Colby College Mathematics

Tenure-track assistant professor position beginning July 1, 2025.

The Colby College Department of Mathematics seeks an exceptional teacher with a dynamic research program in any area of pure mathematics complementing current research strengths of the department. The teaching responsibility is an average of 4.5 courses per year. Candidates must have a Ph.D. in mathematics and must have at least one year of postdoctoral experience with very substantial teaching and research components. Applications must include evidence of a strong continuing research program as well as of exceptional teaching and mentoring of undergraduates from diverse demographics.

To apply, please provide a cover letter, curriculum vitae, statements on teaching and research, official summary sheets from all course evaluations received since 2022, and recent research publications or preprints representative of your scholarship. Please arrange for at least four letters of recommendation to be submitted directly by the recommenders, at least two of which should focus on your teaching and mentoring experience. The cover letter should address your vision of mathematics in a liberal arts context, should highlight your experience teaching and mentoring students from diverse demographics, and should address specific reasons why you have made Colby your choice. The research statement should be aimed at mathematics faculty who are not necessarily in your area of specialization. All materials should be submitted online at https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/list/24907. Review of applications will begin on October 20, 2024 and will continue until the position is filled.

Colby is a highly selective college of approximately 2300 students located in central Maine. The college, situated one hour north of Portland, and three hours north of Boston, enjoys easy access to the spectacular outdoors, as well as to various recreational and cultural activities. The College provides significant support for both teaching and research. For more information about the position and the department, visit colby.edu/math.

Colby is a private, coeducational liberal arts college that admits students and makes personnel decisions on the basis of the individual’s qualifications to contribute to Colby’s educational objectives and institutional needs. The principle of not discriminating on the basis of race, color, age, s*x, s*xual orientation, gender identity or expression, religion, caste, national or ethnic origin, marital status, genetic information, political beliefs, veteran or military status, parental status, pregnancy, childbirth or related medical conditions, physical or mental disability unrelated to the job or course of study requirements is consistent with the mission of a liberal arts college and the law.

Mathematics Colloquium

Fatou Sanogo, Bates College
Tensor and its applications

Advances in modern computer technology has increased the number of available information which has given rise to the presence of multidimensional data. A tensor is a multidimensional array it also can be seen as a multidimensional matrix. In today’s world tensor decomposition faces some major challenges such as sensitivity to outliers and missing data.

In this talk I will introduce a tensor (matrix) completion algorithm using the CP decomposition and tensor (matrix) denoising. The tensor (matrix) completion problem is about finding the unknown tensor (matrix) from a given a tensor (matrix) with partially observed data. I will show some examples on how this algorithm is used for video or image completion and as recommendation systems.

Monday, April 17, 4:00 pm, Davis 201
Refreshments at 3:30 pm, Davis 2nd floor

Mathematics Colloquium
Patricia Cahn, Smith College
Wallpaper Patterns and the Shape of Space

Monday, March 27, 4:00 pm, Davis 301
Refreshments at 3:30 pm, Davis 2nd floor

Wallpaper patterns are infinite patterns in the plane. It turns out that we can classify them using tools from topology, a field like geometry, but where shapes can stretch and bend.
We’ll practice learning to instantly recognize these patterns (a fun party trick). If time permits, we’ll see how similar ideas can help us understand different three-dimensional spaces–think possible shapes of the universe.

Mathematics Colloquium
Friday, February 25, 2022
4:00 pm, Davis 301
Refreshments at 3:30 pm on Davis second floor

Sarah Brauner
University of Minnesota
Card shuffling and a strange type of multiplication

How many times do you need to shuffle a deck of cards to ensure it is adequately mixed?
In this talk, I will describe a framework to answer this question by introducing a strange type of multiplication on words. Beyond probabilistic motivations, this product structure has many interesting connections to combinatorics and representation theory. This is joint work with Patty Commins and Vic Reiner.

