Spring 2012 Newsletter - Bad Request - Oberlin College

Oberlin Department of Mathematics
Alumni NewsLetter
STAFFING NEWS
This winter the Mathematics Department
conducted a successful search in algebra and
hired Lola Thompson, who is earning her PhD
this spring at Dartmouth with a specialization in
number theory. Lola will spend the coming year
in an NSF VIGRE post doctoral position at the
University of Georgia and will begin teaching at
Oberlin in the fall of 2013.
We were fortunate to have two excellent
visiting faculty this year: Matt Spencer and Josh
Lesperance. We also hosted a guest from
Indonesia: Fitriana Abdurrahman sat in on some
of Jeff Witmer’s statistics classes as a visiting
Shansi Fellow.
Looking ahead to 2012–13, we are pleased
that Josh Lesperance will be with us for another
year. We are also pleased to report that we will be
welcoming back Michael Raney. Michael spent
three years with us earlier: 2008-09 through
2010–2011.
ALUMNI NOTES
Many of you responded to our request for
alumni notes a few weeks ago. Here are those
responses (lightly edited – although opinions
expressed here remain those of individual alumni
and are not necessarily shared by the members of
the Department).
Although I have earned no national honors, I
feel I have utilized the excellent mathematics
education I received at Oberlin. I graduated after
the summer of 1943, although I had been in the
class of ’44. I achieved my MS in mathematics in
’44 from the University of Michigan. The next
year I started my fifty years of teaching high
school mathematics. 30 of those years were in
Spring 2012
the public school, but 20 have been as a private
tutor. I am still tutoring, although my intellectual
passion is now tournament bridge. I recently
heard that one of my stellar students (T.S.
Michael, Annapolis professor) is to receive the
MAA Pólya Award for his article in the College
Math Journal in 2011 titled “Guards, Galleries,
Fortresses and the Octoplex”. I had had the good
fortune to attend a lecture by George Pólya at
Stanford, came back to the classroom inspired
and here 40 years later is an example of how the
excitement of mathematics continues.
--Joyce Palmer ‘44
As an 86-year-old widow living in a
retirement home in California, I continue to enjoy
math, though on a rather passive side. I have
tried a little tutoring, but no longer drive. Some
mothers are eager enough to drive their children
to me, but a mother’s interest usually outlasts that
of her children.
I enjoy reading the AMS Notices and the
Monthly. I am interested in constants related to
dimensions. Did you know that in elementary
applications of calculus, optimizing volume or
surface cost, you always spend twice as much on
the surface as on the bases, bottom plus top, no
matter which is to be optimized: volume under
surface constraint, or surface cost under volume
constraint? It is enjoyable to wring a little more
out of elementary problems.
Some years back I wanted to divide the 2/3 of a
cylindrical volume left after an inscribed cone is
deleted. I used a frustum of a cone. It turned out
that the quotient of radii of the bases of the
frustum needed to be phi, the golden section, to
make the division of the cylindrical volume
divide into equal thirds. That was a nice
surprise. Now I am playing with other fractions
of the cylindrical volume.
Lack of a convenient library is becoming less a
problem as Google and Bing take over. And

mathematicians don’t require a lab full of coauthors.
--Margaret [Alice Waugh, ‘47] Maxfield
Since leaving Oberlin, I have taught in the
Math department in Cleveland State University
and then worked in IBM co. in New York for
almost 25 years. I did get a Master’s degree in
Mathematics from University of Illinois, before
teaching in Cleveland.
My husband taught at Columbia University in
New York for 30 years. Now we have both
retired and our children all have jobs outside of
New York. So we decided to leave the New York
area and go back to the orient.
Life is easy and nice here, although we still miss
New York.
-- Yi Chang Chow ‘53
Bob Pendelton ‘58 asks “Are mathematicians
generally, and mathematics educators in
particular, to blame for: (a) the general
innumeracy of the public; and (b) the excessive
and inappropriate use of mathematical models by
other academics and business professionals?”
