Finding Meaning in Calculus (and Life)

A 2015 publication of the Mathematical Association of America (Insights and Recommendations from the MAA National Study of College Calculus) noted that students taking college calculus exhibited a reduction in positive attitude toward mathematics, which can affect their career aspir

Painting Women

This original analysis of the representation and self-representation of women in literature and visual arts revolves around multiple early modern senses of "painting": the creation of visual art in the form of paint on canvas and the use of cosmetics to paint women's bodies. Situating her study in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Italy, France, and England, Patricia Phillippy brings together three distinct actors: women who paint themselves with cosmetics, women who paint on canvas, and women and men who paint women—either with pigment or with words. Phillippy asserts that early modern attitudes toward painting, cosmetics, and poetry emerge from and respond to a common cultural history. Materially, she connects those who created images of women with pigment to those who applied cosmetics to their own bodies through similar mediums, tools, techniques, and exposure to toxic materials. Discursively, she illuminates historical and social issues such as gender and morality with the nexus of painting, painted women, and women painters.Teasing out the intricate relationships between these activities as carried out by women and their visual and literary representation by women and by men, Phillippy aims to reveal the delineation and transgression of women's creative roles, both artistic and biological. In Painting Women, Phillippy provides a cross-disciplinary study of women as objects and agents of painting

The Stella Stories

The first three sections of a longer work

Faith Integration Projects for First-year Students

This talk will consider the use of projects to motivate students to think deeply about how their faith connects with mathematics. This talk will begin by describing what a faith integration project is, including the goals and objectives of such a project. The talk will briefly describe a number of projects written by the speaker, with a more detailed look at one of those projects. The talk will conclude by discussing how these projects are being used to assess how students are doing at articulating a maturing understanding of the connection between faith and mathematic

Integration of Faith, Learning, and Christian Vocation with First-Year Mathematics Majors

The mission of Messiah College is to educate men and women toward maturity of intellect, character, and Christian faith, in preparation for lives of service, leadership and reconciliation in church and society . Therefore, as faculty in the Mathematical Sciences Department at this college, how we build maturity in our students, not only a mature mathematical intellect, but also maturity of character and Christian faith, reflects our commitment to the mission of the College. Further, our departmental mission statement includes the objective to challenge students to live out their faith in their vocation as they become servant leaders in society, church, and the world . While all of us in the department agree that our students should be challenged to live out their faith in their vocation, we realize that to include this objective in our mission statement, and to assess our effectiveness in accomplishing the objective, means much more than references to faith in class devotionals or personal interaction with students. We believe that in order for our students to think seriously about their faith and vocation in the context of mathematics, they must discuss these issues, and think and write about them, throughout their college years, as an integral part of the curriculum of their major. Our goal in this paper is to describe a text we are writing that is intended to help firstyear mathematics majors learn about Christian integration and vocation as they develop broad, mature mathematical thinking skills. We intend in future years to expand this text to address related issues from a perspective appropriate to the more mature student

Whole-genome sequence analysis for pathogen detection and diagnostics

This dissertation focuses on computational methods for improving the accuracy of commonly used nucleic acid tests for pathogen detection and diagnostics. Three specific biomolecular techniques are addressed: polymerase chain reaction, microarray comparative genomic hybridization, and whole-genome sequencing. These methods are potentially the future of diagnostics, but each requires sophisticated computational design or analysis to operate effectively. This dissertation presents novel computational methods that unlock the potential of these diagnostics by efficiently analyzing whole-genome DNA sequences. Improvements in the accuracy and resolution of each of these diagnostic tests promises more effective diagnosis of illness and rapid detection of pathogens in the environment. For designing real-time detection assays, an efficient data structure and search algorithm are presented to identify the most distinguishing sequences of a pathogen that are absent from all other sequenced genomes. Results are presented that show these "signature" sequences can be used to detect pathogens in complex samples and differentiate them from their non-pathogenic, phylogenetic near neighbors. For microarray, novel pan-genomic design and analysis methods are presented for the characterization of unknown microbial isolates. To demonstrate the effectiveness of these methods, pan-genomic arrays are applied to the study of multiple strains of the foodborne pathogen, Listeria monocytogenes, revealing new insights into the diversity and evolution of the species. Finally, multiple methods are presented for the validation of whole-genome sequence assemblies, which are capable of identifying assembly errors in even finished genomes. These validated assemblies provide the ultimate nucleic acid diagnostic, revealing the entire sequence of a genome

The Study of Mathematics: A Text from a Christian Perspective

This paper examines the integration of the Christian faith with the teaching of mathematical texts using the author’s textbook, The Study of Mathematics: Developing a mature understanding of mathematical thought, with consideration of Christian faith and vocation

Genome assembly forensics: finding the elusive mis-assembly

A collection of software tools is combined for the first time in an automated pipeline for detecting large-scale genome assembly errors and for validating genome assemblies