Future Students

Sunspot scientist came close to flying on orbital mission

Las Cruses Bulletin
Las Cruses, Nm., United States
July 22, 2011

Emily Bergl ’97 may be Hollywood’s most famous Grinnellian actor of her generation. Perhaps best known as Annie O’Donnell in the television show Men in Trees, Beth Young in Desperate Housewives, and Tammy Bryant in the drama series Southland, she’s also acted in movies and on stage and made guest appearances on many popular TV series.

A myth in the outside world is that “nothing happens on campus in the summer.” So to dispel that myth, we’ve shown below a nominal sampling of scholarly activity taking place during the lazy, hazy days in Grinnell.

All Over the Campus: MAPs

From Noyce to Burling, Steiner to Mears, Mentored Advanced Projects are all over the campus map this summer. Here are a few examples of the works in progress that incorporate student learning with faculty development and scholarship:

Professor Christopher French cowrote an article, "Hankel Transforms of Linear Combinations of Catalan Numbers" with math majors Michael Dougherty, Benjamin Saderholm, and Wenyang Qian, all math majors in the class of 2012. The article appeared on April 20 in the Journal of Integer Sequences, Vol. 14 (2011), Article 11.5.1. In this paper, the authors consider the result of applying a certain operation called the Hankel Transform to certain sequences of numbers obtained in a natural way from the famous Catalan number sequence.

The Grinnell College Putnam team placed 46th out of 546 teams from across the U.S. and Canada. The annual exam took place in December with 16 Grinnell students among the 4296 students who took the exam. Grinnell College had four students score at least a 20:

• 448 Enrolling Students
• 108 Varsity Captains
• 45 International Students
• 86 First Generation College Students
• 115 Students of Color
• 293 With Community Service
• 42 With Research Experience

Grinnell's Class of 2015 also includes:

New Faces

Biva Rajbhandari '12, Reference Assistant

Nathan Clubb '10, Evening Circulation Supervisor, Burling Library

February 19, 2011, Grinnell will send a team of competitors to Iowa State University (Ames) for the Iowa Collegiate Mathematics Competition. Do you enjoy working on math problems with other people? There are no specific math prerequisites. Our team will be organized by David Romano; contact him by February 8 to participate. Contact him for more information about the contest or visit http://www.central.edu/maa/contest/