2000 Teaching and Service Awards
21 June 2000
Dear Colleagues,
I am pleased to announce that this year's Teaching and Service Awards go to Frank Carroll and Dan Shapiro.
During the period 1983 to 1997 Frank Carroll served as Director of Upper Division Studies. In that capacity he began the Math Advising service in Summer Orientation and wrote the familiar "How to Teach Math XYZ" booklets which have served as a form of institutional memory in our basic service courses. Over the years Frank has worked closely with the Math Counselors Office, especially Judy Berenstein and Judie Monson, supporting them with faculty input and authority. He has frequently served in the capacity of "village elder" whenever the call arose at short notice from some quarter the university seeking a knowledgeable representative of the Mathematics Department.
Frank developed a handful of graduate courses, including the 650 sequence in analysis, and has served continuously on the Analysis Qualifying Exam committee. More recently he has taught the Math 140-141 sequence, Calculus with Review, where he introduced gateway testing. The Department and the Mathematics and Statistics Learning Center have learned a great deal from his experience with the mechanics of repeatable skills tests.
By the way, Frank currently holds the five year Departmental record for service as Graduate School representative on final oral exams!
Over the years, Frank has given willingly and generously of his time to support undergraduates at Ohio State, especially those studying and majoring in mathematics. To illustrate the point consider that in recent years alone he has recruited undergraduate students to OSU on trips around the state and participated in recruitment efforts such as the University Scholars Calling Project, the Maximus Competition and Parents Weekend festivities. Frank has also been generous with his time once these students arrive on campus. He visited the Honors dorms, advised undergraduate majors (numbering, at times, in the double digits) and organized the Undergraduate Recognition Ceremony held each spring in conjunction with Math Awareness Month. A decade ago he revived the Math Club, serving as its faculty advisor for many years, and he has also been faculty advisor to the Pi Mu Epsilon Mathematics Honor Society and the local MAA Student Chapter. A list like this could could go on; suffice it to say that Frank has made a positive impact on the lives of generations of undergraduates. Above all, Frank's work in the Department is characterized by love of mathematics, a cheery optimism for the project at hand and kind regard for his students.
For many years and in several capacities, Dan Shapiro has contributed greatly to the Ross Young Scholars program.
This Program, now in its 44th year, is an intense summer mathematics experience for gifted high school students from across the country. Each year a new class of students arrives in Columbus for eight weeks of deep immersion in mathematics taught by the discovery methods pioneered by E. H. Moore. The students spend most of their waking hours working on a series of carefully constructed problem sets. By exploring properties of integers they invent their own proofs, discover what axioms are needed, make conjectures based on the patterns they observe, and talk everything over with their colleagues and counselors. A similar style of course based on combinatorics is offered to the second year students, while the topics for the advanced courses vary from year to year. These efforts are coordinated in the dormitories by the counselors who, typically, are undergraduate mathematics majors and alumni of the program. Professor Arnold Ross has guided the program since its inception at Notre Dame in 1957 as a teacher training program. Since 1979 he has been aided by Gloria Woods and subsequently by Dan Shapiro.
Dan was a student in the program in 1966 and a counselor from 1967 to 1970 while an undergraduate at Harvard. Dan returned to the program in 1985, teaching a geometry course for the counselors. He has been actively involved ever since, often teaching number theory recitations for Dr. Ross's daily lectures. Many faculty members in our Department have taught a variety of courses to the young students in the Ross Program.
In the past decade Dan developed and taught several advanced courses in the program including knot theory, group representation theory, algebraic number theory, and p-adic analysis. A turning point in his involvement came in the early 90s when he began to help Prof. Ross write funding proposals to the NSF and the NSA. Since then Dan has been increasingly involved in fundraising, recruitment, and administration of the program. He organized the "90th Birthday Conference" at OSU, as reported in the AMS Notices for October 1996. Since that year, when the NSF eliminated funding for all gifted student programs, Dan has been particularly involved in funding issues. That reunion provided many contacts with alumni of the program, leading to increased fundraising from the private sector. After various friends of the Ross Program made some initial contacts with potential donors, Dan has followed through on those possibilities, corresponding with development officers and writing formal grant proposals. So far the program has secured development gifts from the Oracle Corporation and the Clay Mathematics Institute. Dan has also been instrumental in developing a relationship with the IAS/Park City Math Institute, with the result that next year the Ross Program will serve as a satellite site in their high school teacher training program.
For more than four decades, the Ross Program has contributed uniquely to the education of the country's brilliant youngsters. Through its huge network of successful alumni and friends, the program contributes significantly to the reputation of The Ohio State University within the mathematics community. While the Ross Program itself lasts only eight weeks each summer, its administration is a year-round affair to which Dan has given generously of his time and energy.
Best wishes,
Peter