Chris Laskowski, an expert in mathematical logic who has taught at the University of Maryland for 34 years, has been named a 2023 Distinguished Scholar-Teacher.

Established in 1978, the Distinguished Scholar-Teacher title is awarded to a select number of faculty members who have blazed trails in their classrooms and their areas of expertise. Honorees receive $5,000 to support their professional activities and are asked to give a public presentation on a topic relevant to their fields.

Doron Levy, chair of UMD’s Department of Mathematics, described Laskowski as one of the “leading logicians of his generation.”

“His groundbreaking research has always been intertwined with his passion for teaching, mentoring and education at all levels, from high school students to postdocs,” Levy said. “I am very happy to have a colleague that has done so much to promote the reputation of the University of Maryland and its Department of Mathematics.”

Laskowski earned his Ph.D. in mathematics from UC Berkeley in 1987. He went on to complete a two-year postdoctoral fellowship at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and joined UMD in 1989, where he has been ever since.

He is widely known for his mathematical logic research—particularly a paper called “The uncountable spectra of countable theories” that appeared in the Annals of Mathematics in 2000. In that paper, Laskowski and his co-authors determined that every countable theory in mathematics can be sorted into 13 distinct “species” of spectra with shared properties.

“This was the capstone of years of work that mathematician Saharon Shelah started,” Laskowski said. “We can now say that among all theories, there are precisely 13 different strata.”

Laskowski also specializes in an area of research called Borel complexity, which assesses the complexity of first-order theories. In 2022, he received his largest grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct a three-year project aimed at computing the Borel complexity of every mutually algebraic theory, which has applications in computational learning.

This fall, he will teach a new graduate class of his own design—MATH818E: “Model Theory Via Unary Expansions”—based on his years of research.

“The course is going to be a compendium of more than 10 papers of mine over the last 15 years or so, including ones I’ve published and a couple still in preparation,” he said.

Laskowski has been enamored with this field of research ever since he took a mathematical logic course in graduate school, an experience that prompted him to drop his computer science major and pick up math instead.

In addition to his research and classes, he is a representative of the Association for Symbolic Logic as well as a 30-year member—and former chair—of the organizing committee for the Maryland High School Mathematics Competition. From 1999 to 2019, he also evaluated high school projects submitted to the Intel Science Talent Search competition.He has mentored seven postdoctoral fellows, 16 Ph.D. students, and countless undergraduate and high school students throughout his career.

For Laskowski, it’s exciting to be named a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and, more importantly, to have the chance to continue doing what he loves most. He enjoys the “theater” of teaching a packed room of students, especially his favorite large lecture course, MATH 241: “Calculus III,” an introduction to multivariable calculus.

“I find the students, most of whom are not math majors, to be very bright and interested in the subject,” Laskowski said. “I really love teaching and find it very invigorating—I’ve devoted a lot of my life to it.”

The project is supported by a $600,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.

Scott Wolpert, a professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of Maryland, will be the principal investigator of a new pilot project aimed at making mathematics departments a more welcoming space for staff, faculty and students. This project is made possible by a $600,000 grant from a National Science Foundation (NSF) program called Inclusion Across the Nation of Communities of Learners of Underrepresented Discoverers in Engineering and Science (INCLUDES), which supports the participation of populations that have been historically excluded from the sciences.

Set to formally launch in spring 2024, the two-year project will provide diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) training to six representatives of mathematics and statistics departments at the collegiate level in the United States. During the program, participants will launch DEI initiatives that put what they learned into practice.

At many colleges and universities, including UMD, math is the largest teaching unit by number of classroom hours. Wolpert explained that initiatives like this new DEI training program don’t just affect math majors, but the wide range of students who take math courses to meet their degree requirements.“What goes on in math and statistics classrooms is particularly consequential to a student’s experience,” Wolpert said. “We teach, in a sense, all the different parts of campus.”

The framework for this project comes from Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (TPSE Math), an organization co-founded by William E. “Brit” Kirwan, a professor emeritus of mathematics at UMD and chancellor emeritus of the University System of Maryland.

TPSE Math, in collaboration with the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s SEA Change initiative, developed a questionnaire that mathematics departments can use to assess their DEI policies and practices. It applies to staff, faculty and students and covers a range of subjects, including mentoring, professional development, representation in the curriculum, support for parents and caregivers, sexual harassment policies and more.

Wolpert, a longtime senior consultant with TPSE Math, explained that this new project will help participants complete the questionnaire in a systematic way.

“There will be trainings on how to get the information to answer these questions, how to answer questions that are qualitative and how to objectively and accurately provide an overview of your department’s environment,” Wolpert said.

Applications for the training program will be open to math and statistics departments from any university or community college in the United States. In addition, the project will recruit six DEI consultants to help guide the conversation at training sessions, which will be held over two successive summers.

Wolpert has taken part in several DEI-centered projects since joining UMD in 1976, including a movement in the 1990s to introduce group work—now commonplace in academia—into calculus courses. Assignments that foster collaboration and communication among students have been shown to promote DEI, Wolpert noted.

