Q&A with the Department of Mathematics’ Antoine Mellet and Susan Mazzullo on virtual teaching

When the University of Maryland suddenly went virtual last March in response to the coronavirus pandemic, departments had to make a quick shift from in-person to online learning. The Department of Mathematics was no exception. Department Chair Doron Levy and Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies Antoine Mellet took swift action to create a smooth transition for their instructors in a time full of chaos. Together, Levy and Mellet transferred 366 classes, 110 instructors and over 8,000 students to online learning. We spoke with Mellet and Lecturer Susan Mazzullo to learn about their experiences transitioning to online teaching, and what they will bring with them when the department resumes in-person classes in the fall.

How did you feel when you learned that classes were going online?

AM: It was intimidating having to handle such a big undertaking. I was not teaching at that time, but I was tapped to supervise the transition from in-person to online learning along with Chair Doron Levy. Doron was a very crucial force in getting this done. We actually started planning for the shift a few weeks before the campus went virtual. Doron and I were following the news stories about the coronavirus and thought that this might be something we would have to do. 

SM: I have taught online before, and in some of my classes I have done zoom “work” session classes and have found them very useful, but not to see the students in person at all was going to be tough. I just miss them terribly. There's something about being with the students in class and seeing their facial expressions and interacting in person. However, because we have tools like Zoom it cushioned the blow. You can ask the students to turn on their videos in Zoom if they want to, so you can see them and talk to them before class. Things like that helped me find new ways to engage with my students and made the shift a bit easier.

What was the transition from in-person to virtual teaching like?

AM: We spent the week of spring break and the week after, when classes were cancelled, making sure that all of the instructors were comfortable with teaching online. We formed a small committee of five of the more tech-savvy instructors and we met almost every day during the two weeks to create tutorials. We also held a meeting with all of the instructors to manage expectations. I think the initial reaction of a lot of my colleagues was that they were nervous about the idea of teaching online. We let everyone know that we didn’t expect anyone to become a master at online teaching overnight. 

SM: Our chair and associate chair, Doron and Antoine, facilitated the transition with such care and diligence, we were amazingly prepared for such a dramatic change in course dilivery. They great care with giving us all of the information and equipment needed to hold our classes online. I’ve done distance learning before, so I was familiar with the technology, but putting everything online was so much more work than anticipated, so having information and assistance available was so helpful. They created an online community for the lecturers to talk with one another, share our tips and techniques for online learning, and just help each other out. The transition was really quite a beautiful experience, and everything just came together so nicely. With such a horrible, horrendous situation, for beauty to come out of it is amazing.

What was the biggest challenge?

AM: The main challenge that we ran into was lack of student engagement and low attendance. Pre-pandemic, attendance wasn’t a huge issue, and it was strong at the start of virtual learning but began to drop off toward the end of the semester. Since attendance is important for student learning and making sure they are getting all that they can from the class, we set some guidelines regarding attendance by requiring every course to have one live meeting every week. That helped increase attendance in many of the cases. At the start of the fall semester, attendance wasn’t a major problem anymore.

Another big challenge for us was exams. In a normal classroom setting, we would hold exams in person with no notes and no textbook. Once we started virtual learning, we had to accept that students would likely look to their books for assistance. For smaller classes, we started doing live exams on Zoom, which worked really well. It is much harder for students to go through their textbooks to find answers when you can see them through their cameras. For larger classes, many exams were timed. Students may have been able to look up some answers in their book or online, but with the time given, they would not have been able to do that for all of them.

SM: Not being able to see the students in person is very difficult. When you’re teaching in person, you can look at a student and kind of tell when they’re not getting something and then find a way to explain it better to them. Also, students can come up to you after class and ask questions, but on Zoom it’s just different. 

I do office hours and test reviews via Zoom where I can talk with and connect with students. But the most helpful thing has been telling the students at least once a week that they can turn their cameras on so we can say hello and see each other’s faces. A lot of students will participate, and some might even have their hair all crumpled, still in their pajamas, but they were there and participating—I love it. It helped bring back the human element of teaching and I could feel the personality of each student and the class as a whole. 

