I am thrilled to welcome a high caliber class of new faculty to the College this fall. Arts & Sciences is fortunate to have 42 new faculty (professors and lecturers) joining us as the semester starts. Over the next few blogs, I hope to acquaint readers with these new additions to the A&S team.
Allow me to introduce these new faculty members in the Departments of Mathematics and Statistics.
Kathleen Ponto (Mathematics)
Every airport map has a "you are here" point. There is a theorem in topology that says this always must be the case. Kathleen Ponto studies what happens to these kinds of points when you consider more complicated spaces - more dimensions, more twists and turns. She is particularly interested in ways to describe how many "you are here" points there are for a given map. These types of questions originally came up in geometric topology. Kathleen uses techniques from algebraic topology (especially stable homotopy theory) and higher category theory in her approach.
Matthew Schofield (Statistics)