He goes on to comment: “Members of the public
are seldom able to criticize quantitative data
presented in the media, but the ability to do so
would not require a high degree of mathematical
sophistication. Members of the public generally
lack confidence and so avoid quantitative or
mathematical reasoning. Many feel that numbers
can be manipulated to support any point of view.
Many have difficulty appreciating orders of
magnitude, especially in economic discussions,
such as millions, billions, and trillions of dollars.
Should innumeracy be regarded as serious a
public problem as illiteracy?
Mathematics curricula are often geared for the
future professional — scientist, computer
scientist, statistician, economist, or other
professional, and not for the general public.
Should there be different tracks for those
intending to pursue other careers?
Second, a good deal of discussion about the use
and abuse of mathematical models for investment
decision making has brought home the fact that
statistical reasoning is ill-applied when the
outcome in the tail of a distribution is intolerable.
A former Ph.D. student of mine, now a professor
of financial engineering, has stated that the
derivatives modeling done in the 2008 crisis did
not stand up to his standards of rigor. Is our
profession responsible?
What better forum to raise these points than a
college with a strong bias towards social
responsibility?”
My husband, John Selden, and I are still
teaching as Adjunct Professors in the Department
of Mathematical Sciences at New Mexico State
University and have two PhD students in
mathematics education. We regularly go to, and
present math ed research papers to, conferences
such as PME-NA (The International Group for
the Psychology of Mathematics Education, North
American Chapter) and ICME-12 (the
International Congress on Mathematical
Education to be held in Korea in July 2012). We
have an article with a colleague, Mary Shepherd
of Northwest Missouri State, on how students
read their mathematics textbooks coming out
sometime in 2012 in Mathematical Thinking and
Learning. We also have an article on proof and
problem solving at university level coming out in
a special issue of The Mathematics Enthusiast,
sometime in early 2012. We are enjoying our
encore careers.
--Annie Laurer Alexander Selden ‘59
For my 70th birthday, I got a letter from my
grad school roommate, a physics professor at
Iowa State. He noted that 70 is the smallest
“weird” number, i.e. abundant (sum of factors
greater than the number), but you can’t get
exactly to the number by summing a subset of the
factors. Also 70 is the only number N such that N
squared = sum of the squares from 1 to M, for
some M. These facts are not hard to prove, but
have been a good conversation starter since that
time. I hope to be at Oberlin for my 50th reunion
this year.
--Emmett Keeler ‘62
I received my PhD in mathematics from
M.I.T. in 1965; my thesis advisor was Norman
Levinson. I started out at UCLA that fall and
taught there until 1971. UCLA was a great
department, but I went to Minnesota in 1971
because the department there was very strong in
partial differential equations. I worked largely on
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nonlinear problems in applied mathematics,
especially fluid mechanics.
I remarried in 1988, and my new wife, Irene, had
lived in California and Arizona. We both wanted
to get away from the harsh Minnesota climate and
agreed we wanted to retire in a college town out
West. I took a position as Department Head at
Utah State University in Logan, Utah in 1999; but
we soon realized this was not going to be the
place to retire. I finished my academic career with
a 3-year stint at Yale, working with a long-time
collaborator, Richard Beals. I retired in 2006 and
we moved to Tucson, Arizona, where Irene’s
daughter and two grandchildren had moved. We
are still here.
Though Tucson is too big to be regarded as a
college town, it nevertheless is home to the
University of Arizona, which has many strengths,
among them astronomy. I am now a docent at Kitt
Peak National Observatory and at the Steward
Observatory Mirror Lab, where they make giant
8.4 meter mirrors for the new generation of
telescopes. In addition to giving guided tours, I
have given several lectures to groups in Tucson
on the history of astronomy before the telescope
by the Babylonians and the Greeks ( I call it
Naked Histronomy). I have also gotten interested
in Cosmology and General Relativity, and have
been doing lots of reading.