Is there anything from online teaching during the pandemic that you will carry over when in-person math classes resume?

AM: I think that before 2020, technology was slowly making its way into math classrooms. The pandemic has accelerated this movement and some of these tools will stay with us. For example, the collection of homework assignments online, which allows us to get the homework straight from the students to the grader, will likely be used post-pandemic. I also wouldn’t be surprised if some instructors occasionally post short videos for students to watch before or after class. These takeaways from the pandemic will allow us to all become more dynamic instructors going forward. But I think that these semesters of online teaching made it clear that, for most instructors and most students, in-person classes and the connections that are made in them are very valuable and not easily replaced.

SM: I am going to love seeing the students in person! I have missed the in-class contact that builds relationships. This year has encouraged me to continue what I had been doing before the pandemic, but with more, if not all, of my classes. Before the pandemic, I would do an online workshop class about once a week or once every other week for my upper-level classes. When I started these workshops, I found that students who did not like to engage in person seemed to engage more online. I have a feeling that if I have online workshops and in-person classes for all of my courses, then I will be able to actively engage a greater number of students overall. The more ways I am able to engage my students and excite them about math, the better. I am excited to test my theory!

Music, biking and family keep former mathematics department chair busy

When Scott Wolpert first heard his two tween daughters practicing clarinet, it was like a squeaky, off-key invitation to join them.

“I was listening to them and thinking, ‘I’m sure I can play like that,’” Wolpert remembered. “So, I started taking lessons with them.”

That was more than 20 years ago, and Wolpert, who retired from the University of Maryland as a professor emeritus of mathematics in September 2020, continued to take clarinet lessons on and off ever since. He is known for teaming up with other faculty members like Harry Tamvakis and Bill Goldman (who also happens to be his brother-in-law) to play music. Wolpert even convinced the chair’s office coordinator, Stephanie Padgett, to perform with him at the department holiday party in 2017, her first year at UMD.

That was “classic Wolpert,” according to Wolpert’s colleagues who gathered on Zoom for a virtual conference in March 2021 to celebrate his retirement and 70th birthday. “He’s such a nice guy, he’s hard to say no to,” one of the participants remarked as others chuckled in agreement. 

More than just a nice guy, Wolpert is also an accomplished mathematician and a dedicated educator who made significant contributions to the university and the department. During his tenure as department chair from 2013 to 2019, the number of math majors increased by 31%, including a 23% increase in women. The number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in mathematics also grew, with a 48% increase overall and a 57% increase in the number awarded to women. Wolpert also hired eight assistant professors and 15 long-term lecturers, and the annual credit hours taught by mathematics increased by 12,000 during his leadership.

As the associate dean for undergraduate studies from 2000 to 2009, Wolpert was instrumental in reorganizing the campus Individual Studies Program, which enables students to customize their major to their own cross-disciplinary interests. He also cultivated stronger relationships with community colleges to encourage their students to continue their education at UMD. As a professor in the 1990s, Wolpert introduced a calculus workshop aimed specifically at helping underrepresented minorities succeed in calculus.

For these and other contributions, Wolpert received a UMD Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award in 1992-93 and the Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award in 2016. 

Wolpert came to UMD in 1976 as an assistant professor, after earning his M.S. and Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University. He earned his B.S. in mathematics from Johns Hopkins University. A Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship, Wolpert’s research focused on the geometry of hyperbolic shapes—think of the shape of a concave disc or a saddle. Among his peers in hyperbolic geometry, he is best known for a collection of findings about how changes in shape affect the path of light across a surface. 

In the broader math world, Wolpert is known for helping to answer the question of whether mathematicians could predict the shape of a drum based on the sound it makes. For most drum shapes, Wolpert found, they can’t. It’s an important question with practical implications for any technology that analyzes signals resonating off a surface, like an MRI for medical imaging. 

But when asked what he is most proud of, Wolpert refers to his accomplishments as an educator and administrator. He is adamant about the importance of focusing on the student experience. 

“On a day-to-day basis, the most important thing a faculty member does is teaching in the classroom,” he said. “Even my colleagues who are hardcore focused on their research totally agree with that statement.”

