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“When I started teaching, conventional wisdom was you could not do meaningful mathematics research with undergrads,” says Gary Gordon, professor of mathematics. “And students didn’t publish articles until their Ph.D. dissertation.” Undaunted, Gordon began doing research with students even before the EXCEL Scholars program started, writing his first paper with a student in the late 1980s.
He now coordinates the National Science Foundation’s Research Experience for Undergraduates at Lafayette, in which top students from around the country work in small groups with faculty for eight weeks in the summer on topics in mathematics.
Gordon tries to find a series of problems and examples that are accessible to undergraduates. “It’s not a course with the answers in the back of the book. Usually it’s the first time any of the students has done mathematics research. It shows them what mathematics is, and what mathematics research is like. As another mathematics professor said, ‘We don’t make kids memorize the rulebook before they start playing football. They learn as they go.'” Gordon says most REU students go on to good graduate programs in mathematics.
“It’s nice to have students talking and thinking about mathematics outside class,” adds Gordon, who advises students for the national Putnam Mathematics Competition and formerly coordinated the weekly campus Barge mathematics extracurricular exam in which teams of three students compete for prizes at the end of the semester.
“It’s a pleasure to work with students,” he says. “I benefit by working on problems I wouldn’t have otherwise. If I concentrated solely on my own work, my research would likely have taken a different direction. But I’ve gotten a lot of benefits from working with students. They can have great ideas. I’m proud of the papers we’ve published in respected journals.”
“GG, as we called him, always went above and beyond the call of duty for his students,” says Manuel “Manny” Aivaliotis ’98, a mathematics graduate who did research and published a paper with Gordon. Aivaliotis owns Marlborough Pizza Restaurant, Marlborough, Conn., and is a semi-professional poker player. “GG made himself available almost any time, regardless of what his office hours were. He put countless hours into helping students succeed at projects they wanted to undertake, including theses and articles for scientific journals. He helped create a Math Bowl for Lafayette, and always gave interesting talks, which you could be sure would be a blend of both his mathematical prowess and his knack for stand-up comedy. Even ‘non-math’ people thoroughly enjoyed his courses, because he would always go the extra mile to make them interesting.”
Ekaterina Jager ’05 used complex mathematical formulas to determine success rates in network systems as an EXCEL Scholar under the guidance of Gary Gordon, professor of mathematics.