A New Center for Mathematics

DARTMOUTH'S youthful yet nationally distinguished mathematics faculty moved last month into new quarters as modern and up-to-date as the "new mathematics" they teach in Hanover these days.

The occupied half of the mathematics psychology structure on Elm Street, just north of Baker Library, is the Albert Bradley Center for Mathematics, built with funds contributed by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and named for Albert Bradley '15, former chairman of the board of General Motors Corporation and until recently a Trustee of the College. The psychology half of the $1,450,000 project is scheduled to be put into use within the next month.

To mark the inauguration of the new Bradley Center a dedicatory conference on "New Directions in Mathematics" will be held there on November 3 and 4. Thirteen distinguished mathematicians will participate in four panel discussions that will be the highlights of the two-day program. They will attempt to chart the new directions to be taken by research and teaching in secondary-school mathematics, college mathematics, applied mathematics, and pure mathematics. The proceedings are expected to form the basis for a book.

"Mathematical knowledge has doubled in the past fifty years," says Prof. John G. Kemeny, chairman of Dartmouth's Mathematics Department, "and the next twenty years will probably see it double again. In view of the importance of mathematics as the 'language of science' in the Space Age and of the panelists' stature in the mathematical world, there is every reason to feel that their predictions will be of considerable importance to education and basic research."

Prof. A. W. Tucker, chairman of Princeton's mathematics department and president of the Mathematical Association of America, will be chairman of the panel on secondary-school mathematics. Panelists will be Prof. Leon Henkin, a logician from the University of California, now at the Institute for Advanced Study; Prof. E. E. Moise of Harvard; and W. E. Slesnick of St. Paul's School, author of math textbooks for secondary schools.

The college mathematics panel will have Professor Henkin as chairman. Panelists will be Prof. R. C. Buck of the University of Wisconsin, chairman of the MAA's Committee on the Undergraduate Program in Mathematics; Dr. H. O. Pollak of the Bell Telephone Laboratories, a member of CUPM's panel on physical sciences and engineering; and Prof. J. Laurie Snell of Dartmouth, whose specialty is probability theory and mathematical models.

The panelists dealing with applied mathematics will be Prof. Peter Lax of New York University, chairman; Prof. Mark Kac of The Rockefeller Institute, Dr. Pollak, and Professor Tucker.

Prof. Hazelton Mirkil of Dartmouth will serve as chairman of the panel on pure mathematics. The other participants will be Prof. S. Eilenberg, chairman of the mathematics department at Columbia University and a leading figure in the development of topology; Prof. Irving Kaplansky of the University of Chicago; and Professor Lax.

About sixty representatives of New England colleges, universities, and secondary schools will also participate in the conference.

The ceremony dedicating the Albert Bradley Center for Mathematics will take place on the first evening of the conference and will be held in the 200-seat lecture hall which links the mathematics and psychology units and which will be used by both departments when the building is fully in operation. Speakers at the dedication will include President Dickey, Professor Kemeny, and Alfred P. Sloan, a close personal friend of Mr. Bradley's and his long-time associate in the General Motors Corporation.

A separate dedication, following the Saturday morning panel, November 4, will take place in the Wallace Cook Memorial Mathematics Library. Located on the second floor of the Center and providing an attractive and convenient location for a selected mathematics library of about 8,000 volumes, the library was made possible by a gift from John Brown Cook '29 of Hamden, Conn., in memory of his father, Wallace Cook. The donor, who is president of the Whitney Blake Company of New Haven and the Reli- able Electric Company of Chicago, is past president and a trustee of the Library of International Relations in Chicago.

The Wallace Cook Memorial Library and a faculty lounge occupy most of the space on the Bradley Center's second floor, which also contains two sizable seminar rooms. The main floor of the four-story unit (see the floor plan below) is given over entirely to classrooms and the entrance lobby. The third and fourth floors contain the Math Department headquarters, seventeen faculty offices, six rooms for graduate Teaching Fellows, and an air-conditioned Computing Machine Room. A smaller computing laboratory is located on the basement level, where a double Project Room is also provided.

The Psychology Department will occupy the building facing on Elm Street, nearest Baker Library. The main entrance of the Bradley Center will be reached along a walk from North Main Street, but ramps at all four levels will connect the two units. The walkway at the second floor is glass-enclosed, and those at the third and fourth floors are open. The main connecting link, however, is the first-floor auditorium which has doorways at both ends, permitting a free flow of student traffic from the rear toward the front as classes change.

The architects of the structure, Peggy and Ted Hunter '3,8 of Hanover, one of the best-known architectural teams in the country, have been able to tailor the math and psychology buildings to the modern needs of the two departments. The separate yet cooperative arrangement serves as tangible evidence of the growing alliance between mathematics and the social sciences.

The "tangible evidence" as designed by the Hunters is one of the most modern and colorful buildings on the Dartmouth campus. Open and sun-lit, the new structure has granite facing over steel frame and masonry construction. The end walls have a facing of split granite from New Hampshire, and other walls have sawed granite from Vermont. Architectural terra cotta tiles of green and white, covering large areas of the exterior walls and some wall sections inside, are the most distinctive feature of the new center. The three connecting walkways, one enclosed and two open, are another contemporary touch that Dartmouth first acquired with the Choate Road dormitories.

The small auditorium serving both math and psychology classes also is a modern innovation for the College. Its plastic contour chairs (shown in the photo on Page 23) have a variety of colors, which serves an aesthetic purpose and also a practical one when it comes to spacing students during an examination.

The new mathematics facilities will be a boon not only to the Department's faculty members, who are increasingly making a name for themselves in the educational world, but also to the great majority of students coming to Dartmouth. A survey of a recent graduating class showed that better than 90% of its members took one or more math courses during the four undergraduate years, and math courses at Dartmouth are entirely elective. There are 625 math electives for the current term, which follows the pattern for 1960-61 when there were 1884 electives for the three terms.

The Department offers a basic sequence of four math courses and has honors sections for all four. It also offers an honors math major as well as the normal major, and a special two-term sequence for students in the biological and social sciences.

A two-year program for Teaching Fellows leads to the Master's degree in mathematics, and it is expected that the opening of the Bradley Center will give impetus to the Department's desire to carry the graduate program beyond the M.A. level.

IN THE PHOTO ABOVE, Robin Robinson '24, Professor of Mathematics and Registrar of the College, checks a seating plan in the auditorium of the new Albert Bradley Center for Mathematics prior to this month's dedication conference, of which he is general chairman.

Plan of the first floor of the new building, showing the psychology unit to the right, with entrance from Elm St., andthe math unit to the left, with entrance from North Main St.The large lecture hall serving both is the main link betweenthe two units, and there are connecting ramps at all five levels.