Undergraduate

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Two Madison High School Students Bring Home Gold

Daniel Kane, a student at Madison West High School, and Po-Ru Loh, a student at Madison Memorial High School were among 510 students who participated in the 43rd International Mathematical Olympiad in Glasgow, Scotland this past summer. There were 85 teams consisting of six students each. Remarkably, both Daniel and Po-Ru won gold medals, two of the four gold medals won by the U.S. team, which finished in third place beyond China and Russia. The gold medals were slipped over their heads by Princess Anne. Both Daniel and Po-Ru earned perfect scores at the U.S. Mathematics Olympiad in Boston last year; only five out of 326 participants did so.

Neither Daniel nor Po-Ru are strangers in the UW-Madison Mathematics Department, as they have taken many undergraduate mathematics courses here. Daniel is the son of mathematics professor Jonathan Kane [PhD 1980, A. Nagel] of UW-Whitewater and oncology professor Janet Mertz of UW-Madison. Po-Ru is the son of statistics professor Wei-Yin Loh of UW-Madison; his mother, Theresa Loh has a mathematics degree from the University of Singapore.

Recently, Daniel has been conducting research with Ken Ono in Number Theory, and he has already written two research papers. The first paper on asymptotic formulas for partition functions has been accepted for publication in the Ramanujan Journal. His second paper is even far more impressive. Daniel proves a conjecture of George E. Andrews and Richard Lewis on crank inequalities. This second paper employs the theory of theta functions, the circle method for automorphic forms, and a wide variety of complicated combinatorial constructions. He has just submitted the paper for publication - and he is only 16 years old!

Undergraduate Scholarship Awards

Our annual student awards ceremony was held on May 7, 2002 in the ninth floor conference room of Van Vleck Hall. Awards were presented to several of our best undergraduate students:

Named Scholarship		Award Recipient(s)

R. Creighton Buck Prize
for Creativity in Mathematics		Geir T. Helleloid

Mark Ingraham Scholarship		Jonah B. Gaster
		Kendra Nelsen
		Anne J. Shudy

Frank D. Cady Scholarship		Adam T. Feldman
		William C. Hogg
		Abraham D. Smith

Irma L. Newman Scholarship		Scott M. Schneider

Prof. Linnaeus Wayland Dowland		Sang-Hoon Cho
Scholarship		Nathan Corwin
		James R. Diebel
		Mathew D. Felton

AMEP Program Receives Gifts fron Alumnus Dan Koellen

The Applied Mathematics Engineering and Physics (AMEP) undergraduate program has received generous gifts from alumnus Dan Koellen. One gift is a ``Leadership Fund'' endowment, creating an award for AMEP students who excel academically and have a broader impact on the program. The second gift is earmarked for expenses related to attracting more students to the program, increasing the visibility of AMEP, and improving the cohesion of the program. To this end, Professor Paul Milewski, the current coordinator of AMEP, is organizing social get-togethers and a seminar course for AMEP students that will focus on in-depth discussion of various physically relevant problems.

Sidewalk Math

Need help studying for exams? That's how the flyer advertising Sidewalk Math began last spring. It went on to say: Friendly teaching assistants will be on hand to answer your questions in a relaxed atmosphere. It'll be like Math Lab - OUTDOORS.

Every spring many of our teaching assistants volunteer their time to help students prepare for mathematics exams. And many of our students in such courses as College Algebra and Calculus are taking advantage of the offered help. Afterwards the teaching assistants have the different, and not voluntary, task of grading all those exams with faculty members. This contrast is evident in the before and after pictures below.

Sidewalk Math in progress...

Finally grading exams