The
Integral
Department of Mathematical Sciences
January 2015
Volume 3/Issue 2
From the Department Chair
Greetings! I hope all of
you had a wonderful holiday
season.
It is with great sadness
that I report that Dale
Umbach passed away on
August 29, 2014. Dale was a
member our department
since 1979, serving as a cornerstone for our
statistics program and as department chair
person. In addition to being an excellent
scholar, Dale was a mentor and friend to faculty
and students alike. He helped make our
department a place of “peace and welcome.” A
departmental scholarship has been established
in memory of Dale. Contributions should be sent
to: Ball State University Foundation, P.O. Box
672, Muncie, IN 47308. Checks should be made
out to Ball State University Foundation. On the
check memo line, please write ``In memory of
Dale Umbach #5569." More information about
Dale, and a wonderful photo of him, can be
found in the Daily News article http://
www.ballstatedaily.com/article/2014/09/
remembering-dale-umbach.
We congratulate Gary Dean on receiving
the 2014 Matthew Rodermund Service Award
from the Casualty Actuarial Society (CAS). The
award is intended to recognize CAS members
who have made significant volunteer
contributions to the actuarial profession over the
course of a career. More information on Gary’s
award may be found at http://www.casact.org/
community/volunteer/index.cfm?fa=roder
We are delighted to have Roza Aceska,
Dusty Grundmeier, and Dan Rutherford with
us this fall. All are new tenure-line mathematics
faculty members. We also welcome new
contract faculty members Patrick Eggleton and
Jeff Hiatt. They will all introduce themselves in
this issue. We are also conducting searches this
year for new tenure-line faculty members in
actuarial science, mathematics education, and
statistics. If these searches are successful we
will have hired seven new tenure-line faculty
members in the course of three years. We all
have high hopes that these faculty members,
and the students they mentor, will lift our
department and discipline to higher levels of
excellence.
Jon Ekman and Patty Parkison, both
longtime contract faculty members in our
department, have retired. (Jon in May 2014 and
Patty in December 2014.) We wish them the
best in retirement.
The faculty love to hear from our alumni,
and we know that you do, too. In this issue we
are pleased to feature submissions from two
1960’s alumni, Alan Huckleberry and Charles
McConnell. If you have any news you would like
to share in an upcoming newsletter, please send
me an email. In the meantime, I wish you well.
Sincerely,
John Lorch
Chairperson
jlorch@bsu.edu
Inside this issue:
 New Faculty p 2 & 3
 Where Are They Now? P 4 & 7
 Faculty & Student Publications p 5
 Retirement News p 5
 Faculty News p 6
New Faculty
Roza Aceska completed her
master’s degree in mathematics
from State University in
Macedonia where she held a
docent position in 2010-2012.
She earned her PhD at the
University of Vienna in 2009.
Roza is interested in topics at the
intersection of time-frequency analysis and
sampling theory. She has expertise on the
analysis and reconstruction of sound-like
functions and collaborated with the Numerical
Harmonic Analysis Group and the Acoustics
Research Institute in Vienna. She likes that her
formulas have practical importance and deliver
better sound quality not only for hearing aids,
but also for mobile phones and MP3 players.
Roza previously held a temporary
position at Vanderbilt University. Her team
introduced a sampling technique that provides
perfect reconstruction when using significantly
less than a minimal number of sensors.
She finds teaching mathematics to be
joyful and rewarding. She is excited to work
with students who are energetic and gifted for
mathematics. Having lived in two music cities,
Vienna and Nashville, Roza developed an ear
for music and enjoys the concerts of the
Muncie Symphony Orchestra and the School
of Music.
Most recently he taught in a school for
missionary children in Papua New Guinea
where he taught all levels of mathematics from
grade 2 through calculus. He also provided
administrative support for the elementary
school in Papua New Guinea.
Patrick has published a number of
articles in mathematics education journals. He
has also presented at regional, national, and
international conferences. He served as the
president of the Indiana Council of Teachers of
Mathematics from 2002-2004. Patrick enjoys
teaching at all levels and especially enjoys
innovative instructional strategies. Articles like
“Triangles ala Fettuccini” (Mathematics
Teacher, 2001) and “Experiencing
Radians” (Mathematics Teacher, 1999) shared
some of his creative instructional methods
publicly He has also shared several
presentations on how to incorporate calculator
technology effectively into instruction.
Dusty Grundmeier joined the
department of mathematical
sciences after completing a 3-year
postdoctoral fellowship at the