I am affiliated with the mathematics department
at the University of Arizona, which has long been
an area of strength in my fields of interest. My
web page is http://math.arizona.edu/~dsattinger/
--David Sattinger ‘62
I write much on the nature of evolution,
genetics, and complexity. The closest to
‘mathematics’ would be the role of statistics and
probability in reasoning (or faulty reasoning) in
biology and biomedical genetics. My blog (URL
below) deals with these things all the time, and
we recently did a series of posts on whether
‘probability’ even exists or what that would
mean. I write articles in genetics journals and a
column in each issue of the journal Evolutionary
Anthropology that deals with these things. But as
to real math.....well, I still do some computer
programming, and have a program that simulates
evolution of complex traits but I don’t really do
math, sadly. One thing I do do, I must admit, is
point out to my genetics students here at Penn
State how much I regret the number of probability
and statistics classes I cut (sssh!) when I was a
student. It embarrasses me to this day, and I pay
every day today for what I failed to learn well
enough nearly 50 years ago!
--Ken Weiss ‘63
EcoDevoEvo.blogspot.com
I have left actuarial consulting work far
behind in retirement, but am working with my
brother, John Mitchell, a finance professor, on the
mathematics of retirement, particularly on
selecting sensible spending patterns.
I also continue to facilitate math and science
classes at the Lifelong Learning Institute of
Washington University in St. Louis. My most
recent class dealt with Evolutionary Ethics, for
which I presented some of the natural selection
and game theory aspects of the topic of how
altruism, competition and cooperation intertwine.
My next class is “12 Beautiful Equations” in
May, 2012.
--Tom Mitchell ‘63
I continue as Director of Mathematics, K–12,
for the Hingham, Massachusetts, Public Schools.
I am fortunate to teach in a town that values
education and we have been able to attract a
strong math department of 24 people. It has been
interesting to spend a large amount of time the
last two years in understanding and figuring out
how to implement the Common Core State
Standards in Mathematics.
--Doug Holley ‘66
I have decided to retire after 45 years of
teaching mathematics in the public schools (I
want to spend more time with my granddaughters,
two of whom are living in Cincinnati and the
other two are moving from London, England to
Philadelphia in early June.) I taught for one year
at Irving Junior High School in Lorain, Ohio
followed by 34 years at Oberlin High School
where Andy Thomas and I started the first public
high school soccer team in Lorain County. For
the past ten years I have been teaching in the
Lorain City schools, eight years at Admiral King
High School, then the past two at the Credit
Recovery Academy, an alternative school for high
school students who were not able to pass their
courses at Admiral King or Southview High
Schools in the Lorain system.
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Currently, I am President of the Ohio Council
of Teachers of Mathematics (OCTM) and my
term ends in October. I will stay on the Board of
Directors for one more year as Immediate Past
President. Also I have just started working a
recently created position of the association, the
Annual Conference Coordinator. My job will be
to negotiate contracts with convention centers,
hotels, and exhibitors for the conference and
assist the local chairpersons in setting up the
conference. I plan to keep busy after retirement
working with OCTM, answering math questions
on the “Ask Dr. Math” page of the Mathforum
website, serving on the Boards of my synagogue
and the local Cable Co-op company and auditing
courses at Oberlin College.
-- Mark Jaffee ‘67
I’ve moved to Illinois to be near one of my
son’s, his wife, and my 1-year-old
granddaughter. En route west from Boston, I
stopped in Oberlin, seeing my mentor Sam
Goldberg, Jim Walsh (Sociology) and some
others. I still work for the same company—Rho,
Inc.—but now I work at home in Elgin (a western
Chicagoland burb) in my lovely new house in a
55-and older active adult community. The
community is fantastic; great neighbors, more
activities to do than I can participate in timewise—all
good. I can be reached at
kmonti729@rhoworld.com.
--Kathy Monti ‘71
I have published a book, “A Primer of
Multicast Routing.”
http://www.amazon.com/Multicast-Routing-
SpringerBriefs-Computer-
Science/dp/1461418720
In 1994, the Rolling Stones singer Mick Jagger
opened a concert by saying “I wanna say a special
welcome to everyone that’s, uh, climbed into the
Internet tonight and, uh, has got into the M-bone.”
