Ph.D. in Math

AN experimental graduate program lead. ing to the Ph.D. degree in mathematics has been approved by the Dartmouth Trustees ' and will be introduced next fall with a limited enrollment of twelve graduate students.

The new program will be the second at the doctoral level to be inaugurated by the College next fall. President Dickey two months ago announced a course of graduate study in molecular biology that will be offered by the Medical School and the College's Science Division and that will lead to the Ph.D. degree.

The primary purpose of the four-year graduate course in mathematics will be to qualify graduate students to teach mathematics at the college or university level. The Trustees, in approving the new program, specified that all candidates have a liberal arts background comparable to the one provided by Dartmouth and that this experience be actively advanced during graduate study. They also directed that the program must serve to strengthen undergraduate instruction in the College, and especially in the Mathematics Department.

To initiate this new program, the College will seek additional support from both private foundations and federal agencies. The need for more highly educated mathematicians is becoming critical, President Dickey said, and Dartmouth hopes to help meet the need through this program.

Although the graduate course is scheduled to begin next fall with an enrollment of twelve students, about 25 graduate students are expected to be included when the program is fully operational.

President Dickey explained that the new program will differ from the traditional Ph.D. work in the following ways:

(1) It will require greater mathematical breadth of its candidates than do the majority of Ph.D. programs.

(2) It implements a recent recommendation of the mathematical world that the concept of the Ph.D. thesis be broadened.

(3) It is designed to assure continuing close contact between students and the faculty.

(4) Every effort will be made to keep students to a four-year time limit. The delay in completion of the Ph.D. has been cited as a major problem in mathematical education.

The new program was proposed by the Mathematics Department and its chairman, Prof. John G. Kemeny, and was recommended to the Trustees by vote of the Dartmouth faculty. In explaining how the Dartmouth plan breaks new ground, Professor Kemeny said that the requirement that a doctoral candidate create new mathematical knowledge had forced many future teachers prematurely into narrow specialization, thus hampering them later when confronted with material outside their specialized areas.

Under the Dartmouth program, this concept would be broadened. The candidate must complete a thesis of publishable quality and defend it in an oral examination, but the thesis may be either a new mathematical theory or of a critical and expository nature or both.