University of Michigan. He earned
his PhD in mathematics from the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in
2011. Dusty also previously spent six months
as a guest researcher at Norwegian University
of Science and Technology in Trondheim,
Norway. He recently gave a public lecture
series "From the African Stones Game to
Cauchy-Riemann Geometry" in Uganda.
Dusty's research lies in the intersection of
complex analysis, commutative algebra, and
combinatorics. His current research focuses on
introducing algebraic techniques to mapping
problems in several complex variables and
connecting this work with questions in number
theory.
Originally from Minnesota, Dusty has a
healthy respect for winter, hockey, and
mosquitos.
Patrick Eggleton earned his
bachelor’s degree in mathematics
education from the University of
South Florida. He taught high
school for four years while
completing his MEd at University of
South Florida. At the University of
Georgia he joined the RADIATE research
group, an NSF funded research group that
explored questions regarding pre-service
teacher preparation. He completed his PhD in
mathematics education from the University of
Georgia in 1995.
Patrick has taught at Berry College
(Georgia) and Huntington University (Indiana).
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New Faculty
Jeff Hiatt joined the department
as full-time contract faculty
teaching Math 111 and Math 125.
He received his BS in mechanical
engineering from Purdue
University and an MBA from
Indiana Wesleyan University. Jeff
spent 35 years working in industry in various
positions in design, manufacturing, and quality
engineering. He took an early retirement from
Chrysler Corporation in 2008. He taught math
as adjunct faculty at Ivy Tech and also was a
substitute teacher for Muncie Community
Schools after retirement. He most recently
worked for Keihin Aircon in Muncie.
Jeff was born in Muncie and graduated
from Northside High School. His wife, Regina,
is a Ball State graduate, earning bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in elementary
education. She teaches 6th grade English at
Northside Middle School. Jeff’s dad and sister
also graduated from Ball State with bachelor’s
and master’s degrees in secondary
mathematics education and both are retired
from Muncie Community Schools. Jeff has
two sons. Sam graduated from Butler
University with a doctorate in pharmacy, is
married, and lives in Winston-Salem, North
Carolina. Eli lives and works in Muncie and is
attending Ivy Tech part-time pursuing a degree
in criminal justice.
Dan’s research area is topology and
geometry. More specifically, “I am interested
in topics at the intersection of knot theory and
symplectic topology such as Legendrian
knots. These are embeddings of the circle
into 3-dimensional space that satisfy a certain
differential equation. A Legendrian knot can
be visualized as a knotted string with the
loose ends connected to one another, and
the differential equation results in the
appearance of cusp points when the knot is
viewed from a particular angle. (Try Google
for an example).”
In addition to math, Dan’s interests
include listening to and playing music,
especially jazz; and hanging out with his wife,
Erin, and their two Chihuahuas.
Members of the Ball State Council of
Teachers of Mathematics attended the
Nional Council of Teachers of Mathematics
regional conference in Indianapolis on
October 30 and 31. BSCTM is the only
student affiliate of NCTM in the state of
Indiana. These pre-service teachers were
able to attend several professional
development sessions, and they shared
what they learned at BSCTM’s November
meeting. Pictured are: Steven West,
Katherine Thomas, Khloe Vonderheide,
Nicole Yingst, MacKenzie Cox, Krista
Hemmelgarn, and faculty advisor LeAnn
Neel-Romine.
Dan Rutherford earned his
bachelor’s degree in mathematics
from Western Washington
University and then went on to
earn his PhD at the University of
California, Davis in 2008. Before
coming to Ball State, he held
temporary positions at Duke University and the
University of Arkansas. He also spent a
month visiting Max Planck Institute for
Mathematics in Bonn, Germany. Dan states ‘”I
truly enjoy teaching math, and I am excited to
work with the many enthusiastic and talented
students here at BSU.”
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Where Are They Now?
By Charles McConnell
The story begins early in my life but on my
journey I graduated from Indiana Tech in 1961 with
a BS in mathematics and a minor in engineering. I
was in the Air Force Reserve in 1962. From
September 1962 to June 1964, I was a graduate
student and teaching assistant at Ball State. The
mathematics professors from whom I took courses
were Earl McKinney, John Hoelzer and Duane
Deal. The other mathematics professors with
whom I was in contact, either grading papers or
tutoring their students, were Ramon Avila, John
