Personal Statement: George DeRise
This February 2010 will mark the beginning of my 46th year of teaching. Forgive the review.
After graduating Brooklyn College (Feb 1965) I started teaching in a small private high school in Brooklyn N.Y., Borough Hall Academy, at $85 per week, teaching, if I recall, 9 periods with one hour for lunch. When I came back one day early the administrator said that I should patrol the halls. The last two periods of the day were a mixture of about eight students at various levels of mathematics ability with others independently studying biology and chemistry. I was told to circulate and do the best I could.
In the fall I became a Regular Substitute of the Board of Education of the City of New York (that is, I taught five regular classes every day, did lunchroom duty etc. but was not a “Regular”). I never heard of the school that I was assigned to, Haaren High School. Just off Hell’s Kitchen on 10th avenue and 58th street it was an all boys school. The ‘kids’ came from Haarlem, Chinatown, the West Side. After three years of being a ‘Substitute’ I passed the exam and became a ‘Regular’. I am in the beginning stages of writing a memoir on my experiences in that thirteen year stint of teaching. I believe, if published, it would put Frank McCourt’s Teacher Man to shame.
I had the great good fortune of having some excellent teachers, the historian Carl Boyer at Brooklyn College, Mary Dolciani, a dynamic lady who is still held with great respect in the educational field today. And Professor Robert Schatten who walked with the great Banach! I got my MA in Mathematics at Hunter College and afterwards took 15 credits at the prestigious Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
Due to personal difficulties in my life at that time, including the ‘tenure’ at Haaren, I dropped my mathematical studies, became obsessed with chess and practiced Kyokushinkai karate. I was a Mini-School Coordinator and Assistant Dean at various times in the school, but when you’re senior man in the department with about ten years experience a flag should come up. It was my great good fortune to meet my future wife Kathy and by 1978 with her help we moved out of “the Apple” and down South to Virginia where I was hired as an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Thomas Nelson Community College.
In the fall of 1979 I decided to take a Partial Differential Equations course at Old Dominion University. Inspired by a great teacher, Mark Dorrepaal, I began the arduous process of obtaining a PhD in Applied Mathematics. Juggling a full time teaching position, part time doctoral work, and a new family was only possible by the patience of my professors, particularly John Tweed and my Thesis Advisor John Adam. But it would never have been possible without the many sacrifices of my wife Kathy.
My key contribution as a college mathematics professor has been to bridge the gap between the elementary topics presented in the community college and the more advanced upper division and graduate level work in mathematics and physics at the university. Although I enjoy teaching mathematics at all levels, including elementary algebra, the main focus has been on the engineering and mathematics majors.
Since the acquisition of my Ph.D. in Computational and Applied Mathematics in 1990, I have been doing scholarly research on how the "pure" abstruse mathematical concepts are used to "explain" the real physical world, i.e. mathematical physics. I almost finished a book (although still in manuscript form) on this subject to show the engineering student the charm and beauty of applied mathematics. I offer qualified students the opportunity to do honors work. The student picks a topic relevant to the course and does independent research. Some projects that were successfully completed were Kepler's laws, elliptic functions, n dimensional geometry.
I spend many hours preparing for presentations at professional conferences. These lectures with titles like "Quarks, Quasars, Quandaries", "Non Euclidean Geometry and the Universe", "Quantum Mechanics as an honors topic in Linear Algebra" are always very well received. See Conference Presentations for the sundry of talks given in the past twenty years.
In the summer of 1995 I spent ten weeks at NASA Langley Research Center (having won an award as a faculty fellow). I worked with a team of scientists, mathematicians, engineers, and computer scientists on a "real life" problem; the optimal shape of an airfoil. The abstract mathematics and physics were applied to a problem with no answer in the back of the text; errors could have severe consequences. It is obvious how valuable this experience is for an instructor of future engineers.
I am about 80% finished with my book Math Geeks and Other Nerds, a collection of stories about mathematicians, physicists and chess players. These stories enhanced my lessons through the past years.
Experience
Education