News

Prasit Bhattacharya, our new tenure-track topologist, and Sarah Archuletta, our new college-track faculty, are both settling in very well. We also have research collaborators of some dept members here as visitors this year. Candelario Castaneda works with Ross, and Joel Lucero-Bryan works with Guram and Ilya. We can sure use the new help. Among our 15 tenure-track faculty and 5 college-track faculty we have 5 on leave for part or all of the year. This makes it pretty difficult to get the basic business of running a department done.

Our staffing issues will hopefully take a better turn in the near future. We have one college-track position that has just closed and we are now screening the applicants. There are two more college-track positions, three tenure-track positions, and two 2-year postdoctoral positions (open areas) currently being advertised on Mathjobs. The tenure-track positions are in algebra/algebraic geometry, functional analysis, and a position given by the chancellor to support education. If you know of strong candidates for any of these positions, please point them to this link: https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/NMSU

The department and university in general are not completely out of the pandemic, but there is definitely much more activity at the university. About 80% of our classes are in person. Many of our seminars and colloquia are hybrid, with an in-person audience and broadcast over zoom. The equipment in SH 107 and now in SH 236 has worked well for this. The graduate student interest in these events is probably stronger than at any time since I’ve been at NMSU. On a lesser note, after a strong start to the semester in our in-person undergraduate classes, there seems to be a decrease in attendance across many departments. One area where there is no lack of enthusiasm is our labs that are staffed with peer learning assistants. It would be great if we could do more of this.

While our tutoring center in Walden Hall remains shuttered (with no end in sight), in-person tutoring (in addition to online) is back and beginning to grow. This currently takes place in the windowless little room that used to store Joe Zund’s books and in one of our small conference rooms. We have funding from Bank of America to hire some tutors, and we are working with Renay Scott, Vice President of Student Success, to try to get more suitable space in the computer lab in SH 118. The Psych and CS departments have been very helpful in helping us cope with the Walden Hall closure.

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 Tutoring Center offers free online and in-person tutoring services to math students in all majors.