Beekman, Charles Parish and George Grunwald.
They were all great teachers and my experience
at Ball State was very positive. I received a
master’s degree in mathematics and a minor in
physics.
From September 1964 until June 1968 I was
mathematics faculty at the University of Wisconsin
at La Crosse. From September 1968 until 1971 I
was a graduate student and teaching associate at
the University of Minnesota concentrating on
differential equations and numerical analysis. In
1975 I completed my PhD in mathematics at
Sussex College in England. My work was in the
general area of numerical solution of parabolic
partial differential equations.
In 1975 I started teaching full time at Midwest
College of Engineering, Lombard, Illinois (now part
of Illinois Institute of Technology). I taught
undergraduate and graduate engineering
mathematics plus some undergraduate
engineering courses. In the summer of 1976 I did
post graduate work in the area of response surface
methodology at the University of Missouri,
Columbia. I continued teaching full and part time
at Midwest College of Engineering until 1986. The
summers of 1977 and 1978 I held summer faculty
fellowships at NASA, Lewis Research Center in
Cleveland, Ohio. It was a great experience
working with these mathematicians.
From 1979 to 1999 I worked in industry. The
work was in applied mathematics and statistics. In
particular, basic statistic, design of experiments,
statistical quality control and stochastic processes
(Reliability & Markov Chains) for the Singer
Corporation and Thompson Steel Corp. I also
worked for consulting companies of
W. A. Golomski & Associates and Frank Mack &
Associates. Some of the companies we did work
for were fortune 500 companies. The American
Society of Quality Control put one of my reliability
models on the internet.
From January 2000 until June 2014 I taught
mathematics at the Illinois Institute of Art,
Chicago. An interesting course I taught the art
students was Concepts in Modern Mathematics.
This course included elements of chaos theory,
fractal geometry, sets, logic, functions
(exponential & logs) and an introduction to
catastrophe theory. It was great fun to see how
some of these art students applied these modern
topics to their projects.
During the 50 years from 1964 to 2014, I
published eight papers and gave five talks at
professional meetings. “Computing a Best
Discrete L1 Approximation Using the Method of
Vanishing Jacobians” was delivered at the first
international conference on data analysis based
on the L1 norm and related methods, August 31 to
September 4 1987, at University of Neuchatel,
Switzerland.
Also, in the 1980’s I was asked to become a
referee for several papers to be published in the
Journal of Computational Physics at Lawrence
Livermore Laboratory.
For the past 20 plus years I have been
working on “Auction Market Problem.” This work
produced a mathematical computer trading model
that captures small moves in the market using,
among other things, chaos theory and fractal
geometry. It has been tested on the Futures
Markets of Soybeans, Corn, Live Cattle, US 30yr
Bond, 10 year T-Note, and the Emini S&P 500
with very good results – a new career? I am sure
it will work on the US dollar vs. the Euro and
stocks.
As my students from Ball State to the
present have told me, “you really like
mathematics!” I really do like mathematics
because mathematical problems present great
mysteries! I would enjoy hearing from any student
that I had at Ball State or any faculty at Ball State
from 1962 – 1964 (mcconnell9542@yahoo.com).
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Faculty and
Student Publications
Retirement
By Patricia Parkison
My career at BSU seems to have
come full circle. I began my career
in the fall of 1983 teaching algebra
in the evening. My daughter was
due at the semester’s end. Now
as my career comes to an end, I
am teaching algebra in the evening. My
granddaughter is due at semester’s end!
I have enjoyed a wide variety of teaching
opportunities over the past 26 years as a full
time contract faculty member. I taught basic
math classes 107, 108, 111, and 131. I also
taught math education courses 201, 202, 203,
207, 391 and 392 and summer courses to
elementary education school teachers. I have
enjoyed the variety and the challenges each
course presented. I have seen many courses
come and go and some even evolve. Being part
of this process has been interesting, rewarding
and, at times, quite a learning curve.
I have had many opportunities to serve
both at department and university levels. At
both I have been able to develop and initiate
changes that captured my passion to serve as
an equal. I have experienced both failures and
great successes and learned from each one. I
have met many great people and made many
friends while pursuing my interests. It has been
an honor to serve.
I have been exposed to many amazing
students. I will remember those rare times
