All posts by admin

IMG_2227 copy

Chyba Wins Section Teaching Award

Monique Chyba won the 2023 MAA Golden Section’s Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics Award. The award was presented at the 2023 Golden Section Meeting held at Santa Rosa Junior College, on February 25, 2023.

Since joining the faculty at Mānoa in 2002, Dr. Monique Chyba’s classroom instruction, place-based pedagogy, student mentoring,
and community outreach initiatives have impressed her students and colleagues.

“She not only shines individually through her clear and engaging style but also has worked to make substantive changes in the teaching infrastructure at the University of Hawai‘i. Her teaching often extends beyond the classroom through community engagement…(and) in using placebased knowledge to reform the quantitative reasoning curriculum.” — A colleague of Prof. Chyba

Full story

Past MAA teaching awards for our department members:

PXL_20240220_232420845.MP~2

Escape response of copepods

Chelsea Nguyen (math major and Honors student) has been pursuing undergraduate research under the guidance of Daisuke Takagi.
Last week she presented a poster at the Ocean Science Meeting, the flagship conference for ocean science that brings together a diverse group of scientists, engineers and mathematicians working on anything ocean related. Above we see her presenting the poster.
Chelsea received UROP funding for this project.
UROP is currently accepting applications for project funding; the deadline is March 3.
20240226_140856

Challenging computability

Cooperating faculty member Dusko Pavlovic published a book in 2023 in Springer’s Theory and Applications of Computability series:

Programs as diagrams: From Categorical Computability to Computable Categories

In 2024, Bjørn Kjos-Hanssen‘s book

Automatic Complexity: A computable measure of irregularity

was published by De Gruyter.

The books challenge computability theory in different yet similar ways:

  • Programs as diagrams argues that Turing machines can be replaced by category-theoretical diagrams for a more natural understanding of computability.
  • Automatic complexity advocates replacing Turing machines by finite automata in the definition of Kolmogorov complexity, thus obtaining a computable notion that is “visual” in an analogous way to Pavlovic’s diagrams.