John Diamantopoulos

Dr. Diamantopoulos' Recent Scholarly Activities

While intimately involved in many scholarly activities, many involving undergraduate students, a few of these will be highlighted here:

• OK-AR MAA Student Competitions
  Since spring 2008, we have started involving the undergraduates in competitions on the opening Thursday evening of our annual OK-AR MAA Section meeting.  The competition is in two parts: team Math Jeopardy and the individual Integration Bee.  One of our two student teams (Ryan Berkley, Rho Middleton and Joshua Killer) won second place in Math Jeopardy competition at the 2012 meeting, held at Henderson State University in Arkadelphia, AR.  In the spring 2011 meeting, we had a student (Wen Shao) tie for third place in the Integration Bee competition. 
  
  
• OK-AR MAA section webmaster
  Among the many services for the section, Dr. Diamantopoulos has served as section webmaster since 2005.  This began as simple maintenance and updates, but in 2007 he completely re-designed the entire website from the ground up.  The site is constantly modified, updated and improved.
  
  
• UnKnot Theory II
  In summer 2012, Dr. Diamantopoulos learned about possible funding from the NSF to support travel for himself and up to three students to attend the UnKnot Theory II conference to be held at Denison University in Granville, OH.  Upon finding three eager students (Blane Burge, Andrea Molder and Ida Etemad), funding was secured and we all attended this unique experience.  We were exposed to lectures and presentation from some of the nation's leading experts in Knot Theory as well as from undergraduate students from around the country that had participated in REU's in Knot Theory who presented some of their findings.  The students found this an incredible learning experience as they learned from the best and experienced an area of mathematics that our regular curriculum would not revealed.
   
• Exciting Campus Speakers
  To help motivate student interest and excitement for the wonderful area of Mathematics, Dr. Diamantopoulos is fond of bringing in world-class speakers from around the region (and around the nation, when possible) as well as traveling to other schools to present exciting talks for their student audiences.  It might not necessarily be a topic or lecture students couldn't have heard from their own professors, sometimes it is just hearing from a new/different mathematician who is excited about their topic of discussion that gets a group of students excited about mathematics.  It is precisely this that motivates Dr. Diamantopoulos to find new speakers and to present in new places (e.g., invited to present the student workshop at our 2009 OK-AR MAA section meeting).  One recent speaker of national prominence that Dr. Diamantopoulos arranged was Dr. Underwood Dudley who presented a stunning all-campus lecture in the WEBB Auditorium on "the Angle Trisectors"; this thrilling talk was thoroughly enjoyed by hundreds of faculty and staff.  He also recently had noted textbook author John Hornsby (retired) give a very humorous lecture "Math Class Returns to Hollywood" in the WEBB Auditorium (a follow-up to an earlier talk of the same type also enjoyed by hundreds.  He's also brought in speakers from OU, and Pittsburg State University for a variety of topics; often integrating them within Dr. de Banzie's Science Colloquium Series.