This is the homepage of Dr. Alice Deanin.(picture):
(official picture)
Department of Mathematical Sciences, Villanova University,
800 Lancaster Avenue, Villanova, PA 19085-1699 USA
e-mail: alice.deanin@villanova.edu
Spring 2015 was my last semester at Villanova. I am now retired from the faculty. I no longer have an office or a phone at Villanova, but my email is still active, and my primary method for contact. I look forward to hearing from you!
NUMBER THEORY
My research training is in Number Theory, and my primary interests in this area are Computational Number Theory and Diophantine Approximation. My published research has been about p-adic continued fraction algorithms, but my recent endeavors have been directed at continued fractions in power series fields, particularly those with bounded partial quotients. This rather solitary investigation has been neglected of late in favor of more socially interactive endeavors.
MATHEMATICS EDUCATION
I have strong interest in and commitment to teaching. My axiomatic premise as a teacher is that all students have talents to develop, use, and enjoy mathematics. Instruction should be directed at ensuring that all students succeed in the classroom, and value their success there. I have used this basic premise in dealing with students at many levels and in different programs. I have done classroom enrichment in primary grade and middle school classrooms, written curriculum materials and conducted workshops supporting integrative teaching of Mathematics and Science at the Middle and High School level, in suburban and city Regional School districts in NJ and PA. I have supervised independent study projects for undegraduate math majors and education majors interested in mathematics education at all levels, as well as education and curriculum development projects with graduate mathematics students.
TEACHING AT VILLANOVA
I like teaching the freshman Calculus for Life Sciences, (which is really intro to mathematical models in biology). I work every semester with junior and senior mathematics majors, usually teaching modern algebra or linear algebra. I also have seized the geometry course, offered as an elective for math majors and math grad students, required for math education majors. I took my inspiration for this course from a geometry topics course given by Thurston and Conway in Princeton and later at the Geometry Center. These courses all provided opportunities for interactive communication about mathematics and cooperative and project based work.
I conduct and direct seminars, as capstone courses for our graduate program leading to M.A. in Mathematics. In these seminars, each student selects a topic to investigate for the semester, and gives four presentations and writes four reports on the topic, at increasing levels of sophistication. I heartily recommend this colloquium type of format; it requires that the instructor develop some project management skills and sufficient chutzpah to offer to direct projects in anything. But it has had a tremendous payoff in study and research skills for students, and more importantly, a tangible evidence of the interconnectedness of different, seemingly distant, branches in mathematics. Graduate Math Seminar History of Topics
1999 Grad Seminar 2002 Grad Seminar 2003 Grad Seminar 2004 Grad Seminar 2005 Tu Grad Seminar
2005 Th Grad Seminar 2006 Grad Seminar 2007 Tu Grad Seminar 2007 Th Grad Seminar 2008 Grad Seminar
2009 Grad Seminar 2010 Grad Seminar 2011 Grad Seminar 2012 Grad Seminar 2013 Grad Seminar 2014 Grad Seminar
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