educational Sorority. She was state president of the organization for the past year, and represented Louisiana at the National Kappa Kappa Iota Convention in St. Louis in June.
News from 2003:

Dr. Paul Sisson is Full! No, we don't mean that his day is full or his life is full (although they are), we mean he has been promoted to (Full) Professor. Read all about it in the LSUS News.
In that same issue of LSUS News, notice that Dr. Carlos Spaht has taken his hugely successful program, LaPREP, through its 12^th annual summer session.
The Computer Science department has moved! All CS faculty, along with Dr. Paul Sisson (chair of the combined departments of Math and CS) and Libby Choate (secretary of the combined department) have packed up and moved their offices to the "TC" (a.k.a. the "Technology Center") on the 2nd floor of the old library (between the Science building and the University Center).

Assistant Professor Conway Link was on sabbatical for the academic year.

Click HERE for some LSUS NEWS stories concerning faculty members Judith Covington, Conway Link, Rogers Martin, Wanda Moseley, Paul Sisson, and Carlos Spaht.
Here's a great story involving one of our math majors, Ania Swiergiel, who went Belgium this past summer along with Quinton Bell (who is a history major but who we see around the department frequently). The heroine of the story is Megan Conway, Professor of French. Read all about it.
News from 2002:

Judith Covington is still busy with Project NExT. Read all about it in the LSUS News.
Conway Link and Rogers Martin presented papers at the Annual Fall Conference of the Louisiana Association of Teachers of Mathematics in Baton Rouge in November. See the LSUS News for details.
Carlos Spaht, II was on sabbatical during the fall semester of 2002 and is now safely back on the 4th floor of Bronson Hall.
News from 2001:

Mary Ellen Foley attended the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Southern Regional Conference in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, February 21-23. There she presented a workshop for teachers entitled: The Algebra of Transformations in the Coordinate Plane.
HUGE CONGRATULATIONS go to Carmen McLean, who is an LSUS student majoring in Mathematics Education. She attended and gave a presentation at The 4th Annual Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics. Carmen's talk was entitled, "The string art problem: discovering the envelope". And speaking of envelopes, Carmen is pushing the envelope here, being the first student in our department (in at least a decade) to give a talk at a national conference.
The Department of Mathematics and the Department of Computer Science have MERGED and are now aptly named the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. We are all located on the 4th floor of Bronson Hall. The chair of the combined department, as of the Fall of 2001, is Dr. Paul Sisson. We extend our congratulations and condolences to Dr. Sisson, in whatever proportions he deems appropriate!
We have hired some great new people!

Dr. Deborah Shepherd earned her Ph.D. in Computational Analysis and Modeling from Louisiana Tech University in 2001. She joined us during the summer of 2001 and was appointed Assistant Professor in the department as of the fall semester. Welcome, Debbie!

Ms. Jamie Prince also joined us last summer as Lab Manager for the newly merged department. She immediately made herself indispensible and has our labs humming. Welcome, Jamie!

The Pi Mu Epsilon Journal has published an article entitled "The Sum of the k'th Powers of the First n Positive Integers" by Abolghassem Saleh-Jahromi (LMU) and Julien Doucet (LSU-S) in their Fall 2001 Issue.
Several of our faculty gave talks at the most recent meeting of the Louisiana-Mississippi Section of the Mathematical Association of America. (PDF's of their papers are found on that website.)

Julien Doucet, Roger's Factoring and Lifting Theorems

W. Conway Link, Visualizing the Chances of Winning a Lottery

Louis Blair, Indefinite integrals of products and quotients of trigonometric functions

