David Wolfe is continuing his research in combinatorial game theory, a field of mathematics used to analyze two-person games.  His main focus has been to apply the theory to the ancient and popular Asian game of Go (or Wei-Chi).  He recently proved the Go endgame is PSPACE-hard. Practically, this implies that it is impossible to write a fast computer program to play the endgame perfectly. More profoundly, it proves that understanding the Go endgame is tantamount to understanding all space-efficient computation. This result, combined with his previous work on Go, expands both our knowledge of endgames which can be analyzed efficiently on a computer, as well as our knowledge of what can never be analyzed efficiently.

Along with teaching Calculus, Modern Algebra, Computer Science I Lab, and Problem Solving, Moira McDermott continues to do research in commutative algebra, focusing on a characteristic p method known as tight closure.  She is the advisor to the MCS Club and the coordinator of the mathematics competitions including the Putnam Exam.

Amos Ong does his research with his former adviser who is now in Japan.  He continues to look at his pseudo-vector bundles built from the Abel-Jacobi map of a Riemann surface for his research.  He is team-teaching with David Wolfe this J-term on C++ programming and enjoys learning from this computer science course.  In the Spring semester of 2001, he will be teaching precalculus and an advanced math course for physics and engineering.  He will also be teaching Computer Science II Lab.