Mathematics Department Colloquium
Friday, October 12, 2021
3:30pm, Davis 201
Refreshments at 4:30pm, Davis second floor

Professor Ben Mathes, Colby College
Visual Taylor Series

Professor Mathes will describe what the foundation of a second Calculus course might look like in a parallel universe.

The talk should be accessible to students in a first Calculus course.

Mathematics Department Colloquium

Noha Abdelghany, Colby College
The Riddle of Projective Planes
Friday, November 5, 2021, 3:30 PM, Davis 201
Refreshments at 4:30 PM, Davis Second Floor

A projective plane is an enlargement of the usual plane where parallel lines intersect. Some projective planes are finite, having only finitely many points and lines. Finite projective planes, which are interesting on their own right, find uses in many areas; such as designing experiments in statistics, as well as answering some game questions like how many different types of solutions to Sudoku! Constructing projective planes with different orders can be very mysterious and challenging. We will talk about the journey of solving the riddle of projective planes of small order, and learn about the still-unsolved riddle of larger projective planes.

MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT COLLOQUIUM

Amzi Jeffs, Carnegie Mellon
Realizing Convex Codes in d-Dimensional Space
Friday, October 29, 3:30 PM, Davis 201
Refreshments at 4:30, Davis second floor

Every collection of sets in R^d divides space up into a number of regions, with each region labeled by the sets that contain it (think of a Venn diagram in R^2, for example). Motivated by neuroscientific phenomena, Curto, Itskov, Veliz-Cuba, and Youngs posed the following question in 2013: Which collections of labels can arise in R^d from collections of convex open sets? A complete answer has remained elusive, but this question has motivated a great deal of interesting combinatorics and geometry. We will discuss some recent progress on this question and the geometric ingredients that make this progress possible.

Friday, September 17, 2021
3:30 pm, Davis 201

The mathematics colloquium returns! After a hiatus for obvious reasons, we’re glad to be talking math again. Our first speaker is Professor Fernando Gouvea who will give a talk on just how fruitful mathematical mistakes can be. After the talk, we’ll get together for good pizza and great desserts on the lawn outside Davis (weather permitting). Please join us to meet old and new friends. It’s time to rebuild our mathematical community! The schedule can be found at Colby.edu/math and talks are in Davis 201.

**It's often said that in mathematics things are either correct or incorrect. That is true, but it still happens quite often that even a bad mistake hides inside it an important idea. Kurt Hensel was particularly talented at making interesting mistakes. This talk introduces Hensel and some of his mathematical life, then focuses on a spectacular mistake he made in 1905 and what eventually came of it.**

www.colby.edu

Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium
Friday, May 7, 3:30 pm Eastern Time
Ayomikun Adeniran
Pomona College

Meeting ID: 950 4995 9347
Passcode: 191359

https://colby.zoom.us/j/95049959347?pwd=c0w5c0xRV1BTakFSS3dhWXdjUjl5UT09

Parking Cars on a One-way Street

The classical parking problem asks for all sequences of length n that allow n cars to park on a one-way street without any of the cars having to exit the street. It is well known that parking functions are the unique solution to this problem. Parking functions first arose from the concept of storage in computer science and are very central in enumerative and algebraic combinatorics. In this talk, we will look at some recent variations and generalizations of the parking problem, and highlight some recent results in this regard.

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Please join us for our Jan Holly Celebration Colloquium
April 30, 2021, 3:30 PM
Meeting ID: 921 0930 3391
Passcode: 793844
https://colby.zoom.us/j/92109303391?pwd=MnErRkZ2ZlRxTFpnYm1KTXlNRHU4dz09

We will be joined by three of Jan’s research students who will speak about their current work.

Sarah Harmon ’12 received her Ph.D. at UCSC, where she studied computational storytelling and expressive intelligence. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Bowdoin College, where she directs the Computational Creativity Lab.

