Rocky Mountain Mathematica '99
July 18, 1999--This year's
Rocky
Mountain Mathematica courses were
sold out early in the registration process. Fifty
students came to Frisco, Colorado, for introductory and
intermediate courses taught by Ed Packel and Stan
Wagon--some from as far away as schools in Egypt and
Sweden. Many of the participants were college,
university, and community college instructors in math,
physics, or computer science, and there were a few college
undergraduate and industry attendees.
Along with instruction, Rocky Mountain Mathematica
participants shared interesting uses of Mathematica.
Tim Coutts of the National Renewable Energy Lab worked on a
package related to modeling of the current density
generated by multijunction solar cells under both
arbitrary and standard spectra. He hopes the package
will help in the development of higher efficiency solar
cells. Sandy Miller from SUNY Brockport worked on a
package for evaluating improper integrals of rational
functions.
To aid with questions and technical issues related to
hardware, two assistants were added to the staff for
this year's courses: Dan Schwalbe of Macalester
College and Ann Serdynski, an undergraduate at Lake
Forest College.
The programming contest was won by Joel Zeitlin
from California State University, Northridge, who came up with a neat
way of removing duplicates (for a given tolerance) in a
set of points in the plane.
Rocky Mountain Mathematica is sponsored by Wolfram
Research, Inc. and Springer-Verlag New York.
Participants' Comments
"The instructors and workshop were terrific. Ed Packel
and Stan Wagon's enthusiasm for Mathematica is
contagious. Their five-day course got me kick-started
on using and wanting to learn more about Mathematica."
Sanford S. Miller
State University of New York, Brockport
"I had a tremendous time at Rocky Mountain Mathematica.
The instructors had boundless enthusiasm for and an
encyclopedic knowledge of Mathematica. The afternoon
break for hiking, cycling, or swimming left me
invigorated and alert for the evening session. During
the lab time I was able to complete an animation
project that I will be showing to my students. I highly
recommend this workshop to anyone wanting to learn
Mathematica from the ground up or enhance their
knowledge of the program."
Paul Grant
University of California, Davis
"Stan was a terrific instructor and introduced both
humor and depth into his classes. The value I received
from the Intermediate Course was tremendous and will
influence the way in which I approach my future
programming problems. I strongly recommend anyone even
vaguely interested in Mathematica to attend this
course. This applies to relatively experienced
programmers as well as to novices."
Tim Coutts
National Renewable Energy Lab, Golden, Colorado
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