In terms of students, in the spring we graduated 6 PhD students; 3 MS students; and 7 BS students. We have a total of 13 incoming graduate students, this was a big job and the Grad Studies Committee did a great job. Additionally, our current student Bayron received the Distinguished Graduate Assistant award for the coming year and Ruwa and Sewvandi received Preparing Future Faculty Awards.

Our graduate program has approximately 34 students, with one or two more joining in spring, a relatively stable situation. Of these 34, about 20 are PhD and 14 MS; about 21 are international and 13 domestic. Our undergraduate program has about 45 majors. The number of majors is stable, but is less than what we would like. Our agreement with Chihuahua and our new undergraduate major through Global that hopefully begin next year may help with this.

Research continues to be very active. We have grants in algebra, analysis, foundations and topology; faculty are traveling to many conferences; a strong publication; a recent logic conference in the summer and an upcoming conferences in C*-algebras (groupoids) in mid November and algebra (matroids) and around the winter break; and active seminars and colloquia. We are also introducing an undergraduate seminar series, led by Keegan Boyle, that will introduce undergraduate and beginning graduate students to areas of mathematics and research.

The general state of the department is a mixture, but mostly good. We have a strong group of faculty with a youth movement and have made excellent hires in recent years. The postdoc program is running very well. Our graduate program is very healthy and many of our undergraduates are very good. Thanks to our generous donors we have means to support students and research, invite visitors, and many other activities. Recent undergrad/grad topics classes in timely subjects have been well populated both within the department and across departments. The demand for math courses is up by 30% over the past 4 years, with a chunk of the increase due to Global

On the down side, the demand for math courses is concentrated at the 1xxx level classes. We continue to have issues with space, and we continue to have fewer majors than we want. Despite a very healthy state economy and an uptick in university enrollment overall, there is a 1% budget cut this year at the university to be followed by a 1.5% budget cut next year. This will translate into difficulty in hiring replacement faculty when there are departures. There are also rumblings about monitoring low enrollment programs (now defined as < 30 majors and 15 grads over a 3-year span). Here our undergraduate major is above the thresholds for this by a reasonable amount, but this is cause for us to continue our efforts with outreach. The “demographic cliff” has this year as peak enrollment in New Mexico high schools with a decline of 15% over the next decade. About half NMSU students are directly from high school so the effect of this cliff will be mitigated. In sum, we want our efforts to boost our undergrad program to outpace negative external effects. Pass rates in lower-level courses are always of importance to the admin and we face hurdles in the coming year with ever decreasing abilities of incoming students, something that will only be made worse by elimination of Algebra II as a high school graduation requirement.

On a final note, we should think about AI, it will affect us ever more into the future. Students using AI for homework is one issue. Also, if you play with AI in research you can see that it can be a very versatile tool to search the literature and can be leveraged in various ways for specific smaller tasks. It is also going to change jobs that are open and the kinds of skills that students need. My personal impression is that understanding is something that will come back into fashion, and that this plays to our strengths. The effects of AI can be quick and dramatic, CS enrollments at NMSU are down steeply, likely in part because of a sharp downturn in programming jobs caused by AI reducing the work required to produce code.

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 is closed indefinitely.