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THIS WEEKat Southern State Community College
Week of May 9, 2011EMPLOYEE NEWSLETTER
Ag Departmentto hold plant sale
The agriculture department at Southern State Community College will hold a plant sale from 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. Tuesday, May 17, in the atrium lobby of the college’s Central Campus, 100 Hobart Drive, Hill-sboro.
All plants—offered on a first-come, first-serve basis—were grown and cared for by stu-dents in the college’s agriculture classes, and include seven variet-ies of tomatoes, seven varieties of peppers, cabbage, broccoli, red and pink geraniums, coleus, marigolds, pansies, dill, rosemary and cilantro. Proceeds will be used to support greenhouse op-erations and laboratory costs for the horticulture courses.
To learn more, please con-tact SSCC instructor Tom Smith at 1-800-628-7722, ext. 2693, or [email protected].
The new Southern State Community Col-lege website is moving out of development and into production on Fri-day, May 13. Additional updates, including avail-ability of a Net Price Calculator (mandated by the HEOA), have been implemented based on input received during the three-week internal/soft launch period.
Features include prominent access to search, My SSCC and course schedules; bread-crumbs which aid navi-gation and provide links
to parent pages; events calendar that allows users to subscribe to items; drop-down menu for commonly visited areas; accessibility, dial-up and search engine friendly; scannable text including highlighted keywords, sub-headings, bulleted lists, less word count; contact information on page footers; tracking code on every page; news items and student profiles on home page; wider page design; call-outs for key information; and improved overall design. Check it out!
1030am-530pm | May 17 | SSCC Central
New SSCC website!
SSCC president announces 2011 graduation speaker
UPCOMINGEVENTS
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Comments or submissions?Contact Director of Public RelationsKris Cross at [email protected] call 1-800-628-7722, ext. 2676.
Spring Invitational Area ArtistExhibition and Competition
May 4-20, 2011South Campus, Sardinia
SPRING FLING!May 9: North CampusMay 10: Central CampusMay 11: South CampusMay 12: Fayette Campus
Guest Speaker Bethanie Tucker‘Understanding and EngagingUnder-Resourced College Students’
May 13, 2011 (two sessions)10-11:30 a.m. & 1:30-3 p.m.Central Campus, Hillsboro
MAST Annual “Pink Tea”1-4pm, May 14, 2011Central Campus, Hillsboro
SSCC Community Band Concert4pm, May 15, 2011Edward K. Daniels AuditoriumCentral Campus, Hillsboro
Master Gardeners Lectureon “Canning and Freezing”
6pm, May 19, 2011Learning Resources CenterSouth Campus, Sardinia
Board of Trustees Meeting6pm, May 25, 2011Room 149Central Campus, Hillsboro
SSCC Theatre: “Trifles”June 1, 2011Edward K. Daniels AuditoriumCentral Campus, Hillsboro
American Sign Language Concert “Red, White & Blue Country”
5:30pm, June 2, 2011Edward K. Daniels AuditoriumCentral Campus, Hillsboro
PTK Induction Ceremony7pm, June 3, 2011The Patriot CenterCentral Campus, Hillsboro
Commencement CeremonyJune 10, 2011The Patriot CenterCentral Campus, Hillsboro
IN THE NEWS
JON DAVIDSON | SSCC Assistant Professor
Winter quarter I only taught online classes, so I had the privilege of driving down to New Orleans in January for what was probably the largest math conference in history. Every year two major mathematical organizations, Mathematical As-sociation of America and American Mathematical Society, hold a joint conference in January. I previously attended the Joint Mathematics Conference in Baltimore in 1998, and in San Francisco in 2010. After last year’s conference Dr. McCall told me that he was happy for fac-ulty to attend conferences in their disciplines and he encouraged me to do a presentation next time.
This conference had a record of 6,032 attendees and over 2,000 talks. Lasting four days in four large hotels on Canal Street in downtown New Orleans, at any given time one had a choice of around thirty talks to attend on a huge array of sub-jects related to math, including cut-ting edge research in all the count-less branches of math, educational issues, history of mathematics, philosophy, even some music, sta-tistics and physics. I estimated that I went to thirty to forty talks. Facing the choices and deciding what talks to attend was daunting and required me to spend a lot of time perusing the 240 page conference book. And I did a lot of walking.
Dr. Boys encouraged me to write about my experiences, and I encourage my fellow faculty to get out there and attend a conference in their field every now and then. I am always rejuvenated after these big events. They keep me informed on the state of mathematics, give me many ideas for exploration, and even ideas for teaching.
For example, one young lady from Harvard gave a fascinating talk about using a very old idea in statistics known as bootstrapping in order to produce statistical calcula-tions I teach, confidence intervals and hypothesis testing. Apparently this is how the old pioneers in statis-tics wanted to calculate these things
but the computing power required did not exist a hundred years ago. I have since experimented with the idea and will be producing a video to supplement my Math 160 classes. It is an idea that the Harvard professor claims makes understanding these issues easier for students.
I attended a rare talk by a high school teacher presenting a novel way of understanding the arithme-tic of algebraic polynomials. I was amused because I have done the same thing, only more, and was able to chime in during the brief Q&A at the end of the talk.
MATH/Cont’d on Page 3
Jon Davidson: ‘My Adventures at a Major Conference’
Cannon balls at the Battery in Charleston, S.C. (Photo by the author)
A Cystic Fibrosis Foundation’s Great Strides walk/run will be held 10 a.m. Saturday, May 21, at South-ern State Community College’s Fay-ette Campus, 1270 U.S. Route 62 SW, Washington C.H. Registration begins at 9 a.m. and two routes will be avail-able: a 5K (3.1 miles) route and a 10K (6.2 mile) route. The event is being organized by the college’s SSCC Re-spiratory Club under the direction of instructor and program director Chy-ane Collins.
