Mathematics & Computer Science

Majors & Courses

Professors who teach Mathematics & Computer Science focus on providing students with the problem-solving expertise essential as a foundation for a variety of careers, as well as having a thorough preparation for graduate study. Students also have the opportunity through the topics courses, the problem seminars, the independent studies courses, and electives to focus on individual needs and objectives.

The department offers the major, minor and dual majors in Mathematics & Computer Science with complementary studies in the following disciplines: Biology, Business Administration & Economics, Chemistry, Philosophy, and Physics. Students who major in Mathematics may elect to minor in Education and earn Secondary Teacher Certification.

Students also have the opportunity to intern at a company or government agency, or to pursue independent research with a faculty member.

Faculty

Associate Professor and department chair Pavel Naumov

(Ph.D. Cornell University), Academic interests: reasoning about knowledge in multi-agent systems, logical foundations of concurrency and game theories, proof complexity, type theory, automated deduction, and modal logics.

Assistant Professor Spencer Hamblen

(Ph.D. Cornell University), is the advisor to the Math Club and Kappa Mu Epsilon, the Mathematics Honor Society at McDaniel. He studies Number Theory, Algebraic symmetry, and Arithmetic Statistics. He also enjoys baking pecan pi and crocheting hyperbolic surfaces.

Associate Professor Sara Miner More

(Ph.D. University of California, San Diego), is an expert in information flow in multi-party systems, from computer networks to spy rings, Facebook to genetics. She frequently collaborates and publishes with her students on research topics that involve cryptographic – secret and secure – protocols and computer security when she isn’t in the classroom teaching the Art of Programming, Discrete Mathematics, Database Design, Theory of Computation, Principles of Programming Languages and Modern Cryptography.

Senior Lecturer Michelle Gribben

(M.S. University of Maryland Baltimore County), teaches Finite Mathematics and focuses on making mathematics accessible.

Professor Italo Simonelli

(Ph.D. Temple University), teaches Calculus and Complex Analysis, among other courses, and mentors students in his areas of interest: probability theory, statistics, graph theory and combinatorics.

Visiting Assistant Professor Eunkyung Ko

(Ph.D., Mississippi State University), Academic interests: partial differential equations, ordinary differential equations, nonlinear analysis, and optimizations.

Experiences

During the recent years, students and faculty have collaborated on a wide variety of research. Some of these research collaborations have led to student co-authored publications and conference publications. Examples follow:

Peer-Reviewed Publications

Brittany Nicholls (with faculty): Rationally Functional Dependence in proceedings of 10th Conference on Logic and the Foundations of Game and Decision Theory (LOFT'12), University of Sevilla, Spain, June 2012 and  Game Semantics for the Geiger-Paz-Pearl Axioms of Independence in proceedings of Third International Workshop on Logic, Rationality and Interaction (LORI-III), Guangzhou, China, October 2011, LNAI 6953, pp. 220-232, Spring 2011

Benjamin Sapp (with faculty): Concurrency Semantics for the Geiger-Paz-Pearl Axioms of Independence in proceedings of 20th Conference on Computer Science Logic (CSL '11), Bergen, Norway, September 2011, pp. 443-457, 2011

Sarah Holbrook (with faculty): Fault Tolerance in Belief Formation Networks in proceedings of 13th European Conference on Logics in Artificial Intelligence (JELIA'12), Toulouse, France, September 26 - 28, 2012 (forthcoming)

Andrew Yang (with faculty): A Ternary Knowledge Relation on Secrets in proceedings of 13th conference on Theoretical Aspects of Rationality and Knowledge (TARK '11), Groningen, the Netherlands, July 2011 pp. 46-54. ACM 2011

Michael Donders (with faculty): Information Flow on Directed Acyclic Graphs in proceedings of 18th Workshop on Logic, Language, Information and Computation, (WoLLIC '11), Philadelphia, USA, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011, Volume 6642/2011, pp. 95-109

Robert Kelvey and Benjamin Sapp (with faculty): Independence and Functional Dependence Relations on Secrets in proceedings of 12th International Conference on the Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning, (KR '10), Toronto, Canada, pp. 528-533, AAAI Press 2010

Research Presentations

Michael Donders, "Independence of Colorings on Graphs"; MD-DC-VA Section MAA Spring 2012 Meeting, Stevenson University, Owings Mills, MD, April 13-14, 2012

