Our spring hires from last year are coming aboard: tenure-track Assistant Professors Adaline De Chenne (math education), Boyu Li (functional analysis), and Michael DiPasquale (commutative algebra); college-track Assistant Professors Maria Cruz-Quinones, Zach Letterhos, and Brady Rocks; and post-doctoral fellows Yang Hu (topology) and Arvind Kumar (commutative algebra). Long-time faculty Prof. Tiziana Giorgi has departed to become Chair at U. of Alabama. This puts us at 17 tenure-track faculty, 7.5 college-track faculty and 2 postdocs. We are in the process of getting permission to make another tenure-track search this year as well as a post-doctoral search funded by a research grant.

Enrollment is up at the university about 10% from last fall. We don’t have figures specifically for math yet, but it seems to match the general situation. Our graduate program has 10 Master’s and 26 Ph.D. students this year with 8 of these new to NMSU. Our undergraduate Majors have dropped in the past year or so, probably linked to the pandemic. The incoming class of majors this year seems bigger than usual and with very good students. Some have mentioned being attracted specifically by the new degree programs we have introduced in recent years. Expanding our undergraduate program is a top priority for the department. We have increasing issues with upper-level undergraduate math courses running since few other departments require these anymore. It seems the only solution is to focus more on our own majors, and comparing our situation with others such as UTEP, this should be possible.

This year about 5% of our main-campus classes are online. We offer NMSU-Global classes in an online asynchronous format to support degrees offered by other programs. We anticipate over 20 sections of NMSU-Global classes this year through our department and the projections are for these numbers to at least double in the next several years. The NMSU-Global classes are built and overseen by faculty, and largely run by graduate students. So it provides significant benefit to our graduate program.

Research funding has gone well lately. Major individual research awards are held by Prasit Bhattacharya (NSF for topology), Michael DiPasquale (NSF for algebra), and John Harding (Army for quantum computing); Louiza Fouli is co-PI of a 5-year $3 million NSF grant for improving STEM classroom; and the our logic group of Bezhanishvili, Harding, Morandi and Shapirovskiy has a 5-year $1.4 million NSF grant for a Research Training Group in Logic and its Application that will put about $115,000 directly to our undergraduate majors and graduate students each year. These successes are generally reflective of a lot of activity by members of our department in applications. Along with research funding, publications in the department continue to be strong and travel is now quite active again. Faculty travelled within the US, Europe, Asia, and India. About 8 graduate students were funded for various conferences and workshops around the U.S. this past spring and summer as well.

There is no improvement in the situation with the Walden Hall closure. With people coming in, nobody on leave, and things now nearly completely in person, we do not have enough space. We offer the most student credit hours on campus, yet have about half the square footage of other major departments.

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.

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!

On April 2nd, 2022, the 27th Joint NMSU/UTEP Workshop on Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computational Sciences was held at NMSU.

Math department professors initiated a gathering in support of the Ukrainian people in the wake of the Russian invasion. A group of faculty at New Mexico State University, their families, and students got together in front of Corbett Center to show their solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
Las Cruces Sun-News
NMSU News

Our colleague of many years, Laura White-Hosford, has retired in January. There are likely a few thousand business and biology students that learned calculus from Laura!

John Selden passed away on January 8th. John Selden retired to New Mexico with his wife Annie Selden in the early 2000’s. They formed a well-known team that worked in math education for many years prior to their retirement, and continued their work as adjuncts in our department. John and Annie regularly volunteered to teach a course on proving mathematics to entering graduate students in our department, and helped many of our graduate students on their path. The Selden Prize of the MAA is named after them.
John Selden Obituary

Linda Zimmerman passed away on January 7th. Linda Zimmerman was a College Professor with many years in our department. Linda was a very well-liked instructor who was dedicated to her students. For several years Linda battled serious illness, but remained upbeat and positive. Linda was very much looking forward to being back teaching this semester when a sudden crisis hit her. 
A virtual celebration of Linda's life will be held on Thursday, February 10 at 1:00 PM MST. 
Linda Zimmerman Obituary

Emeritus Professor, Arthur Kruse, passed away on December 21, 2021 at La Posada in Las Cruces. Arthur received his Ph.D. in 1956 from the University of Chicago under the guidance of one of the major figures of 20th century mathematics, Saunders Mac Lane. His dissertation was titled “Introduction to the Theory of Block Assemblages and Development in the Theory of Retraction”. After spending several years at the University of Kansas, Art joined NMSU in 1960 and retired in 1995. He had 7 doctoral students including Edward Gaughan, who was also a long-time member of the NMSU Department of Mathematical Sciences.

The department seeks applications for a tenure-track position in topology https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/18310

NMSU has joined MSRI. This is a consortium of top research institutions that offers curreing edge research opportunities to faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students at locations around the world. 

The Department has joined Math Alliance. This is a consortium of universities devoted to the advancement of underrepresented groups in graduate education in mathematics and statistics.

The department held an international conference in logic and foundations titled BLAST. There were nearly 300 registered participants.

The department is now offering a menu of 5 lower-division service courses to serve students in the new and quickly growing NMSU-Online. Apart from benefits to students and the university, this allows us to support an additional 4-5 graduate students.

The very successful “Math Problem of the Week” contest for undergraduates continues. https://math.nmsu.edu/activities/math-problem-of-the-week.html

A new promotional video describes our department to prospective undergraduate students. https://vimeo.com/574488960/484cac66c0

Mary Ballyk wins the university Westhafer Award for teaching. This award, named after former Mathematics Department Head Robert Westhafer, is given in alternate years for teaching and research. It is the university’s highest honor.

Andres Contreras has received his tenure and promotion to Associate Professor.

John Harding received a 3-year, $348,000 grant from the Army titled Logic and Geometry in Quantum Computing.

Tingting Tong has received the Anna Schrufer Kist Scholarship.

Sebastian Meltzer received the Charles and Nita Swartz Scholarship.

Chau Hoang, Le Tran, and Ishraq Al-Awamleh received Kist Outstanding Graduate Student Awards.

Remembering Dr. Karen Trujillo.