“I have helped treat patients with Cystic Fibrosis and for the past five years, I have been helping teach my students how to diagnose and treat those with CF,” said Collins, who not-ed that her motivation is the memory of her friend, Mark Garland. “Mark was a good friend to me and my ex-tended family through high school, 4-H and FFA activities.”
The SSCC Respiratory Club is comprised of alumni and current re-spiratory students in Southern State’s
respiratory care program.“We encourage everyone to be-
come involved in the Great Strides event,” said Collins. Participants will be recognized for their fundraising efforts, and special recognition will be provided for the top fundraising individual and team. For more information about participating in or helping to sponsor the event, please call Chyane Collins at 740-333-5115, ext. 5620, or [email protected]. You may also register online at www.cff.org/great_strides/.
SSCC’s respiratory program organizing CF walk
MATH/Cont’d from Page 2In San Francisco I attended
a talk in which a method for converting any picture into origami (Japanese paper folding) was given. This year one of the keynote addresses talked about the growing uses of origami in tech-nology. About anytime you need something complicated to fold into a small space, you need the mathematics of origami. Examples I recall are space satellites that unfold once they are in orbit, or stints placed in arteries.
Out of curiosity I stumbled into a talk about the state of the Kepler conjecture. I couldn’t recall what that was, but I do teach Ke-pler’s Laws in Calculus, so I knew that Johannes Kepler was the last of the major astronomers before Galileo started selling telescopes. Kepler was able to figure out how the planets moved around the sun by studying years of astronomical data.
I found out that Kepler’s con-jecture concerned sphere-packing. Put simpler, one day he walked by a stack of cannon balls and wondered if there is a closer way to pack balls different from the natural way they cluster together.
His conjecture was no, there is not a better way to pack spheres together. This problem defied a solution until just a few years ago. (Kepler was right.) I remember it making the world news when it was finally solved. And there at the front of the room was one of the two guys to crack this four hundred year old problem! Better yet, it is one of only two major mathemati-cal theorems to ever have been solved by the use of computers. Like the Four-Color Map Theo-rem before it, both problems are easily understood but the accuracy of the huge stack of computer printouts is too large for any human’s time or patience to verify. The speaker was giv-
ing an update on shrinking the computer output so that humans could verify the accuracy and finally put to rest any lingering skepticism that perhaps there’s an error in it.
I must confess that some talks were simply over my head. Mathematics is such a large sub-ject that no one has been able to understand most of its entirety for over a hundred years, and sometimes I feel like I’ve only scratched the surface. But I want to know what is going on out there in the latest research, not just for my curiosity, but also to share with my classes.
Unfortunately you do not see a lot of community college people at these big math conferences.
I presume that we’re too busy teaching, but in a way it is a shame that more of us cannot find a way to make time for such events. I, too, balk at attending these annual conferences in winter quarter if I know it means canceling too many classes.
I estimate that around 95% of attendees are associated with four-year schools, and some of them are graduate students. It looked like around 30% to 35% of attendees were women, a refresh-ing development in a field that historically was almost entirely dominated by men until a few decades ago.
I did a search of the week’s program and only found six instances of community college professors presenting original research, and three of those were in collaboration with university professors. I have never given a talk on my original research at a conference before, partly because I’ve never organized any of it into a talk, nor have I produced much that I would consider at the conference level. It was a great ex-perience. The problem I presented took me eight years of off and on dabbling to solve, around forty
PowerPoint slides to present, and I only got fifteen minutes to talk through it. As in my classes, my goal was for everyone watching to understand everything I talked about.
I am pleased to share the state-ment of the problem with you because it is easy to understand, and the problem is a real gem, able to be solved by using classic theorems from pre-calculus. I have been able to share parts or all of it with some students through the years.
Everyone knows what equi-lateral triangles and squares are. These are examples of regular polygons, sharp-edged, two dimensional objects in which the length of each side is equal and all the angles inside are equal. The corner points are called vertices.
Now imagine a large sheet of graph paper—infinitely large, in fact. It is a square grid, and if you prefer, you could think of it as the x-y plane from algebra in which each integer for x or y represents a vertical or horizontal line.
So here’s the statement of the problem I thought up in 1990. Except for squares, is it possible to draw a regular polygon such that each vertex of the polygon ap-pears at an intersection of lines on the graph paper (or, each vertex has integer coordinates on the x-y plane)? You are allowed to draw a regular polygon with as many sides as you like, any size you like, turn it around any way you like, and put it anywhere you like.
This problem was my insight into how real math research works. Had I known how to approach the problem I probably could have solved it in a day or two. Not knowing, it took me eight years of dabbling at it from time to time in order to hit upon the right methods.
Here’s an attempt to draw a regular octagon on a square grid.
Two vertices appear at inter-section points, but none other do in this example.
With infinitely many sizes of infinitely many regular polygons able to be placed in infinitely many positions in infinitely many ways, is there at least one non-square out there with all vertices at intersec-tion points? The answer is no!
The talk went well and I received some compliments. It was disappointing that it did not fill the room, but I prefer to think the reason was that it was late in the afternoon and many had already wandered off in search of great eating. It was New Orleans, after all!
Since I was able to teach my classes online, I was able to take my time getting back. I took a day at my expense to explore the battlefield where Andrew Jackson’s rag tag army won a lopsided vic-tory in 1815, to find the grave of a great-grandfather in little Donald-sonville, Louisiana, and to wander about Baton Rouge, where I lived and worked in 1984-85.
I am grateful to the college for the opportunity to take this trip, and thank Ryan McCall for encouraging me to present a paper, something I should have done years ago. I am already thinking of new research or topics I could present at a future conference.
IN THE NEWS
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