Department of Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado-Boulder

(Vigre Regional meeting April 12, 2003 -University of Washington, Seattle)

Objectives of the Department of Applied Mathematics (APPM) at the University of Colorado-Boulder are (i) to teach our students well; (ii) to seek out and develop new, interesting applications of mathematics in other disciplines, (iii) to provide each student with a rich educational experience and (iv) to create new mathematics.

The NSF-sponsored VIGRE (Vertical InteGration of Research and Education) grant has completely changed the educational and research program in the Department. For example:

• The quality of our undergraduate majors is high. The combined GPA of our graduating seniors has been over 3.2 every year since 1995.
• Many of our majors participate in an intense, 4-day contest in mathematical modeling, competing with students from around the world. Our students have won this international competition four times in the last ten years.
• Even more of our students participate in nontrivial research projects, some of which lead to published papers in well-established scientific journals.
• A high percentage of our majors continue on to graduate school at prestigious universities.

Because of our quest to seek out and develop new, interesting applications of mathematics, the department engages actively in interdisciplinary work at many levels.

• Every APPM graduate student must take a year-long graduate sequence in some other discipline, in which mathematics is applied.
• The department maintains an active program of Affiliated Faculty, who reside in other departments across campus, who apply mathematics in their own disciplines, and who can direct the PhD theses of graduate students in applied mathematics. About 8 APPM graduate students are currently working on PhD theses under the direction of an affiliated faculty member in another department.
• In 2001-02, the department developed two new interdisciplinary graduate programs. One is a combined MA/MS in mathematical biology, in which an interested student takes three years to earn two master’s degrees, one from APPM and one from MCDB. The other program is in computational science and engineering (CSE); here a student earns a master’s degree in applied math on the way to a PhD in another discipline.

National rankings of departments are based primarily on research, and research is very important to this department.

• U.S. News and World Report ranked schools in applied mathematics for the first time in 2002. The ranking included schools with a separate Department of Applied Mathematics, like CU/Boulder and Caltech, as well as schools with a single Department of Mathematics, like Princeton and Berkeley. APPM tied for 21^st in this ranking. Among departments and colleges on the Boulder campus, only Physics ranked higher (at 20^th) in the U.S. News survey.
• The 2000 National Doctoral Program Survey ranked departments on the basis of how well the doctoral students in a department thought their own department prepared them. APPM ranked first among seven departments of applied mathematics in terms of “overall satisfaction”.
• The State of Colorado, through the CCHE, designated the PhD program in Applied Mathematics as a “Program of Excellence” in 1999, with an award scheduled to last until 2004. Only four departments or programs on the Boulder campus have received this designation.
• Based on data published annually by NSF among the 25 AAU universities with which CU regularly compares itself, APPM ranked 2^nd in terms of federally funded research dollars per faculty member.

To summarize, the Department of Applied Mathematics has achieved very high quality in both its teaching and its research and as the Department goes forward it seeks to build on its accomplishments.