looking in the right direction at the right time to
see the light bulb go off and a new understanding of the material begin. I will remember
those students whose very presence seemed to
signify a greatness yet to be. They surely are
destined to become the new leaders in their
fields. I am thankful for those students who
challenged me and made me a better teacher
and a better person. These students are the
country’s future and I will retire with confidence
that all will be well.
I will enjoy my wonderful family as it
changes and grows; engage in 100 different
projects, hopefully finishing a few; and continue
to serve my community.
Munni Begum (2014). “A Generalized Inflated
Poisson Distribution with Application to Fertility
Data.” Thailand Statistician, 12(2), 135-159.
A.H.M. Rahmatullah Imon and K. Das
(2014). “How to Tell the Truth with Statistics.”
Malaysian Journal of Mathematical Sciences 8
(2), 289-309.
A.A.M. Nurunnabi, A.S. Hadi, and
A.H.M.R.Imon(2014). “Procedures for the
Identification of Multiple Influential
Observations in Linear Regression.” Journal
of Applied Statistics, 41(6), 1315-1331.
Sohel Rana, Habshah Midi and
A.H.M.R. Imon (2014). “Detection of Outliers
in Multivariate Data Based on Comedian MAD
Approach.” Proceedings of Fundamental
Science Congress, 2014, 270- 272.
Ann Leitze, Barbara Fennell, Angela Greene,
Timothy Hildebrand, and Rebecca Wakeman
(2014). “Calendar Problems.” Mathematics
Teacher. 108(4), 280-286.
Alan Lair and Ahmed Mohammed (2014).
“Large Solutions to Semi-Linear Elliptic
Systems with Variable Exponents.” Journal of
Mathematical Analysis and Applications, 420,
1478-1499.
Dr. Dale Umbach passed
away on August 29, 2014. Dr.
Umbach was a professor in
the department for 35 years.
He served as the department
chair from 1997 to 2005.
The Integral is published bi-annually by Ball State
University Department of Mathematical Sciences,
RB 465, Muncie, IN 47306.
5
Faculty News
Munni Begum gave several presentations
during the summer of 2014 in Dhaka
Bangladesh: “A Two-Step Integrated
Approach to Detect Differentially Expressed
Genes in RNA-Seq Data", Department of
Applied Statistics, East-West University. “A
Generalized Inflated Poisson Distribution with
Application to Modeling Fertility Data", Faculty
and Graduate Student Seminar, IUBATInternational University of Business Agriculture
and Technology. “A Generalized Inflated
Poisson Distribution with Application to
Modeling Fertility Data", Faculty and Graduate
Student Seminar, Jahangirnagar University,
Savar. “Statistical Models for RNASequencing Data, Department of Applied
Statistics,” East-West University, “A Two-Step
Integrated Approach to Detect Differentially
Expressed Genes in RNA-Seq Data,”
Department of Applied Statistics, Institute of
Statistical Research and Training, University
of Dhaka.
“Word Calculus in the Fundamental Group of
the Menger Curve," in the section on Wild
Algebraic and Geometric Topology of the joint
annual meetings of the German and Polish
Mathematical Societies in Poznan, Poland in
September 2014.
Rahmatullah Imon delivered a keynote paper
entitled “Past, Present, and Future of
Statistics" at the 2nd ISM International
Statistical Conference at Kuantan, Malaysia,
in August 2014. He also presented a paper
entitled “Environmental Statistics: Some
Sampling Issues" at the monthly seminar of
the Centre for Foundation Studies in Science,
University of Malaya, in August 2014.
Ann Leitze presented “News Flash: Students
Are Eager to Solve Rigorous Problems” at the
National Council of Teachers of Mathematics
regional conference, Indianapolis, IN in
October, 2014.
Gary Dean is a winner of the CAS Matthew
Rodermund Memorial Lifetime Service Award.
Fall Honors Breakfast
Gary Dean made a presentation in the
Casualty Actuarial Society webinar “Predictive
Modeling: Tying Real World Applications Back
to the Classroom." A presenter from Travelers
represented the business side and Gary
represented the academic side.
The department held it’s annual Fall Honors
Program on September 13. Students and their
guests enjoyed breakfast which was followed
by an awards ceremony. Students honored
for outstanding performance in calculus were:
Claire E. Smith, Aleks Kuchenbrod, Timothy
R. Hoblin, and Cody S. Kocher. Presenting
the awards this year was Ralph Bremigan.
Holly Dickin, Crystal Lorch, and Robin
Rufatto presented a poster titled “A MultiModel Redesign of a Liberal Arts Mathematics
Course” at the national AMATYC meeting in
Nashville, TN in November 2014.
Hanspeter Fischer gave an invited
presentation, “Cotorison Free Groups from a
Topological Viewpoint,” at the topology
seminar of Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan.
He also gave an invited presentation, entitled
6
Where are They Now?
By Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Alan Huckleberry
My first contact with Ball State
mathematics came in 1957 through my
high school geometry course which was
part of an experimental program in