Wolpert traces his passion for math education to the influence of excellent teachers, especially math teachers, throughout his high school years. They helped him recognize the importance of an effective learning environment and good mentors. It also helped that he grew up in a mechanically inclined family. His father was an engineer who always spoke highly of mathematics, and his mother was a registered nurse and a homemaker with a talent for sewing who instilled in him a curiosity for how things work. 

“Sometimes when my mom was using her sewing machine, she'd say, ‘Hear that sound, that means it needs to be oiled,’” Wolpert remembered. “And she’d get out her oil can and just flip this old Singer over and point to where it needed oil. So, there was always an inclination toward the mechanical growing up.”  

Wolpert may have had strong influences directing him toward a STEM career, but there was always something about mathematics in particular that appealed to him.

“I've always loved what mathematicians call the purity of it,” he said. “For example, when you talk about points and lines and planes, these are pure concepts. We know what they are. We don’t need a model to understand them. And as mathematicians, we don’t need them to physically exist to work with them. I was always fascinated by that aspect of math.”

In his retirement, Wolpert continues to be involved with mathematics education as a senior consultant for Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics (TPSE Math). Directed by William Kirwan, University System of Maryland chancellor emeritus and UMD professor emeritus of mathematics, TPSE Math promotes activities that prepare students to use mathematics productively regardless of the field they choose. 

“We want to make sure that the math curriculum at universities gives students the skills and know-how to take advantage of the opportunities available to them in today’s job market,” Wolpert said. “This aligns with the kind of work that I’ve always done, so I’m very committed to continuing with this goal.”

In addition to spending more time with TPSE Math since he retired, Wolpert spends much more time on his bicycle. He’s always been an avid bicyclist, riding both road and mountain bikes. In the past few years, he focused on road riding, and throughout much of 2020, Wolpert and his daughter biked together daily, averaging around 80 miles a week. 

And, of course, he’s taking music lessons. In fact, his daughters convinced him to start his own YouTube channel to share his practice sessions. It’s called “Baroque my heart.” So far, he hasn’t persuaded any other faculty members to join him in his videos, but he’s just getting started and he’s looking for a vocalist.

Written by Kimbra Cutlip  

The Distinguished University Professor will deliver the prestigious Gibbs Lecture at the 2022 American Mathematical Society meeting

Eitan Tadmor will tell you that success in mathematics comes not from calculating the correct answer, but from finding the right question. 

“I could ask a million questions and do the calculations to answer them, but this is not the point,” said Tadmor, who is a Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics at the University of Maryland. “The point is to find the most natural question. Maybe you start with one idea and you see your question needs to be reformulated, maybe relaxed, maybe strengthened. You try different approaches until you get the right equilibrium.”

When the question is right, everything falls into place. Tadmor likens it to a composer striking the perfect combination of piano keys to complete a beautiful symphony. 

“It doesn’t happen many times, but when you get it right, the feeling in that exact moment is incomparable,” he said. 

Tadmor has experienced that feeling of success on more than one occasion. His ideas on the theory and computation of differential equations have contributed to groundbreaking results in multiple arenas, from shock waves and digital image processing to flocking behavior and emerging consensus of opinions.

Well-known and respected for his contributions to mathematics and his leadership in the field, Tadmor was invited by the American Mathematical Society to give the prestigious Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture in 2022. He will be the fourth Gibbs Lecturer on the UMD faculty, following in the footsteps of Jan Burgers in 1959, Elliott Montroll in 1982 and Michael Fisher in 1992. The public lecture, which over the years has been given by Fields medalists and Nobel laureates, including Albert Einstein, was established in 1923 to share mathematics’ important societal contributions with the public. 

It should come as no surprise that Tadmor was selected. His research has addressed issues at the forefront of many fields of scientific research important to modern society. And throughout his career, he has been instrumental in fostering collaborations across disciplines that apply mathematics to some of society’s most pressing concerns.

His current research in kinetic theory uses mathematics to describe and model how small fluctuations translate into the properties observed in large systems. One example of kinetic theory is how flocks of birds appear to move as one flowing entity even though each bird behaves as an individual and is aware only of the movement of its neighbors. 

