Bernard Society Review - Davidson College

The 2001-2002 school year has been an
interesting one for Associate Professor Donna
Molinek. Last fall, she taught the department’s
Finite Math class, commenting on more than one
occasion, “Wow!” She says it was a special
challenge to teach such interesting mathematics to
students who were inclined toward other
disciplines. She’ll try again next spring.
After living in Davidson for almost 10
years, Donna and her family finally made it to
Charleston! Donna gave a talk about Stephen
Smale and his Horseshoe at the College of
Charleston; afterwards, the Molineks enjoyed a
fun weekend.
Donna also helped coordinate the
congregational retreat April 12-14 for Davidson
College Presbyterian Church. During that weekend
in Montreat, daughter Sullivan turned 5. Sullivan
and her 8.5-year-old brother Rudy celebrated by
rock hopping and building dams in the creek.
For fun, Donna is taking pottery lessons
with a local artist and elementary school teacher
and is working on making Möbius bands, knot and
link sculptures, and wheel-thrown pots. Donna
reports that she and Laurie Heyer again put in
respectable finishes in the Town Day 5K,
improving their times over last year.
Professor Richard Neidinger took full
advantage of a year on sabbatical for research,
travel, and even some Spanish study. His research
in numerical methods developed improvements in
the most efficient way to compute multivariable
Taylor series. His travels took him to central
England, San Diego, Atlanta, Toronto, and the
Yucatan peninsula in Mexico.
In England, Rich gave the opening talk for
the Joint Symposia in Automatic Differentiation.
The Symposia is organized by Cranfield
University at the Royal Military College of
Science and the University of Hertfordshire. He
visited both schools, working with Applied
Mathematics and Computer Science faculty for
much of the month of November. His family was
able to join him for Thanksgiving in London. San
Diego, Atlanta and Toronto were conference sites
where he gave presentations on his work.
Rich was in the Yucatan for the
groundbreaking of a boarding school that will
make secondary education accessible for children
in the local Mayan villages. At the ceremony,
attended by around a thousand villagers, he had
the honor of representing the American churches
that are supporting the project. (Contact Rich if
you want to know more.)
The trip motivated Rich to audit a SPA
101 class at Davidson this year, and he learned just
how hard students work in such an intensive firstyear
class! In the fall, he felt just like a Calculus I
student that comes in with no previous study of the
subject. Since he couldn’t complete the course
due to his travels, he started over in the spring and
felt like the more experienced Calculus I students.
From either perspective, learning is a great
opportunity!
Kimbrough Associate Professor John
Swallow participated in the 2001 AP Calculus BC
reading in June and then promptly left for two
weeks in France, attending the XXII Journées
Arithmétiques and then a more specialized
conference, Modules Galoisiens en Géométrie
Arithmétique, in Lille.
Two of John’s papers saw publication, in
the Transactions of the AMS and in
Communications in Algebra. He was named an
Associated Colleges of the South Technology
Fellow, for work on Mathematica and Maple
packages to support an undergraduate course in
Galois theory. At the end of this academic year he
was gratified to learn of the award of a Young
Investigator Grant from the National Security
Agency, which will support his research during
2002 and 2003.
Associate Professor Todd Will has taken a
one-year leave from Davidson in order to begin
teaching at the University of Wisconsin at La
Crosse. Todd and his wife, Heather Hulett,
accepted two positions in the Department of
Mathematics at UW-L. We wish Todd and
Heather all the best as they return to the Midwest.
Faculty and first-year students continue to
value the service of Visiting Assistant Professor
Rob Whitton ’66 as a calculus instructor. This
fall Rob has also enjoyed teaching a course in
differential equations.
Faculty and staff from departments at the
College also celebrated the marriage of Frances
Alexander, our departmental assistant, and Gerald
Scott at a ceremony on December 8, 2001,
expressing congratulations and hearty good wishes
to both.
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