Bernard Society Review - Davidson College

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and 715, the property that the product of 714 and 715 was the product of the first seven prime numbers. Pomerance challenged a colleague to find an unusual property of the two numbers 714 and 715. His colleague discovered the same property of the two numbers, but not before posing the challenge to one of his classes. A student in his class discovered a different property of the two numbers: the property that the prime factors of 714 and 715 both summed to 29. Pomerance and his colleagues found other examples of consecutive numbers with this property and they named them Ruth-Aaron pairs. In their paper, Pomerance et al conjectured that the density of these Ruth-Aaron pairs is 0. In his letter to Pomerance, Erdös claimed that he could prove this conjecture, and this letter began a collaboration between Pomerance and Erdös that resulted in a life long friendship and several joint papers. Pomerance concluded his talk with several of the conjectures and results that appeared in these papers. He gave several justifications of why there should be infinitely many Ruth-Aaron pairs. In addition, he and Erdös established an upper bound on the number of Ruth-Aaron pairs occurring before a given number—a new result. As a corollary to this result, the two were able to determine that the series of reciprocals of numbers with Ruth-Aaron pairs converges. Next year’s Bernard Lecture will be given by Underwood “Woody” Dudley of Depauw University, author of five books, including Mathematical Cranks (1992) and Numerology (1997), and winner of several awards including the 1996 Trevor Evans Award (for expository writing) from the MAA. For more information, consult http://www.davidson.edu/math/ Front row: Andra Whitt ’01, Gretchen Hamm ’02, Martha Peed ’03, Lesley Bowman ’80, Bernard Lecturer Carl Pomerance, Ashley Moore ’02; Back rows: Melanie Albert ’02, Rich Joiner ’03, Martin Turner ’04, Cindy Moore ’03, Katie Osbolt ’02, Mark Medendorp ’00, Megan Shafer ’03, Randy Skattum ’01, Ian Nelson ’02, Ashley Alderman ’03, Will Jordan ’02, Adriel Cornman ’03, Mike Harney ’02, Lang Robertson ’02, Alex Pow ’02, Matt Phillips ’02, Mary Hunter Wylie ’02, Bernard Society President-Elect Robert McLean ’03, Stanley Prybe ’02, James Daniel ’02, Ben Sargent ’02, Bernard Society President Andy Schultz ’02, Will Herring ’02, Carlos Carreras ’02 4
Faculty News Professor Irl Bivens and Professor and Chair Stephen Davis are pleased that their work with Howard Anton has come to fruition—no less than five versions of the now Anton-Bivens-Davis Calculus, 7 th ed., published by Wiley. Now they’re hard at work on the next iteration! Professor Davis also finished up a second three-year term as Secretary-Treasurer of the Southeastern Section of the MAA and helped organize the joint MAA-SE/AMS-SE meeting in Atlanta. This spring he became Chair-Elect of the Section. Stephen traveled to Cincinnati for the annual meeting of SIGCSE (Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education, of the Association for Computing Machinery). He and several others in the Department also participated in workshops last summer on Blackboard, a new program for class management over the web, and used it for his MAT 135 course. Professor Irl Bivens continues to edit the Problems and Solutions section of the College Mathematics Journal with Richie King, Ben Klein, and Todd Will. Assistant Professor Laurie Heyer is working with Davidson biology professor Malcolm Campbell to put the finishing touches on their textbook, Discovering Genomics, Proteomics and Bioinformatics, to be published in August. Other activities related to her interests in computational biology include teaching a seminar course, doing summer research with Adam Abele '03, and speaking at the Duke University mathematics seminar. Laurie is thrilled that the Patterson Court Council voted this spring to adopt the solution to assigning women to eating houses that her operations research class developed last spring. Students Anthony Albert ’01, Tim Valdes ’01, and Mary Hunter Wylie ’02 worked on this project, and Laurie met with PCC representatives this year to explain how the method would work. Laurie and husband Bill stay busy rooting for the Wildcats and keeping up with their new The usual suspects (l-r): Laurie Heyer, Irl Bivens, Donna Molinek, Rich Neidinger, Stephen Davis, John Swallow, Ben Klein, Bernard Lecturer Carl Pomerance, Rob Whitton ‘66, Todd Will, and Richie King ‘59. Border Collie puppy Addie. They have also begun to explore North Carolina, including the Smokies and the Outer Banks. Richardson Professor Richie King ’59 retired at the end of this academic year. He offers the following response to the question, “What are you going to do in retirement?”: The short version is NOTHING. Beyond nothing: we are moving back into town from the lake, so there is a new garden spot to be worked. I do have a couple of projects with mathematical content I will work on. Lots of pleasure reading, most of it low brow stuff. Did I mention our grandson James? A nice prospect, retirement. Congratulations, Richie! Dolan Professor Ben Klein continues to serve on the Advanced Placement Calculus Committee of the College Board. The Committee is now charged with preparing seven different free response examinations—AB and BC exams for Europe, AB and BC (operational) exams for the continental United States, AB and BC (alternate) exams for the continental United States, and an AB exam for Alaska-Hawaii. He also gave an invited presentation entitled “Probabilistic Paradoxes” during the Virginia Episcopal School’s Paideia Program on April 15. 5
Page 1 and 2: In Memoriam: R. Bruce Jackson, Jr.
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Bernard Society Review - Davidson College

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