A reporter from The Times interviewed our very own Christi Tyson and Carmen McLean about the CSEMS grant from NSF. See their mugshots and the article HERE.
Dr. Rick Mabry has returned from his sabbatical. He spent the academic year 2000-2001 in DeLand, FL, and hung out at Stetson University. A short article, "Asymptotic Symmetry of Polynomials", written during this sabbatical, with coauthor Paul Deiermann (formerly at LSUS and now at Southeast Missouri State University) has been accepted for publication in Mathematics Magazine. During his absence, Dr. Mabry was promoted to the rank of Professor.
Dr. Julien Doucet had an article, "Reducing Trigonometric Functions by Using Spokes on a carousel," published in the January-February, 2001 issue of the International Journal of Mathematical Education in Source and Technology.
Paul Sisson, Dr. Rick Mabry and Michael Avidon have had an article entitled "Enumerating Row Arrangements of Three Species" accepted for publication in the April 2001 issue of Mathematics Magazine. (Michael Avidon was a visiting professor at Centenary College when the article was conceived.)
Several members of the department attended the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans in January, 2000. Judith Covington was an active participant as a panelist in Project NExT discussions, and organized 3 contributed paper sessions entitled, " Courses and Programs That Illustrate Recommendations of the Mathematical Education of Teachers Document." Paul Sisson presented a paper, "College Algebra and Analysis of Stock Market Investing." Mary Ellen Foley presented a paper, "A Methods Seminar for Preservice Secondary Teachers." Carlos Spaht gave an invited presentation on "Programs for Minority Students" as part of a Summa (Strengthening Underrepresented Minority Mathematics Achievement) panel discussion.
Two LSUS math majors, David Fletcher and Brad Weatherly, recently took and passed the new Course 1 Exam of the Society of Actuaries and Casualty Actuarial Society. Less than 34% of the more than 2500 people who took the test passed it. David and Brad are scheduled to graduate this semester.
News from Fall semester, 2000:

In December, Mary Ellen Foley served as a consultant to the AAAS (American Association for the Advancement of Science) project "Resources for Science Literacy: Assessment." The project is designed to produce a procedure and data base of benchmark-aligned assessment tasks for K-12 science and mathematics
Spaht does it again!
Read all about Dr. Carlos Spaht's most recent prestigious award HERE, HERE, and HERE.
Sisson does it again!
Our math labs are sporting new gear. Dr. Paul Sisson's recent grants have brought 20 new computers to the labs in BH404 and 406. The university now has a site license for Mathematica, a powerful program available to all students.
Barron Tabor retired from LSUS after working in our department for ... well, basically forever. He joined the department in 1969 and retired during the summer of 2000. We miss you, Barron. Don't be a stranger!
Dr. (Big Al) Vekovius
has left (or lept) to become
Interim Dean of the College of Sciences
(but he still a little class left, namely, Math 490).
Dr. Rick Mabry has gone on a one-year sabbatical, to Stetson University in DeLand, Florida, where we hear he is wrestling tough math problems and alligators.
Wanda Moseley is teaching at LSUS while on sabbatical from the Bossier Parish School System.
Mr. Dan Goodwyn, who has taught with us on and off for years, has signed on as a full-time lecturer with the department this year.
Dr. Louis Blair has taken a one-year Visting Professor spot with the department.
LaPREP saw another terrific summer in 2000. See for yourself.

LaSIP 2000 was a great success. Click here for proof.

March, 2000: LSUS Mathematics student, Michelle Ogle wins Matel and Bessie Hall Dawson Scholarship.
February 2000: Seven faculty members and 4 students attended the Louisiana/Mississippi Mathematical Association of America Section meeting in Lafayette, LA on February 25 - 26. Read all about it HERE or look at the published Proceedings.
January, 2000: Dr. Judith Covington attended the recent MAA/AMS Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, DC in January. While at the meeting she organized two sessions for Project NExT Fellows. She also serves on two MAA committees, the Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers, and the Articulation Task Force.
Judith is presently the LATM NCTM Representative.
News from 1999:

October 28-30, 1999: Three department faculty give 6 talks at the State Conference of LATM in New Orleans.

October 26, 1999:
A seminar by Dr. Mary Ellen Foley,
Do Middle Grades Mathematics Texts Promote Learning? A Report on the AAAS Project 2061 Textbook Evaluation Project

August, 1999:
Q. Which former LSUS Math Department professor left academics a decade ago to seek his fortune, found it, and has returned?
A. Big Al, that's who!

June 25, 1999: LaPrep '99 is up and running.
See the article in The Times.

June 9, 1999: Who is the 1999 Caddo Parish High School Teacher of the Year?

April 22, 1999: 1999 Math/Math Ed graduate Tammy Hall presents a seminar to the math department.

April 5, 1999: 1996 Math graduate Kevin Harbin pays a visit.