Elizabeth McCaslin, "Improving Abundancy Bounds"; Joint Mathematics Meetings, AMS Session on Number Theory, New Orleans, January 2011

Mike Donders, "A Poisson Approximation for the Number of kl-Matches II"; Joint Mathematics Meetings, AMS Session on Statistics, New Orleans, January 2011

Elizabeth McCaslin and Fenghao Wang, "Improving Abundancy Bounds"; MAA MathFest (MAA Student Session), Pittsburgh, PA, August 2010

Stephen Hardy, "Extensions of Van der Waerden numbers to finite gap sets"; MD-DC-VA Section MAA Spring 2010 Meeting, Virginia State University, Petersburg, VA, April 2010

Robert Kelvey, "To be, or not to be... Lucky" (poster); MD-DC-VA Section MAA Spring 2010 Meeting, Virginia State University, Petersburg, VA, April 2010

External Awards

Jeffrey Kane, Jeff Norton, and Mike Donders winning Jeopardy team (second place), Mathematical Association of America, MD-DC-VA regional section (2012)

Brittany Nicholls, Computing Research Association Outstanding Undergraduate Researcher Awards, Honorable Mention (2012)

Benjamin Sapp, First Place Student Poster Award (2011), Mathematical Association of America, MD-DC-VA regional section

Michael Donders, Benjamin Sapp, and Fenghao Wang winning Jeopardy team (2011), Mathematical Association of America, MD-DC-VA regional section

Mathematics majors at McDaniel participate annually in the Putnam Competition offered to all undergraduate students of the U.S. and Canada. Since 1938, this exam is administered by the Mathematical Association of America. Recent results are as follows:

McDaniel College team, 72nd place in North America on 2010 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition

Michael Donders, listed among top 500 contestants on 2010 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition

Robert Kelvey, Second Place Student Poster Award (2010), Mathematical Association of America, MD-DC-VA regional section

Stephen Hardy and Robert Kelvey, winning Jeopardy team (2010), Mathematical Association of America, MD-DC-VA regional section

After McDaniel

Our graduates distinguish themselves by acceptance into some of the finest graduate programs in the country; majority receive fellowships or assistantships which funds their studies at either the Master's or Ph.D. level.
Brandeis
Cornell
Harvard
Johns Hopkins
Michigan
North Carolina State

SUNY at Stony Brook
U. of California at Berkeley
U. of Maryland
U. of Michigan
U. of Pennsylvania
U. of Texas at Austin
U. of Virginia
Virginia Polytechnic Institute
Washington at St. Louis
Sample Outcomes for Computer Science Majors Class of 2010
Fenghao Wang: graduate student at U. New Hampshire (Durham, NH)
Stephen Hardy: graduate student at U. Virginia (Charlottesville, VA)
Adam Sommers: Alliant Techsystems (Rocket Center, WV)
Robert Kelvey: graduate student at Bowling Green State U. (Bowling Green, OH)
Andrea Mills: GSE Systems, Inc. (Sykesville, MD)
Samuel Smith: GSE Systems, Inc. (Sykesville, MD)

McDaniel has a chapter (the Beta chapter in MD was established in 1965) of Kappa Mu Epsilon, the national honor society in Mathematics to promote scholarship in Mathematics and to recognize good performance in the study of Mathematics. Students meet monthly and volunteer as tutors in math and computer science courses. 

Frequently our graduates return to discuss career opportunities in mathematics and computer science at annual Career Nights. In the last few years graduates with the following positions have been back on campus:
• Senior programmer/analyst, Sentient HealthCare
• Mathematician, Pentagon
• Systems engineer EDS
• Senior Actuarial Assistant, USF&G Insurance Co.
• Cartographer, Defense Mapping Agency
• Special Agent, Federal Bureau of Investigation
• Credit Analyst, Maryland Bank Statistician, National Agricultural Statistics Service
• NASA-Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD
• Vice President, Dean Witter Reynolds Chief, Computer Science Division, Department of Defense (NSA)
• Director of Financial Planning, Denny's Restaurants
• Senior Computer Programmer, National Geographic Society
• Senior Accountant, Homewood Hospital Center
• Assistant Circulation Director, Kiplinger's Personal Finance Magazine
• Vice President IIT Research Institute
• Programming Analyist, Datatel Corporation