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Steven J. Miller Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Williams College Bronfman Science Center (Steven.J.Miller AT williams.edu) |
curriculum
vita
research statement
teaching statement
Welcome letter
to Williams Students
Possible
thesis / colloquium projects |
Greetings! Starting in Fall '08 I'll be a professor of mathematics and statistics at Williams College. I've known several graduates and members of the faculty for years, and my family and I are excited about joining the community. I wanted to briefly introduce myself by providing some personal and professional information.
I received a BS in Mathematics and Physics from Yale in 1996, and then earned a PhD in Mathematics from Princeton in 2002. Since then I've taught at Princeton, New York University, (The) Ohio State University (GO BUCKS!) and Brown. I'm married; my wife Liz is a professor of Marketing at Boston College, and we have a son Cameron who'll be about a year and a half in September. I grew up just outside Boston. My hobbies outside math include tennis, sailing, reading (primarily historical fiction, politics and science fiction), Boston sports teams, bridge and twistie art. In previous years I served as faculty advisor to the Brown chess club, and I currently maintain a math riddles page (which is usually among the top ten hits when googling math riddles). I'm also an early riser, and enjoy starting the day by having breakfast with friends (I'm currently the President of the International Federation of Collegiate Breakfast Clubs, so if you're ever in Oxford and want a free meal, let me know!).
One of the reasons I love studying math is that there must be a reason for
each answer, and that reason is not 'because I said so!'. I find it amazing that
many very different phenomena can be explained by the same basic equations (for
example, the same math used to analyze the Fibonacci numbers 1,1,2,3,5,8,13,…
can be used to teach you why playing roulette at Vegas is a terrible idea). My
main research is in number theory and probability, especially some
problems on the boundary of math and physics. For example, there are many
similarities between the behavior of primes and the energy levels of heavy
nuclei such as Uranium! This is a specific example of a very general
phenomenon, namely how results and observations in one field can suggest
problems (and sometimes solutions) in another. In addition to research in
pure mathematics, in the last few years I have written papers in accounting, baseball, computer science, economics,
geology and
marketing. I've supervised over 100 undergraduates in the past 7
years (several of whom only knew basic calculus), and I try to have open research projects in my classes. If you are interested
in undergraduate research, please drop me a line -- I'm interested in almost
anything that relates to math (for those interested in a senior thesis or
colloquium, click here for a more detailed list). Some of my current projects with undergraduates
include a collaboration with the San Diego Padres (I'm a huge
Red Sox fan, but
some of my students are Yankee fans, so we figured this is a nice, neutral team)
and working with the
IRS to detect tax fraud,
as well as some problems in number theory and dynamical systems. I've written a
number theory
book (the link will take you to a webpage with links to some student reports
and background papers).
Last semester at Brown I taught
Mathematical
Statistics and a baseball
research class; in the fall I taught honors multivariable
calculus and a research class on
Benford's
law of digit bias (which is used by the IRS to detect tax fraud). This year
I'll teach two sections of
Math 103 (Calculus I) in the fall, while in the spring I'll
teach Math 209 (Differential Equations and Vector
Analysis) and
Math 406 (Analysis and Number Theory), as well as
running Williams' Green Chicken Team.