News

Some updates for the start of the Fall 2022 semester. The department welcomes our new topologist, Prasit Bhattacharya. Prasit earned his doctorate from Indiana, and comes to us after stops at Notre Dame and U. of Virginia. Sarah Archuleta joins us as a new College-Track Assistant Professor. Louiza Fouli begins this fall as Professor Fouli, a very well-deserved promotion. In the spring, Pat Baggett and Ted Stanford announced their retirements, and Jonathan Montano has moved on to Arizona State. The department will conduct tenure-track searches this fall for positions in Algebra and in Functional Analysis. There will also be a search for a college-track position in the fall. We additionally anticipate several postdoctoral positions to be filled over the next year or so. With five of our full professors on leave for all or part of the year, it will be a very busy time for faculty here. We have as visiting professors Ishraw Al-Awamleh, Haneen Alayed, Candelario Castenada, Maria Cruz, Joel Lucero-Bryan and Feras Yousef. All have prior experience teaching in our department, and several have active research projects with our faculty.

Research continues to have a large virtual component. Many faculty attend or give talks in a wide range of virtual seminars and conferences around the world. It is not the same as in-person with the discussion over coffee, but it does have many advantages. Being "at" Harvard from 8:00 - 9:00 AM before your first Calc III class in the morning is a pretty common thing now. On the flip side, giving a talk at 4:30 AM or 11:00 PM for an audience in India is also pretty common. Now we are also seeing the resumption of in-person conferences. This summer, faculty have travelled to Europe and Mexico, and many more within the US for conferences or collaboration. This fall there is an in-person AMS sectional meeting at UTEP where many of our faculty are organizing special sessions. It seems that slowly things are starting to return to normal.

Our graduate program continues to thrive. This summer we had 8 graduate students attending workshops or conferences in places ranging from Portugal, Berkeley, Los Angeles, and others. Part of this is through our recently joining MSRI. We were additionally able to support a large number of graduate students this summer, either through jobs teaching classes, tutoring, or serving as research assistants. We have secured a number of tuition fellowships through the graduate school to match with our own Kist fellowship. Hopefully the day soon comes when the university provides tuition for all of our recently unionized GAs, but in our department things are going in the right direction already. This fall sees new students from Northern Arizona, Texas A&M, Western Colorado, Guam, Jordan University of Science and Technology, and Iran; and several of our current students are moving up in the program. Last year was very large incoming class, and as a result the incoming class this year is a bit smaller, but the program remains steady at about 35 grad students.

The undergraduate enrollment in math courses seems more-or-less stable, with some interesting anomolies. The more advanded entry-level courses such as precalc and calc are a bit down, and the larger ones like college algebra and intro to stats are steady, and may wind up a bit increased. It may be that incoming students are less confident in their placement level, who knows. Classes in our department are about 70% in person this fall. While may prefer in-person classes, this wasn't a cure-all to what seems to be a sort of malaise among many undergraduates. The effects of this pandemic will likely be with us for a while. Thanks to a very generous donation, we have $200,000 to devote to our majors over the next years. We haven't detailed how to make use of this, but this should give a significant boost to our undergraduate program.

Walden Hall remains "out of service" with no end in sight. We are cozy all inhabiting Science Hall, but it isn't all that bad. A year ago there were 4 office staff, and now with Maria's retirement and Dawn being reassigned, it is Paloma and Alex. We are reinventing our office processes, and it is going well, but please be patient if there are some bumps. A new tracking video camera is installed in our main conference room accross from the math office. It is new and still not tried, but hopefully allows for simultaneous use of the room for a combined in-person and high-quality virtual use. This may be useful immediately for our departmental seminars that have attracted external audiences, and may someday be useful for graduate classes as well.

Welcome back everyone!

About the Department

The department offers courses in mathematics and statistics leading to the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degree. At the Bachelor’s level we have several options for career preparation, such as applied mathematics and actuarial science. 

Our faculty has research groups in many areas of pure and applied mathematics, and in mathematics education. Strengths lie in commutative algebra, logic and foundations, probability and statistics, dynamical systems, mathematical biology, variational methods in partial differential equations especially relevant to materials science, and applied and computational harmonic analysis with applications to machine learning and data analysis. 

We provide courses for other disciplines throughout the NMSU main campus. This includes the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, agriculture, business, and education. This includes preparatory and general education courses that ensure every student has the quantitative and reasoning skills needed every career now demands. 

The department’s mission is to provide core education in mathematics and statistics that prepares graduate and undergraduate students to be knowledgeable and responsible citizens of the world. 

Our Math Success Center offers free online tutoring services to math students in all majors.