The M-bone was an early multicast network,
which uses multicast routing to send data from
one source to many destinations, or from many
sources to many destinations.
Multicast is enjoying a resurgence of interest - the
BBC and Virgin Radio now deliver their radio via
multicast. Typically, multicast methods employ a
network topology that looks like a tree, where the
root of the tree is the source, the data is replicated
at each branching point of the tree, and each leaf
node of the tree is a destination. This book covers
historical developments, state of the art methods,
and theoretical research. The target audience is
students of computer science, electrical
engineering, and operations research, and
telecommunication network designers and
architects.
--Eric Rosenberg ‘75
In my research, I’ve been participating in a
big effort to explore the interplay between
computation, ecology, and natural resource
management. One exciting activity is developing
fancy non-parametric statistical methods for
modeling the distribution and behavior of species
(especially birds and bird migration, in
collaboration with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology
and their ebird.org citizen science project).
Ecological phenomena take place over such large
spatial scales that it is almost essential to involve
the general public in helping collect the data to fit
these models.
Another challenge is to develop optimization
algorithms for solving large spatio-temporal
problems such as managing wildfire and invasive
species. It seems that many problems in
ecosystem management involve either
encouraging or preventing spread through
networks.
I’m also part of a startup called BigML that is
developing machine learning methods for “big
data” and implementing them “in the cloud”.
On the family front, my daughter Hannah is
pursuing a PhD in Geology (Vulcanology) at the
University of Oregon and my son is a struggling
musician in LA (yoyatheband.com).
--Tom Dietterich ‘77
I just opened Wagner’s book (1977 edition)
on Operations Research that Dr. Jay Devore used
when I took the class about 35 years ago. Great
course! I work for the Baylor Health Care
System in Dallas and carries the title of VP -
Quantitative Sciences, which means most of my
job is administrative and managerial (and less
time for science — too bad). I enjoy my role with
the Oberlin Admissions Office as an alumnus
interviewer of prospective students. I’ll be at
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Commencement this year for my class’s 35th
reunion.
--Ed De Vol ‘78
After 28+ years working for Eli Lilly and
Company, I retired and took a faculty position
within the Pediatrics Epidemiology Center at the
University of South Florida. I consult with
pediatric researchers around the country on design
and analysis of clinical trials. Still have great
memories of Oberlin and faculty mentors like
Sam Goldberg and Eddie Wong.
--Roy Tamura ‘78
On the personal front, I spent ten days in
Cambodia with my son Julian, who was born
there thirteen years ago. We are homeschooling
him this year and I am enjoying teaching him
math. A problem I proposed a while back
sparked some interest; I was hoping one of the
contributors would turn it into an article (being
outside academe, I don’t have the time), but that
hasn't happened. Here it is: Cutting muffins
produces lots of crumbs, and small pieces are
particularly hard to keep together. Given m
muffins and n people, how can you divide up the
muffins such that everyone gets m/n muffins and
the size of the smallest piece is maximized?
--Alan Frank ‘79
I graduated in 1985 with a BA in
mathematics, and have been working pretty much
ever since in the computer games industry,
writing auto-racing simulation software. I use
math every single day, as I am largely responsible
for the code that calculates the physics of the race
cars. My latest venture is iRacing.com, an online
subscription-based racing service. I wrote a
(somewhat mathematical) blog article last year
that might be of some interest to other math and
CS alums, regarding a bug in said physics code:
http://www.iracing.com/q-circles-the-cropcircles-of-iracing/
Last summer I got a chance to visit Oberlin with
my wife and college-hunting son, and we were
greeted warmly by Bob Geitz, who started
teaching at Oberlin shortly before I graduated! It
was great to catch up and hear about the growth
of the Oberlin CS department.
--Dave Kaemmer ‘85
On November 1, I moved to Paris to take up
a position as Director of Research at INRIA
Paris-Rocquencourt. Shortly before that, I paid a
brief visit to the Oberlin Computer Science
department, where I gave several talks. I can be
reached at Julia.Lawall@lip6.fr.
