Greetings to all friends and alumni of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMD. As always, the past year has been a busy one for our department. Our 31 faculty continue to set the bar for high quality instruction in our classes, and continue to make significant contributions to research and scholarship. The department teaches about 9% of the student credit hours at UMD. We offer 31 different classes in 70 sections. We provide the mathematical and statistical education, especially for all students in the Swenson College of Science and Engineering. In 2016-17, we graduated 35 math majors, and 35 statistics majors. Twenty of them were double majors. We also graduated 12 students from our master’s program. Our graduate program has been renamed from Applied and Computational Mathematics to Mathematical Sciences, acknowledging the strong role that statistics plays in our program. We also formally added a statistics “track” for our master’s students who choose to study statistics. Our Statistics Minor, developed by faculty last year, is now officially available as of Fall 2018. We added a course in The Theory of Interest. This course is useful for many students across UMD, and especially useful for students who are studying to take “Exam F” in the actuarial exam series.
See articles in our news feed about two faculty members who recently received college teaching awards. They join a long list of department faculty awarded for their teaching. Other articles highlight a summer math preparation program for underrepresented students, a conference organized and run by UMD faculty and students, and news from faculty and alumni.
Best to all for a productive and fulfilling year.
-Bruce Peckham, Department Head