The mathematics department is located on the second floor of E-Wing of the Sharvy G. Umbeck Science and Mathematics Center. We share the second floor of E-Wing with the Advancement Office and the Computer Science Department.
The entrance to "SMAC"
photo by Joel Van Laven (Class of 1996)
Mathematics faculty offices are all located within a few steps of each other in E-Wing. Interspersed with these offices are a secretary's office and a conference room which is shared with the Computer Science department and open to all students when not in use. Faculty mailboxes are located outside of the secretary's office. Our office area also houses two small computing laboratories. In room E-220 there are four Pentium 4 systems running Windows XP. In room E-206 there are four Linux systems (running Fedora Core 4) and two additional Windows systems. These computing labs are available for all students. We encourage students having difficulty with Mathematica to work on these systems and ask faculty for help when needed. A student office with both Windows and Linux computer systems is available in SMC E-208. If you are working on a research project and would like office space in SMC, please talk to Professor Armon, Chair of the Mathematics Department.
The Math and Computer Science conference room houses a small reference library of mathematics materials. These books are mostly cast-offs from faculty collections, but they may be useful for research projects or as alternative resources for class. The college's collection of mathematics books is located in the Science and Mathematics library, just down the hall from the mathematics department. The department enjoys an endowed fund for making library acquisitions, and library holdings are quite extensive. (When browsing books, don't forget the Dewey decimal collection located on the second floor of the science library!) These holdings can be searched online from the Knox College Library web site. Here are some online resources thay may also be useful for mathematics work:
In addition, a Google search will generally turn up countless sites related to mathematics. We've also gathered a short list of some useful mathematics-related sites on a separate page. This page contains numerous pointers to further collections of mathematics-related links.
Computer technology has altered the shape of mathematics in a fundamental way. 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional computer graphing programs have made it much easier to visualize mathematical concepts, and the numerical capabilities of computers have made computations much easier to perform. Most students have made use of graphing calculators in their mathematics courses, but sophisticated software packages known as Computer Algebra Systems (CAS's) have also made it possible for computers to perform even non-numerical computations like those encountered in calculus. The Knox mathematics department has made a commitment to incorporating the CAS Mathematica throughout the mathematics curriculum.
A Basic Mathematica Session
Most introductory and many advanced mathematics courses make use of Mathematica in some way, and mathematics majors are expected to be proficient in the use of Mathematica. To facilitate this use of Mathematica, the college has purchased a site license for Mathematica. Consequently, Mathematica is available in every computing laboratory on campus, and this license allows any computer on campus--including any student-owned computer --to run Mathematica. Click here for more information.
A fully-functional student version of Mathematica may be purchased from Wolfram Research, Inc, the producers of Mathematica. While students will not need their own copy of Mathematica when they are on campus, the student version is quite cheap compared to the standard version of Mathematica and is available only to students with a valid student ID. See the Wolfram Research web site for details.
The primary computer server for the Mathematics Department is a Dell PowerEdge 2650 rack-mounted server called leibniz. Leibniz is a dual processor 2.8Ghz Intel Xeon system with two gigabytes of memory and 100GB of RAID 5 disk space. Our server is shared with and jointly administered by the Computer Science department, and currently runs the Fedora Core version of Linux. Most students know leibniz simply as the "Math/CS SAMBA server" on the Knox network, where electronic class notes are stored and electronic homework is submitted. But the server also performs Mathematica kernel computations for all systems on campus.
Since technology is an important part of how mathematics is taught at Knox, computers and data projectors are available in all classrooms. The department also makes use of two teaching laboratories located in the basement of E-wing. The Stellyes lab houses 25 Windows XP systems and is available to all students on campus. The Caterpillar classroom houses 21 Linux systems running Fedora Core. The Linux systems are jointly administered with the Computer Science department. They are available to everyone on campus, but are used primarily by mathematics and computer science students. Both labs are open daily and are staffed by a student assistant throughout the day.
Professor Leahy and Professor Schneider were awarded an NSF grant to develop education material for introducing distributed computation to mathematics and science students. As a part of this grant, the Caterpillar classroom also doubles as a platform for performng distributed computations.