NES MAA

Greetings! I hope that everyone had a nice summer and that your semesters are going well.

It was great seeing so many of you at the Spring Meeting at St. Michael’s College this past May. It was a fantastic meeting with many wonderful invited speakers, student papers, and contributed papers. I would like to take the time to thank the Local Arrangements Committee: Joanna Ellis-Monaghan (co-chair), George Ashline (co-chair), Amy Adams, Karl-Dieter Crisman; and the Program Committee: Lloyd Simons (chair), Zsuzsanna Kadas, Greta Pangborn, Jim Hefferon. Many thanks to the people who diligently served on these committees.

We are eagerly anticipating the upcoming Fall Meeting which will be held at Bentley College on November 21-22. Rick Cleary (Bentley College) is the chairing the Local Arrangements Committee and Ann Trenk (Wellesley College) is chairing the Program Committee. It is shaping up to be an exciting meeting with many wonderful speakers lined up including David Bressoud (MAA President-Elect) and three relatively new faculty in our section from Project NExT. Other highlights of this meeting:

• Rob Poodiack (Norwich University) will be organizing the Third Annual Problem Solving Competition for undergraduates. Prizes will be given to the winning team. Anyone interested in fielding a team of undergraduate students from their institution should get in touch with Rob.

• David Carhart of Bentley College is the most recent winner of the NES/MAA Award for Distinguished College/University Teaching. He received his award at the Spring meeting and will be giving at talk at the Fall meeting – right on his home turf! Congratulations again to David Carhart.

• We will be conducting elections to elect the Secretary/Treasurer, Two-Year College Representative, and Vice-Chair. Note that the Vice Chair takes over as Chair in November 2009. Since these elections are so important to our section, we urge all members to attend the Fall Meeting.

• Karen Stanish (Keene State College) will be organizing the Section NExT workshop and luncheon which will take place on the Friday of the Fall Meeting. All untenured faculty members from our section are welcome to participate. Since our financial situation is so good, we will be waiving the registration fee for all Section NExT participants. (Note: Section NExT participants will still have to pay for Friday’s dinner and Saturday’s lunch.)

• In light of our positive financial situation, we will be embarking on a new initiative to get newer faculty to participate in NES/MAA events. All faculty who are first-time attendees will be eligible to take part in a drawing. We will draw ten winners; each winner will receive free registration and free meals for the Spring 2009 Meeting!

So as you can see, we have a lot of wonderful things taking place at the Fall Meeting at Bentley College. I encourage all faculty, especially newer faculty, to attend. I promise that you won’t be disappointed!

There are many other events that are being planned for the upcoming year. They include:

• Simmons College is hosting a Dinner Meeting on October 27 where Christopher Danforth from the University of Vermont will speak on "Chaos and the Mathematics of Prediction: Hurricane Katrina, Harry Potter, and Happiness". This is a great opportunity to learn some very interesting mathematics and to socialize with other members of the Section. Visit the Dinner Meetings web page for details.

• The national Joint Meetings will be held in Washington D.C. on January 5-8, 2009. See the MAA website for more details.

• The Spring Meeting will be held at Fairfield University on May 29-30, 2009. Matt Coleman (Fairfield University) is the Local Arrangements Chair and Karen Stanish (Keene State College) is the Program Committee Chair. It is shaping up to be a fantastic meeting. More details will follow as time gets closer.

In the Spring Newsletter, I discussed the possibility of implementing on-line registration and payment for our section meetings. Ideally this would be available for the Fall meeting, but we are still working on that. We are confident that on-line registration and payment will be available within the next year.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas for what you like to see the Section offer, I would be happy to hear them. I hope to see many of you at Bentley College on November 21-22!

The full Newsletter in PDF Format