Tadmor recently became interested in using kinetic descriptions to understand how groups of people form consensus. He is finding, for example, that consensus is more likely to form in communities whose members tend to seek out other individuals with views that differ from their own, compared with communities where members seek out others with the same opinions.

“It’s fascinating that when I started talking to people about this work of so-called collective dynamics, I realized that almost everyone has an opinion about opinions,” Tadmor said. “This topic is very important to people, and it is way more engaging to the general public than anything I have done before.” 

Understanding how large groups of people form opinions and build consensus is increasingly important in the age of social media and political division around the globe. Tadmor’s research in this area will be especially appropriate for his Gibbs Lecture, which draws a large public audience. 

Coincidentally, Tadmor has a direct connection to the mathematical work of Josiah Gibbs, the namesake of the talk. Gibbs was a highly esteemed American mathematical physicist, who first pointed out one of the key challenges in using high-resolution mathematical descriptions of shock waves—something Tadmor helped find a solution for early in his career. 

Shock waves are formed by passing through sharp transitions, the way a supersonic jet creates a shock wave when it accelerates beyond the speed of sound. The sound barrier the jet passes through may be invisible, but the transition is real and distinct. And that type of sharp transition creates challenges for mathematicians trying to make computations to describe shock waves at high resolution. Those challenges are known as Gibbs oscillations because Gibbs described them in 1899. In the 1980s, Tadmor was among the mathematicians who helped overcome the challenges created by Gibbs’ oscillations. 

More than a decade later, Tadmor applied the same theory and technology he used to compute shock waves to processing high-resolution digital images. He recognized that from a mathematical standpoint, the visual appearance of edges in images—the edge of a nose or the outline of a jaw, for example—could be handled much like the sharp transitions of a shock wave. 

Digital images are made of thousands of tiny pixels on a screen or page, and it is the sharp variation in the intensity of side-by-side pixels that gives the appearance of edges. To create high-resolution digital pictures, those sharp transitions must be managed mathematically during image processing. Tadmor accomplished that by introducing a novel method of processing images which uses hierarchical composition to adapt to the shockwave-like sharp transitions in images. 

Throughout his career, Tadmor has been known for thinking outside the box and for bringing experts from different disciplines together to help them apply rigorous mathematics to important scientific challenges. In 2002, he came to UMD to direct the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling (CSCAMM), which he led until 2016. CSCAMM encouraged cross-fertilization of research activities between different scientific fields utilizing scientific computation and mathematical modeling, which fit perfectly with Tadmor’s natural inclinations to create and foster cross-disciplinary collaborations. 

He also directed Ki-Net, a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded network for research and collaboration in kinetics descriptions and their applications, from 2012 to 2020. Tadmor established Ki-Net as an expansion of an NSF-funded focus group he led from 2008 to 2012.

Ki-Net brought together over 1,000 researchers—including physicists, chemists, socials scientists and mathematicians—who studied everything from how cells organize to form organs and tumors to how traffic flows to how weather develops and the dynamics of quantum systems. 

Prior to joining UMD, Tadmor co-founded the NSF-funded National Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA in 2001. With such a long track record of applying mathematics across many different disciplines, it might be easy to assume Tadmor is one of those mathematicians who sees the world largely through equations and numerical models. But he rejects that characterization. 

“Math is first and foremost a language,” he said. “It happens to be the language with which we effectively describe physical phenomena in our world, and it’s enriching to understand how these processes work. But there are many dialects to math, and I think the most fascinating aspect of mathematics is the imagination it requires. When you think about problems that are ignited by practical issues, and they translate into mathematical language, which is very formal, and then you have to use your imagination in order to reveal some sort of connection to or expansion of the underlying phenomena, I think it's fascinating.”

No matter what he’s doing, the language of mathematics is always running on a loop in the back of Tadmor’s mind. 

“I am definitively the person who wakes up every morning with my mind completely bothered by the problem that I was thinking about at the end of last night,” he said. “And this is fantastic, because it is like my hobby. I would be doing it no matter what. And here I am, getting paid to think about these things.”

Written by Kimbra Cutlip