--Julia Lawall ‘87
Michael Braverman ‘87 asks “Why is Oct 31
= Dec 25?”
I am in my 24 th year of teaching mathematics
at Hudson High School in Hudson Ohio.
This year we started a Mu Alpha Theta math
honorary society at Hudson High School.
Oberlin’s Susan Jane Colley gave a talk on
“Mathematics in the Tropics” at our inaugural
induction ceremony!! It was a great talk and
great evening! I really enjoyed reconnecting with
Dr. Colley (she taught me Calculus II at 8 AM!).
--David Spohn ‘87
After getting a PhD in Computer Science at
Cornell, I had a brief academic career before I
switched to industry. I'm now working for
Toshiba Medical Visualization Systems, Europe,
writing medical imaging software. We let users
visualize large amounts of complex 3D image
data acquired from scanners like CT and MR.
You can see some of our pretty pictures
at http://www.tmvse.com/. The job requires real
mathematics -- mostly linear algebra / matrix
computations to manage operations on the
original data, but our image analysis people use
various techniques to try to identify particular
anatomy algorithmically.
I work in Edinburgh, Scotland, and live near St
Andrews. I'm happy to hear from people at
judithlunderwood@gmail.com.
--Judith Underwood ‘88
After 20 years of meandering around the
country doing everything from teaching middle
school to baking to statistics to running a fair
trade store, living in CA, MN, DC, PA, CO and at
least one other state I'm forgetting, I finally
settled in Indianapolis of all places. I have
decided to follow the Obie path and go back to
school. This fall I start a Math Education PhD
program at IU Bloomington. With a 43-year-old-
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ain, it may be a stretch, but so far with one class
it's exciting. Wish me luck!
--Robin Jones ‘90
carrotxy@gmail.com
I have been teaching mathematics, statistics
and computer science for 19 years now. Currently
I am teaching at Dublin Coffman High School in
Dublin, Ohio. Recently I had the chance to talk to
a group of my former students about their
experiences studying math in college, and I
wanted to say thanks to my Oberlin College
professors and classmates who provided a
fantastic mathematical education for me. I
wouldn't change anything about it, except perhaps
to have taken my first Statistics course a little bit
earlier in my OC career.
Aside from my teaching and coaching (crosscountry,
track & field, FIRST Robotics) duties I
have been doing some work lately on how to
better use all of the No Child Left Behind inspired
standardized test and other data schools have to
collect. While I have some pretty strong opinions
on the limits of the usefulness of that data, if it is
going to be collected we should be using it. Yet in
my view we aren’t using it particularly
effectively. In particular we want the tests to be a
measure of the effectiveness of instruction, but
don't use them much as a tool to look at what
students do and do not know/know how to do.
Getting the score on the test is the end these days.
--Greg King ‘90
Several college students and adult learners
have asked me this past winter what kind of
mathematical prerequisites are necessary to
understanding graduate/current publication level
modern physics. Oberlin majors and prospective
majors might want to know.
Another thing I am often asked (a bit over my
depth, but they learn you are a mathematics major
who took statistics and they ask) is about how to
do errors bars for Poisson distributions as
opposed to Gaussian distributions that are
frequently include impossible outcomes (e.g.
negative and fractional values for quantities that
can't be negative and come only in integer
values).
The most interesting mathematical question I've
come across lately is the Descendants of
Confucius problem
(http://dispatchesfromturtleisland.blogspot.com/2
012/02/descendants-of-confucius.html) which has
a quite counterintuitive result. Basically, it
provides that under quite minimal assumptions,
over much larger areas, and much more rapidly
than one would intuitively expect, the universe of
people who have living descendants, and the
universe of people who are ancestors to all people
now living, converge to be the same set of people.
Mathematical work in my professional life as a
lawyer is limited to adding up filing fees and
billable hours for prevailing party cost and fee
awards, calculating the interest due on money
judgments, and calculating court deadlines. I also
tutor a high school student in math.
