Dear Friends of the Department,
Welcome to our spring newsletter! I look forward to update you on our latest research, teaching, and outreach activities post-Covid. During these extraordinary times, we are grateful for the increased engagement with the broader community.
This issue of our newsletter contains an article on the innovative effort to run our undergraduate courses in online and hybrid modes in the autumn semester. This concerted effort by instructors in our department, with the support of the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center and other teaching and technology resources at Ohio State, has enabled our teaching activities to run remarkably smoothly. Additionally, many of these innovations will impact instruction for years to come.
We also have an article on how the sudden switch to online instruction has affected graduate student life in our department. Our graduate students give opinions about the changes forced on their program by the pandemic. Indeed, teaching graduate mathematics online presents a unique set of challenges, which are discussed in that article.
Another article is about challenges and opportunities in running our latest Young Mathematicians Conference (YMC) online. The YMC event is an annual national undergraduate research conference in mathematics hosted by our department with continuous NSF funding since 2003. It has one of the most competitive and rigorous admission process among all venues of its kind in the US.
Our final article discusses emerging applications of mathematics to drawing voting districts in Ohio and across the country for the next decade. The article highlights research in that area by our faculty members.
In addition to these articles, this newsletter issue contains a spotlight on the actuarial club at Ohio State (ACOS), which has around 300 members and is focused on career development for our actuarial science undergraduates. There are also spotlights on new and select members of our community and alumni, as well as on recent activities carried out by our Mathematics Graduate Student Association (MGSA).
We hope you will enjoy reading our newsletter. And as always, we encourage you to consider donating funds to help support our departmental activities.
