Dr. Anthony Weston is currently on sabbatical. New Mathematical Topographies will resume in Fall 2008 pending refunding.
New Mathematical Topographies (NMT) is an experimental teaching initiative that is funded by the John R. Oishei Foundation and supported by the infrastructure of Canisius College through its program of Peter Canisius distinguished professorships.
The goal of NMT is to bring undergraduates in the Western New York area into direct —profound— contact with some recent, and important, research advances in the mathematical sciences. This goal will be implemented through a series of atypical one-week courses that will be taught at Canisius College by eminent visiting researchers. Each visiting scholar will, moreover, give a Public Lecture while at Canisius College - this with the intention of bringing the science to as wide of an audience as possible! There will be three one-week courses offered per semester throughout the period Fall 2003 to Spring 2006, and each such course may be taken as a one-credit hour (upper division) mathematics elective. Each one week course will comprise fifteen hours of lectures, recitations and laboratory work. Assessment of the one-week courses will generally be based on essays, homework problems, and culminating research projects. The program of one-week courses is intended to be highly interdisciplinary and the courses given during any one particular semester will be linked together by a theme. The themes will be Applied Mathematics, Mathematical Biology, Pure Mathematics, Mathematical Physics, Philosophy, and Theoretical Computer Science.
This clustering of the one-week courses by theme is intended to reach out to students in a variety of majors, not just mathematics. NMT is very interested in highlighting the applicability of mathematical methods and ideas to a broad swath of contemporary fields of academic endeavor.
The list of visiting scholars will include David Blecher (University of Houston), John Burns (Virginia Tech), Manuel De Landa (Columbia University), Clio Cresswell (University of New South Wales), Ian Doust (University of New South Wales), Per Enflo (Kent State University),Willem Fouché (University of South Africa), Elizabeth Grosz (Rutgers University), Robert E. Kass (Carnegie Mellon University), Toshikaze Natsume (Nagoya Institute of Technology), Jorg Peters (University of Florida), Petrus Potgieter (University of South Africa), Sarada Rajeev (University of Rochester), Sangeeta Singh (Norwegian School of Business Management), Meera Sitharam (University of Florida), Alan Taylor (Union College), Valerie Ventura (Carnegie Mellon University), and Fred Watson (Anglo Australian Observatory).
The twisted cubes that appear throughout this site (top right) are loaned to us by courtesy of Dr. Jorg Peters, the director of SurfLab at the University of Florida. The stormy photograph (above central) was taken by Gordon Garrad at Siding Springs Observatory (in Australia) and retouched by Molly Jarboe, NMT's photographer in residence. - Anthony (Sam) Weston