--Andrew Oh-Willeke ‘92
(under the name Andrew Willeke) in Denver,
Colorado (and still married to Sharon Oh-
Willeke, ‘93)
I will be celebrating my 12th wedding
anniversary with Vivian Chang (a fellow Oberlin
B.Mus. grad from 1992). We have 2 children,
Jacob and Caleb (now 11 and 9 years old,
respectively), and live in Westchester, New York,
25 miles north of New York City. I am currently
working as head of Finance at for the IT
department of Starwood Hotels & Resorts, and
am pleased to report back that not a single
financial analysis matches the intellectual
challenge of Oberlin mathematics take-home
exams.
--Mark Freiheit ‘93
Susan Sierra (‘93) has a position at the
University of Edinburgh in the U.K. Some of her
work follows in the footsteps of Emmy Noether,
one of the two or three most important female
physicists in all of history.
My wife and I managed to solve the twobody
problem by moving to Tucson and getting
jobs at the University of Arizona. I’m now a
Visualization Researcher at UA’s School for
Information: Science, Technology, and Arts. I've
been working with several scientists here, from an
astrophysicist who is studying turbulent flows in
the interstellar medium, as well as with scientists
at the Tree Ring Lab, who study the effects of
climate on forest fires (Incidentally, one of the
Tree Ring Lab’s scientists, Don Falk, is an
Oberlin Alum from 1972. Not math, though!). I
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am working to develop visual interpretations that
will help these scientists in their own work, as
well as visual explanations to be used for public
outreach and education. I am also teaching an
undergraduate course on technical, legal, and
ethical aspects of dealing with data. Earlier this
year, while finishing up my 11 good years with
the Advanced Visualization Lab at the National
Center for Supercomputing Applications, I
worked on producing several of the data-driven
visualizations for the IMAX film “Hubble 3D”,
including a flight through the Orion nebula, and
another exploring the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field
data. Our group also produced two short shots for
Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life”, and
collaborated with Adler Planetarium in Chicago
on their first digital planetarium show “Deep
Space Adventure”.
--Matthew Hall ‘94
http://u.arizona.edu/~mahall
Gail Potter ‘97 has accepted a faculty
position in the Statistics Department at California
Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo,
CA.
For most of my post-Oberlin career, I’ve
been getting paid to do what I did
extracurricularly (is that a word?) during college:
namely, directing music for Catholic churches.
Currently my wife Teresa and I live in Lansing,
Michigan, and I commute ten miles each way (by
bicycle occasionally, but not as frequently as I’d
like) to the Catholic Community of St. Jude in
DeWitt, Michigan. My repertoire has broadened a
bit since my days with the Newman Club, and our
choir sings everything from recently-composed
pop-style songs to Palestrina and Gregorian chant.
St. Jude is the first church where I’ve had the
opportunity to direct a handbell choir, which is a
delightfully unusual way of making music. This
year, I started exploring with them an English
tradition called “change ringing,” which involves
ringing a set of bells in a given order, permuting
the order according to certain rules, and repeating
for as long as possible, ultimately returning to the
original pattern. Those who were in Susan
Colley’s Abstract Algebra: Group Theory class
(327, I think) around 1995 may remember that my
end-of-semester presentation explored change
ringing from a group theoretical perspective! It’s
nice to finally be able to put that theory into
practice.
--Steve Kasperick-Postellon (né Postellon) ’97
I am reminded of Bob Bosch’s Discrete Math
class as he works on difficult problems at
Amazon.com.
--Andrew McCormick ‘98
I just accepted a post-doc position in
Santiago, Chile doing research on bus rapid
transit primarily in developing countries. In
keeping with my Oberlin math and liberation
struggles major, I am going to be serving as a
bridge between the engineering and social science
sections of the research center.
