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Faculty News

Students, Please note that the faculty members in the Department of Mathematics are very interested in working with undergraduate students on research projects.  You can get a sense of our interests below.  Please drop by our offices or e-mail us to discuss research possibilities.

• Dr. Denny will be on sabbatical in Spring 2008 semester at the Mercer University Medical School working on modeling how the heart heals after a heart attack.
• Dr. Denny has published the paper "Computing and Fitting SSNMR Powder Patterns with the Arithmetic-Geometric Mean and Edge Detection," in the journal Concepts in Magnetic Resonance in January 2007 with Mercer mathematics major Britt Daniel.  Dr. Denny also published "Cooling the Macon Volunteer Clinic" with recent Mercer mathematics graduate Carrie Trivett in the Winter 2006 issue of The UMAP Journal.
  
• Dr. Denny and Dr. Yackel have written a joint paper that is an exposition on partial fractions in several settings (calculus, elementary number theory and commutative ring theory).  The paper appeared in the College Mathematics Journal in November 2007.
• Dr. Herink was the MAA State Director from 2004 until 2007. 
• At the Spring 2007 Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the MAA, Dr. Herink gave a talk titled “A class of groups related to Sudoku” on work that was inspired by his supervision of Kimberly Conner’s Honors project.
• Dr. Howard has given talks on a differential equations model for cultural influences on developing policies concerning HIV control, based on data on HIV control programs developed in England and Sweden.  He has also spoken on this topic at Morehouse College’s departmental colloquium, at the 25th Annual Southeastern-Atlantic Differential Equations Conference at the University of Dayton, and at the Southeastern Atlantic Conference on Differential Equations. 
• Dr. Howard is on the Steering Committee for the Southeastern Atlantic Conference on Differential Equations.
• Dr. Nelson was elected outstanding faculty member of the year by the Mercer Student Government Association, 2005-2006
• Dr. Symington has had a joint paper with Dr. David Gay, titled “Toric structures on near-symplectic four-manifolds,” accepted for publication in the Journal of the European Mathematical Society.  She plans to spend visit Dr. Gay at the Universtiy of Cape Town for two weeks this spring to continue the collaboration.
• During the summer of 2006, Dr. Symington gave talks on her work with Dr. David Gay at the Workshop in Geometry at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and at the International Conference on Toric Topology in Osaka, Japan.
• Dr. Yackel  has, with dr. sarah-marie belcastro, edited and contributed chapters to a book  titled Making Mathematics with Needlework.  This edited volume will appear in December, 2007, published by A.K. Peters.  Dr. Yackel has presented work in art exhibits.  Of  particular interest is her collaborative “Dual Tori,” two tori, one crocheted and one knitted that she made with sarah-marie belcastro.  The crocheted object exhibits a seven coloring of the torus while the knitted object shows the dual (adjacency) graph, namely an embedding of K_7 on the torus.  Recently, Dr. Yackel organized a special session on Mathematics and Mathematics Education in Fiber Arts at the 2005 Joint Mathematics Meetings.
• Dr. Yackel was an invited participant at the 2005 Bridges Conference at The Banff Center, Alberta, Canada.