Submitted by Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science
Earlham College, Richmond, IN
Last updated July 21st, 1998
Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science currently support a number of relatively small interdisciplinary programs which involve students with local businesses and governmental agencies within Wayne County. It has been shown that students who participate in these programs are more likely to stay in Indiana after graduation than those who don't. It has also been shown that our graduates have had a positive effect on the continued development of the local technology industry and local government's information management infrastructure.
The physical and computing facilities shared by Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science in Dennis Hall are elderly and lacking in many necessary capabilities. In order to formalize and expand the current programs and develop the new initiatives outlined below we are applying to Lilly Endowment's Capital Improvement Program for a grant of $82,370 for the renovations and equipment described below.
Each of these programs involves students and faculty working together in various ways. Many of them also involve local businesses and govermental entities.
Analysis of graduates from the three departments for the years 1980 through 1998 has shown the following:
Many of the retained students participated in one or more of the programs listed above. Although it is impossible to directly attribute their residency to these programs we have documentation that the relationship is not casual. In addition it seems intuitivly obvious that involvement with the community during the undergraduate years would predispose a student to residing there after graduation.
/* Comparison with other science departments. Waiting on data from A/D. */
Most of the money we are requesting will be used to update and expand our aging computing facilities. A small portion of it will be used to renovate small spaces for student study areas and long-term student/faculty research projects.
In general we plan to expand our internship programs along the lines of our curriculum and research areas. We have also identified research projects which will give our students the necessary skills to pursue careers in technical fields and graduate study in those areas. The new initiatives are:
All of our existing programs and classes will be enhanced by the workspace and computational improvements. The square footage used by each of the departments will not change very much as a result of these renovations. The quality and usability of the space will be improved dramatically as will our capacity for developing and supervising these programs and our classes.
Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science currently support a number of relatively small interdisciplinary programs which involve students with local businesses and governmental entities within Wayne County. It has been shown that students who participate in these programs are more likely to stay in Indiana after graduation than those who don't. It has also been shown that our graduates have had a positive effect on the continued development of the local technology industry and local government's information management infrastructure.
The physical and computing facilities shared by Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science in Dennis Hall are elderly and lacking in many necessary capabilities. In order to formalize and expand the current programs and develop the new initiatives outlined below we are applying to Lilly Endowment's Capital Improvement Program for a grant of $82,370 for the renovations and equipment described below.
Computational geometry involves the study of algorithms for solving problems of a geometric nature on a computer, and involve primarily discrete and combinatorial geometry. The algorithms have proven useful in many practical areas such as computer graphics, robotics, and pattern recognition. Computational geometry algorithms are being applied to problems involving solutions of systems of partial differential equations. It is relatively new field, rich with potential. It is accessible to an upper-level undergraduate in mathematics or computer science, and has the advantage that one can reach the boundaries of current knowledge rather quickly. We introduced this course into our curriculum last year.
Through coursework and participation in the annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM), we are providing students with opportunities to use modeling skills to solve realistic problems taken from governmental and commercial settings. Our intention is to provide additional modeling opportunities with government and business in the local area.
Last semester, after a number of years of good intentions, Earlham finally entered 3 teams of 3 students in the annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM). Our teams did well in the contest, especially considering that it was our first effort, and we had only about one month to prepare them. We hope to make use of this contest in our efforts to emphasize applications of mathematics in our major and to infuse more mathematics into upper level courses in the natural and social sciences.
Outside of academia, mathematicians and computer scientists often work as members of teams attempting to solve problems or carry out tasks which involve numerous disciplines. In view of this, one of our goals for Earlham computer science and mathematics majors is that they learn how to solve realistic problems in concert with persons from other disciplines.
Study of the formation and evolution of active galactic nuclei. Active galactic nuclei are believed to be supermassive black holes at the center of large galaxies which are accreting matter and explosively emitting energy in a fashion which makes them the most violent and energetic objects in the universe.
We do our research by building models for the formation and evolution of these objects and then testing our models for consistency with observed data for the distance and luminosity of AGN's. We use empirical data from earth-orbitting X-ray telescopes and make model calculations which require as much processor speed as possible.
To date six Earlham students have presented posters on this research at three different conferences during the years 1994 and 1995. We expect this research to be a continuing and ongoing effort as new data becomes available with the launch of the Advanced X-ray Astrophysics facility (a major new X-ray telescope) by NASA later this year. This work was supported by a three-year grant from NASA during 1992-1995.
Each Spring 2-4 students work with a professor of CS and the Director of MIS for Wayne County on a significant software project. Recent efforts have included design and development of tools to manage the county's publication of budgets, minutes, tax rate, and court scheduling information via the world wide web (see www.wayne.co.in.us) and work on the County's implementation of a geographical information system (GIS.)