which BSU was involved. We built up a
theory from scratch (Axioms, etc.) and
every day for a year we proved theorems. I loved it.
Probably as a result of this course, I was awarded a
scholarship to spend the summer after my junior year
in an NSF program at Kansas University. I remember
reporting on this to Professor Higgins' math education
class during the following fall semester.
In the fall of 1959 I entered Yale as a math
major. During the summers I worked as an apprentice
actuary at Occidental Life in LA. Despite my true
interest being in mathematics, my studies gradually
drifted toward statistics, even biostatistics. In 1963 I
graduated from Yale and returned to Muncie having
no idea what to do. I decided to enter the
mathematics MA program at Ball State and in 1963 I
met John Beekman who put me onto a small
research project on the pure math side of statistics.
This was exciting for me and the courses were also
very interesting. I particularly remember the lectures
of John Hoelzer, Earl McKinney, and Duane Deal.
Primarily due to the project with Beekman, in
early 1964 I began looking for mathematics faculties
where I might continue toward a doctorate in an area
in or around probability theory. For various reasons,
including the possibility of studying with Kai Lai
Chung, I chose Stanford, where I began my PhD
studies in 1964. Probability was still in its
foundational stage (Kolmogorov's book had appeared
only roughly 30 years before) and I found no real
connection to it. Fortunately, in the completely
informal setting of a pool hall, Halsey Royden asked
me if I had any particular interests. I told him complex
analysis (based on the beautiful lectures of Max
Schiffer) but I was missing the geometry. He laughed
and told me that complex analysis is geometry and a
few months later he became my thesis advisor.
Toward the end of my PhD studies luck struck
again when two distinguished mathematicians, Aldo
Andreotti from Pisa and Wilhelm Stoll from Notre
Dame, visited Stanford for a year. I was the only real
student in Andreotti's fantastic course. He asked me
to write up the notes and to come to his house on the
weekends to go through them. In the second
semester he asked me to take over the course,
lecturing to him and Stoll on certain analytic topics
7
which were becoming important at the time.
In 1969, with my wife Barbara (a student of my
father at BSU) and our 5 month old baby (now a
professor of piano at University of Iowa), I moved to
Pisa to take a post doctorate with Andreotti. This
was the beginning of my "globalization.” At the end
of that year I made the decision to take a tenure
track position at Notre Dame. I was strongly
influenced there by a number of geometers who
were permanent faculty members and guests.
Among them were Karl Stein and Reinhold Remmert
who were leading figures in the German school of
complex geometry. As a result of these contacts, I
spent many extended visits in Europe, primarily in
the Muenster group of Remmert.
After being promoted to full professor at Notre
Dame in 1978, I began a one year visit to Muenster
supported by the Humboldt foundation. I was
fortunate to be embedded in a European
mathematical culture with contacts to various centers
in Germany, Italy and France. In 1980 I made the
difficult decision to take the chair of complex analysis
at Ruhr Universitaet Bochum.
I was extremely fortunate to step into the
school of German complex geometry which had
been built up after WW II by Stein, Grauert,
Remmert and Hirzebruch. I was able to continue
this tradition in Bochum in addition to carrying out my
own research in the areas of complex geometry, Lie
group actions and certain topics in mathematical
physics. Many doctoral students received their
degrees under my guidance (see my websites for
further information on my research and students).
Including those at Notre Dame and Jacobs
University in Bremen, where I am now "Wisdom
Professor of Mathematics", the number is now
approaching 40. I am proud to say that a large
percentage of them are active in academia.
I have expanded my international work to
centers in Eastern Europe, in particular Warsaw and
Moscow, and to the Far East and Australia. I am
involved in research projects funded by Deutsche
Forschungsgemeinschaft in Bochum and Bremen in
which I am guiding theses in various directions. This
semester I am giving a course "Foundations of
Mathematical Physics" in Bremen and am lecturing
in a seminar in Cologne on "Integrable Systems."
Making a Difference
Your contribution is invaluable to the support of this department. The gift you make may benefit one or
several of the accounts listed below. Thank you for your support of Ball State University’s Department of
Mathematical Sciences. Checks should be mailed to BSU Foundation, PO Box 672, Muncie, IN 47308.
Please include the number of the fund you wish to contribute to. Go to www.bsu.edu/giving to give online.

