Integral Bee
09/02/2008
The student chapter of SIAM recently hosted our first annual Integration Bee. On the evening of May 1st, a field of twenty students from various majors competed. Many more were in the audience. The integrals started out simple, and got harder. But even a simple integral can be difficult to do in a short time limit with everybody watching. At the end, the problems were complex enough that it was sometimes hard to tell if an answer was correct. (Next year, we’ll speed that part up!)
Kiran Kumar Megraj from Engineering came in first, followed by Solomon Roberts from Mathematics. Congratulations to everybody who participated! The Integration Bee was also covered on the SIAM website. See: http://www.siam.org/students/news.php?id=1323
SUNY New Paltz Professor Strikes Gold!
08/14/2008
Techniques of genetic and evolutionary computation are being increasingly applied to difficult real-world problems—often yielding results that are not merely academically interesting, but competitive with the work done by creative and inventive humans. These biologically motivated techniques begin with random data and grow or evolve solutions to problems that were never imagined by their human designers.
This month the ACM Special Interest Group on Genetic and Evolutionary Computation held their annual Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO) in Atlanta, Georgia. For the past five years a central theme of these conferences has been the competition for Human-Competitive awards. This year \$10,000 in prizes went to contestants who used genetic and evolutionary algorithms to automate discoveries that would have been viewed as competitive achievements had the same discoveries been make by humans.
The $5,000 first prize in the 2008 Human-Competitive competition went to David Clark (Mathematics, SUNY New Paltz), Lee Spector (Cognitive Science, Hampshire College) and three Hampshire College undergraduates: Bradford Barr, Jon Klein and Ian Lindsay. In their paper, "Genetic Programming for Finite Algebras", the team reported discoveries obtained by genetic programming that they demonstrated to improve past human and computer results by up to 14 orders of magnitude.
"This year's field had a number of exciting and impressive entries," said Clark. "Ours stood out because of the long documented history of efforts to solve these problems by both theoretical and computational techniques. We were able to give a quantitative argument that our results were not only human-competitive, but in fact exceeded past human efforts by a substantial margin."
Carly Anderson Wins SIAM Award
07/25/2008
Mathematics had many outstanding students graduate in May. The Gerson B. Robison award goes to Mathematics or Math Adolescence Ed majors who exhibit extraordinary mathematical ability. While there is typically only one winner, this year there were four: Carly Anderson, Catherine Ma, Beth Peluso, and Jacob Prairie. The Julia Robinson award is similar, but for Mathematics Elementary Ed majors. It was awarded to both Genna Leder and Emily Miller. Congratulations!
How to Contact the Department:
Department of Mathematics
Faculty Office Building (FOB) E 2
State University of New York at New Paltz
1 Hawk Dr.
New Paltz, NY 12561-2443
Phone: (845) 257-3532
Fax: (845) 257-3571
Department Chair: David Hobby (For appointments, call (845) 257-3532)
Department Secretary: Lisa Lupini