Michael MacNicoll ’09 is an ocean engineer for Kelson Marine Co. in Scarborough, ME. After graduating from Colby with a double major in mathematical science and physics, Michael received a Master of Civil Engineering degree in 2013 from the University of Maine, with an emphasis on ocean engineering and renewable energy. At Kelson, Michael conducts cutting edge research and supports commercial projects in ocean energy and aquaculture. He uses engineering analysis, advanced design methods, software development and programming to help solve challenges associated with producing food and energy from the ocean.

Arjumand Masood ’13 equipped with a math and physics degree from Colby (and research experience in Prof. Holly’s lab) in 2013, Arjumand went on to pursue a PhD in Applied Mathematics at Harvard where he focused on Machine Learning. He currently works as a data science consultant at the Boston Consulting Group.

During his PhD, he worked primarily on understanding the presence of meaningfully diverse optima in the solution space of machine learning problems and designed algorithms to discover a representative solution set of that diversity. Algorithms investigated include matrix factorization (unsupervised learning) and policy gradient methods (reinforcement learning), with applications in decision support systems for healthcare.

In the data science consulting space, he currently engages with a broader class of modeling techniques. His goal is to understand business problems, identify and apply appropriate algorithms to solve them, and convert modeling solutions to actionable business decisions. Arjumand has worked in Biopharma Ops, Agribusiness sustainability initiatives, and Covid

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, confer...

We are excited to announce the guests for our 2021 Mathematics and Statistics Alumni Panel
Thursday, April 1, 7:00-8:00 PM
Zoom Meeting ID 984 9845 0567 Security Passcode 974333
https://colby.zoom.us/j/98498450567?pwd=TXRXU2pDNzU1aHg2R2xrWE1odDNIUT09O

Our guest panel includes:
Pratap Lutiel, Colby ’14, alarm.com
Joerose Tharakan ’08, Microsoft Corporation
Dan Medici ’19, United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia
Dr. Hanna Gerlovin ’08, US Department of Veteran Affairs
Malia Kawamura ’14, Raytheon Technologies

Scott Taylor will ask a couple questions about their time as a math/stats student at Colby and how their education has influenced their life or career since then. He will then open it up to questions from those in attendance.We hope you can join us.

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, confer...

Surveying Voters on Election Day:
How Exit Polls Are Conducted and Used by the Media

Dan Merkle, NBC News

Virtual Mathematics and Statistics Colloquium
Friday, March 12, 3:30 pmhttps://colby.zoom.us/j/93518592504?pwd=aXBGbHZObm5URkJLaXlTTThmNHBWZz09

Exit polls play an important role in the media’s coverage of elections by providing accurate and timely data that help us report on the two main stories of any election: Who won, and what does it mean? My presentation will start with a brief history of exit polling and an overview of how exit polls are used on election night. Then I will discuss methodological issues in exit polling including sampling, questionnaire design, noncoverage, nonresponse and weighting. I will conclude by discussing the challenges posed by COVID-19 and changes made to the exit polling procedure for the 2020 election.

Bio: Dan Merkle is Executive Director of Elections at ABC News where he is in charge of the Decision Desk, election data and projections. At ABC News, he’s also responsible for setting and enforcing survey reporting standards for the news division and vetting surveys and social science studies to determine if they are reportable. Dan also oversees the ABC News/Ipsos polling partnership which conducts online polling using the probability-based Knowledge Panel. Dan has been elected to the Executive Council of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR) five times. He’s currently AAPOR’s President and previously has served as Secretary/Treasurer, Counselor-at-Large, Conference Chair, and Communications Chair. Dan is the author of over 60 conference papers, journal articles and book chapters on survey methodology and public opinion. He earned his M.A. and Ph.D. in Communication Research from Northwestern University.

Join our Cloud HD Video Meeting Zoom is the leader in modern enterprise video communications, with an easy, reliable cloud platform for video and audio conferencing, chat, and webinars across mobile, desktop, and room systems. Zoom Rooms is the original software-based conference room solution used around the world in board, confer...