Funding for mathematical sciences programs #5501

D. W. Simpson & Co. Actuarial Science
Scholarship - #5558

Funding for actuarial science graduate program - #5502

Ramon L. and Vivian E. Avila Scholarship #5559

Funding for the actuarial science program #5506

John A. & Jane K. Beekman Actuarial
Science Scholarship - #5560

L. Harper Whitcraft Fund - #5517


Dr. Mir Masoom Ali Scholarship - #5518

Mathematical Sciences Scholarships - #5550
Steven D. & Debra L. Myers Actuarial Science
Scholarship in honor of John A. and Jane K.
Beekman - #5561

Levi Shively Memorial Scholarship - #5551


Higgins/Nelson/Robold/Kappes
Towers Watson & Co. Actuarial Science
Scholarship in honor of John A. & Jane K.
Beekman - #5562

Mathematics Scholarship - #5552

Otto W. Beebe Memorial Scholarship - #5563

Edwards Memorial Scholarship - #5553


Mr. & Mrs. Herman V. Hallett Memorial Scholarships - #5554
Swiss Re Actuarial Science Scholarship #5564


Undergraduate Actuarial Science Scholarship
- #5555
AEGON Actuarial Science Scholarship #5565

Ram Lal Seekri Endowed Scholarship - #5566

Emma Whitlock Garnett Scholarship - #5556

CNA Foundation Exam Scholarship - #5568

Harold J. Gale Scholarship - #5557

Dale Umbach Memorial Scholarship—#5569
8