During his tenure as associate dean of UMD’s former College of Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences in the early 2000s, Wolpert partnered with the A. James Clark School of Engineering on two NSF-funded projects that aimed to improve the graduation rate of first-generation students in STEM fields.

“Our graduation rate was very close to 100%,” Wolpert said of the success of those projects. “Some of our alumni placed in high-level positions immediately.”

Wolpert said he is excited to join a new project aimed at making math a more positive experience for students.

“The mission of TPSE Math is to affect change in the post-secondary math community and see to it that every student receives math education that is appropriate to their career goals,” Wolpert said. “We hope, through this project, that departments get a more sophisticated understanding of their own atmosphere and initiate a project which has real impact for the student experience.”

The pi-reciting professor retired from teaching in August 2023 but still has campus ties.

Sidney “Denny” Gulick III is something of a celebrity at the University of Maryland. Alums of all ages and educational backgrounds remember taking one of Gulick’s math classes.
“Everywhere I go in Maryland, I meet people who enthusiastically recall a great teacher they had for calculus, and it almost always turns out to have been Denny, even if it was several

decades ago,” said UMD Mathematics Professor and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies Larry Washington. “He's responsible for many people's fond memories of UMD.” 

On August 1, 2023, Professor Gulick retired from teaching after 58 years at UMD, but he hasn’t gone far. He continues to handle class scheduling as the Department of Mathematics’ associate chair for course staffing, a role he’s had for nearly 20 years.

His time in the classroom may have ended, but Gulick said teaching is in his blood—and not even retirement can change that. 

“My father, grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were all teachers. My wife was a teacher, and so was our son and our daughter,” he explained. “Teaching is a part of my system.”

3.14 (and many more)

Gulick is well-known across campus for his ability to recite 100 digits of pi from memory—a feat he demonstrates with the speed of an auctioneer during the annual Pi Day Celebration hosted by the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. He has been honing this skill ever since a childhood accident claimed his left eye.

“When I was two years old, I tripped and fell on a spike that went through my eye, and at five I became nearsighted. My father didn’t think I should be reading very much because it might hurt my eye, so he gave me multiplication tables, and I learned them really well,” Gulick recalled. “Then he gave me pi to memorize to 15 places. I’ve loved mathematics ever since.”

Gulick’s interest in math flourished in adulthood. He earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Oberlin College and a Ph.D. in the same subject from Yale University. He then did a two-year instructorship at the University of Pennsylvania before joining UMD in 1965, explaining that it was an exciting time to be a scientist.

“Sputnik went up in the late 1950s, and by the early 1960s there was a huge demand for mathematicians and physicists and engineers,” he said. “I was one of 10 math professors to come here in 1965, and the next year there were 18.”

Not long after joining UMD, Gulick met his future wife, Frances, then a postdoctoral fellow who became a longtime lecturer in the math department until her retirement in 2018.

“Every Tuesday evening, we had a seminar in functional analysis at a colleague’s home and Frances would cook for us,” Gulick fondly remembered. “That’s something I relish.”

Over the years, Gulick became a staple in the math department, gaining a reputation for his 8 a.m. calculus courses and charming catchphrases. “Don't fall into the abyss,” he’d often tell his students—a plea to carefully check their work to avoid crucial miscalculations. 

“I have always claimed that there needs to be a little bit of humor in math classes. There needs to be a little bit of smiling,” Gulick said. “My whole goal was for them to learn as much as they could realistically learn without giving them psychological crises.”

‘A lasting impact’

Beyond teaching, Gulick helped mold mathematics curricula at UMD and across the state. He served as the undergraduate chair of UMD’s math department from 2003 to 2006 and was a longtime chair of the Statewide Mathematics Group, an organization of mathematicians from colleges and universities across Maryland. During his career, Gulick co-authored six editions of a calculus textbook and another on chaos theory and fractals—one of his favorite areas of mathematics.

Many of his roles extended beyond his department. Gulick judged high school science fairs and hovercraft competitions, co-chaired an East-Asian Science and Technology Group at UMD, and served on thesis committees (mostly in music, a personal passion of his). 

For many years, he and his wife sent hundreds of “friendship dolls” to schools in Japan, continuing a family tradition started by his missionary grandfather, Sidney Gulick, in the 1920s. The dolls started as a token of kindness to foster cross-cultural understanding between the U.S. and Japan at a time of heightened tensions. Today, they continue to be a treasured gift.

Gulick and his wife now live in a retirement community in Silver Spring, Maryland. He hopes to take more trips to Yosemite National Park—his “favorite place on Earth”—and to their son’s family home in New Hampshire. Gulick, who plays cello, and his wife, a pianist, also plan to fill their free time with music, looking forward to many more duets together. 

At UMD, Gulick’s teaching legacy lives on. Jim Yorke, a Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at UMD, said Gulick’s many contributions won’t soon be forgotten.

“He has always been proactive and vocal when he sees things that need fixing and he never shies away from a challenge, but more than that, Denny is a wonderful person to work with and to know,” Yorke said. “We are so grateful for his service and dedication to our department and to our students. He has made a lasting impact on the department.”

Written by Emily Nunez