News

A message from our Department Head, Dr. John Harding:

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.

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.