Why is this good?
A small group of students under the guidance one or more professors are responsible for all the database administration tasks for the College's administrative and academic information. Backup, recovery, upgrades, and software design and development are integral parts of the work. The primary focus is on production application of classroom based knowledge. Responsible for the design, development, and ongoing improvement of webdb.earlham.edu, an information tool for students, faculty and administrators at Earlham.
Why is this good?
A small group of students under the guidance of one or more professors are responsible for all the system and network administration tasks for the computing facilities used by mathematics, physics, and computer science. Facilities managed include small teaching labs, desktop machines, various central servers, and a parallel computing cluster. The primary focus is on production application of classroom based knowledge.
Why is this good?
Three of the local technology companies were started by Earlham graduates. Two of them regularly hire our majors for internships during the school year and during the summer. The nature of the internships varies depending on the students' interests and the companies needs.
Why is this good? This is obviously good for the local economy.
Testimonial letter from Dan Woodhouse.
The real-world problems encountered in our community are appropriate educational opportunities for our students and the experiential aspects of the education we hope to offer them. The local entities who participate in these programs are enriched by our students presence as well. For example:
Testimonial letter from Nick Fankhauser.
Companies started in Indiana by people in either of these groups:
Continued monitoring of the statistics. Additional tracking of people that participate in one or more programs as compared to those that don't within mathematics, physics, and computer science.
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Used primarily for astrophysics calculations.
This would replace a Sun SPARC 10.
Used primarily for teaching classes and as an after-hours lab. Some classes (operations research and computational geometry for example) would be taught in this facility.
These would replace a cluster of 8 NeXT workstations.
Used primarily for operations research, high energy physics, computational geometry, parallel and distributed processing research.
These would replace a cluster of 386s, 486s, and DECstations.
Used for mail, world wide web, file transfer, and home directories for students and faculty.
This would replace a pair of DECstations.
These would replace a collection of older Macintoshs and DECstations.
In all of these programs we strive to find internship and job opportunities within Indiana for our students and graduates. Over the past 15 years many Mathematics, Physics, and Computer Science majors have stayed in Indiana after graduation. We have found that students who participate in internship programs with Indiana companies often stay here after they graduate. For this reason we have begun to focus on this as a key aspect of our efforts.
In general we plan to expand our internship programs along the lines of our curriculum and research areas. We have also identified research projects which will give our students the necessary skills to pursue careers in technical fields and graduate study in those areas. The new initiatives are:
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Opportunities for involvement in new and ongoing research in experimental nuclear physics exist. This research takes place mainly during the summer and involves running experiments at facilities such as the Tandem/Superconducting LINAC Accelerator at Florida State University and the National Superconducting Cyclotron Laboratory at Michigan State University. Computer analysis of the data collected could be done at Earlham during the academic year.
There is potential for bringing radiation detector development work to Earlham which would support the experiments mentioned above.
There is currently a need to port data analysis software to the LINUX operating system and perhaps to produce graphical user interfaces for some of this software. These analysis packages are used to produce, view and manipulate one and two dimensional histograms of data. For particularly ambitious students, there are potential projects involving development of analysis software "from scratch."
There may be opportunities to port theoretical nuclear physics calculations to the LINUX operating system. It would be useful to run them on the parallel virtual machine (PVM) currently under construction by the CS Department. We must first enlist a nuclear theorist interested in collaborating with us.
Following on the pattern of the Wayne County MIS Internship and the Ray Ontko & Company internship we have contacted four other local entities about the possibility of setting-up a regular internship program with their organization. All four are interested and we are currently working through the details. Aside from the service-learning aspect of these internships our students also benefit from taking their knowledge into the community to solve problems working with professionals from various fields.
Over the past year a group of computer science faculty and students have begun exploring parallel and distributed processing Parallel Virtual Machine (PVM) technology. Our intent is to provide a facility for mathematics, physics, and computer science faculty and students who are doing classwork or research in areas that can be explored using parallel and distributed algorithms.
By managing and utilizing such a facility students and faculty have the opportunity to learn about the issues surrounding parallel and distributed algrorithms from a variety of perspectives. Our initial work is being done on a group of machines that are between 4 and 8 years old, hand-me-downs from other departments on campus and local businesses. This has been a reasonable approach for learning about the basic issues but is obviously insufficient for doing any real classwork or research.
In general we would like to increase our capacity for offering these programs while increasing the percentage of our students that participate in them.
Our existing programs will be improved in the following ways by these improvements: