Congrats to Dr. Hanlon -- The New President of Dartmouth

Several Ivy League universities have been searching for Presidents this year and Dartmouth just announced that its 18th President will be a Dartmouth alum, Dr. Philip J. Hanlon, who graduated from Dartmouth in 1977 and then went on to get a PhD at CalTech.


But what I find especially exciting is that he is a mathematician and, as Provost of the University of Michigan, has been teaching freshman calculus! He hopes to also teach some math courses as President of Dartmouth, which is terrific and time will tell, and his schedule, whether he will be able to pull this off.

Plus, his PhD advisor at CalTech was a female, Dr. Olga Taussky-Todd, as you can see from his cv!

The New York Times has a nice photo and article on Dr. Hanlon.

I remember taking calculus for two semesters as a freshman at Brown University and I was taught by Professor Joseph LaSalle, who was one of the founders of dynamical systems. I would regularly visit him during his office hours to chat and together we would model how his coffee would get cold, among other problems. I'll never forget having one of the most famous applied mathematicians of his time teaching me calculus and I hope that it was worth it since I ended up getting a PhD in Applied Math from Brown and my love of math modeling and computing is in part due to my great freshman calculus teacher.

Coincidentally, I used one of Taussky-Todd's theorems in my PhD dissertation since I needed one of her results to prove some of my theorems!

I wish Dr. Hanlon much luck in his new position. Dartmouth has made a terrific choice.

The suspense continues, though. I wonder who will be the next President of Princeton University?

Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) Meeting at MITRE

After teaching my undergraduate class in Transportation & Logistics this past Wednesday, I was picked up by Dr. Kevin Fu of the CS Department at UMass Amherst (who also taught his undergrad class that morning) and we headed to the Institute for Information Infrastructure Protection (I3P) meeting that was taking place at MITRE in Bedford, MA.

I3P is a consortium of academic institutions, government labs, and nonprofit organizations that focuses on information infrastructure protection. This consortium is led by Dartmouth College. Its new Research Director, Dr. Shari Pfleeger, formerly of Rand, assumed this position on September 1, 2010. She is terrific and very knowledgeable and dynamic.

UMass Amherst is a member and Dr. Fu is the rep from UMass while I have been appointed the alternate. The member map is available here. The talks and brainstorming sessions were terrific over the past two days as were the many conversations that took place during the breaks and at the dinner Wednesday night at the Bamboo restaurant (simply magnificent).

I personally very much enjoyed meeting with consortium members from the University of Idaho, the Idaho National Laboratory, Indiana University, the University of Tulsa, Carnegie Mellon University, the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, SRI International, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, and MITRE. When you get a group of very engaged and smart researchers together, the intellectual discussions are very rewarding and exciting. Also, one can't beat face -to-face communications.

You can find more information on the I3P here.

I was pleased to see my research on transportation, the Braess paradox, and the wisdom of crowds featured in the September 2010 issue of I3P Researchers in the News.