--Laurel Paget-Seekins ‘01
In September, 2012, I will be beginning a
tenure-track Assistant Professor position with the
University of Wisconsin-Madison (go Badgers!)
in the Geoscience department. My research
program there will use mathematics in the areas
of inverse modeling (large scale parameter
estimation), uncertainty analysis, and numerical
modeling, and will apply these tools to a focus on
water resources systems, particularly improving
efficiency in the areas of aquifer remediation and
water supply management. My wife, Gwyneth
Hughes (also an Oberlin math alum), is currently
changing the world (or at least Idaho) with the
Institute for Development of Mathematical
Thinking at Boise State University, which
develops and presents professional development
workshops — among other things — that are
aimed at enabling mathematics teachers to help
students improve their conceptual understanding
of mathematics. If all goes well, she will be
continuing her position by offering online
seminars remotely from Wisconsin in the coming
year. Also — and perhaps most exciting of all —
we have a new addition to our family, Mr. Brenyn
Francis Cardiff. He was born September last year
and has been trying to keep us from working too
hard (see attached). He already seems to like
counting and geometrical shapes.
-- Mike Cardiff ‘01, Gwyn ’01, and Brenyn
(pictured below)
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In August 2011, Wes started a position as a
Market Manager for Jaguar Land Rover,
wholesaling vehicles and providing consultative
services to retailers in the Midwest. Wes was
relocated to Indianapolis, IN, and covers markets
in Indiana, Ohio, Missouri, Kentucky, and West
Virginia. Wes also graduated from Northeastern
University in January 2012 with an MBA in
Marketing and Finance, and was offered a
membership in the international honor society,
Beta Gamma Sigma.
-- Wesley Kania ‘04
I am now a graduate student at the University
of Illinois pursuing Masters degrees in orchestral
conducting and music education. Before that, I
taught middle school orchestra in the Chicago
suburbs for 4 years.
-- Daniel Beder ‘05
As a pension actuary, I’m heartened by recent
legislation that finally goes the direction of
encouraging people to take their retirement
savings in the form of monthly annuities lasting
through their life time, as opposed to a pot of
money that’s all too easy to outlive. Annuities are
still very expensive in the individual insurance
market (and will continue to be so), so the more
employers can do to take advantage of pooling
(lower prices), the better!
On a more personal note, I’m expecting my
second daughter in June which is just a few
months away. Keeping busy! When I have a few
spare minutes, I've found a great website to
entertain myself: www.Gapminder.org. It really is
quite nifty.
--Ellen Chai ‘05
I am working for the Ohio Democratic Party
as their voter file manager, which means I provide
data support to every Democratic campaign in
Ohio. Data has really come into its own in the
2012 electoral cycle as a whole sector of
campaigns. I was a double major at Oberlin in
Applied Mathematics and Politics.
--Brendan Kelley ‘07
I returned from a Shansi Fellowship in
Himachal Pradesh, India last summer and has
spent the year working for an international
English school. Starting this fall, I will be
pursuing a dual masters program in International
Development and Global Cooperation from
American University School of International
Service and Ritsumeikan University in Kyoto.
-- Jenna Lindeke ‘09
This fall I will begin teaching secondary
math in Washington, D.C. as a DC Teaching
Fellow. While my time as an
AmeriCorps*VISTA volunteer in Baltimore has
been productive and growthful, I've recognized
that I need work that is more consistently
demanding (I’ve spent my year organizing
neighborhood workshops and block projects, and
I’ve found the work unfortunately intermittent).
I’ve also been (probably predictably) frustrated
that my passion for math and science hasn’t had
much room for expression as a VISTA. Anyway,
I'm excited to begin teaching math this fall, and I
wanted to share the news!
--Ben Jakubowski ‘11
I graduated this past year, class of ‘11.
Regarding math-related activities, I will be
leaving for the Peace Corps this June to teach
math in Burkina Faso. I won't really know any
more details until I get there, but it will probably
be around middle or high school level. One of the
goals of the project that I am really excited about
relates to supporting girls’ empowerment in the
schools, and helping to increase their retention
rate as they get into their teens. I am sure that it
will be a really eye-opening experience.
--Mariko Meyer ‘11
COMMENCEMENT
• This year our Commencement Reception is
Sunday, May 27 from 2-4 PM in King 205. If
you are here for commencement, please come; we
would love to see you.
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