1. Name: Gerald Kruse, my friends
call me "Jerry." My students typically call me "Professor Kruse."
2. Email id: kruse@juniata.edu
3. POE: When I was an undergrad at
the University of Illinois, I majored in Computer Science. Since my program
was in the College of Engineering, I had a math course almost every semester
(the three course Calc sequence, Linear Algebra, Differential Equations, Prob
and Stats, and Linear Programming). In graduate school at Brown University,
I was in Applied Mathematics, so all my courses were math courses, although
many of them had a lot of computing too.
4. Expected Graduation Date: 1985
- University of Illinois, B.S. in C.S. 1993 - Brown University, Sc.M. in Applied
Math. 1997 - Brown University, Ph.D.
5. Why are you taking this class? I will answer the
question, "Why am I teaching this class?" instead. First of all, MA
103 is one of my favorite courses to teach. I think the material is really cool,
and it seems like each semester I teach the course, I notice something new and
exciting. I also enjoy the opportunity to meet many students from POE's outside
of the areas I normally teach in. It is very gratifying to help a student who
begins the course by reporting that they "are no good in math,"
or they "hate math," overcome these feelings and have a positive
and productive semester.
6. What are you hoping to get out of this class? I
will answer the question, "What I hope you get out of this class?"
instead. I hope you all learn to think critically about the quantitative information
you are exposed to daily. In addition, I hope that you increase your comfort
with mathematics and computations, and are able to apply your skills to solve
real-world problems.
7. Breifly describe your math background: When I was
in grade school, I was pretty average in arithmetic. In fourth grade I remember
having a "race" with my friend to complete our assigned addition and
multiplication problems. I remember "winning" the race but then discovering
that I got 11 of the 12 problems wrong! Oh man. Math first clicked for me in
7th grade. My teacher was tough, but I learned so much in his class. In high
school my favorite math class was Geometry, since I absolutely LOVED the logical
way to solve problems. As an undergrad, I enjoyed all my math courses. They weren't
really theoretical or proof-based, and most of the problems were computational,
so I appreciated having material that had a "right" answer. It was
especially fun to grind through all the steps. In grad school I got exposed
to higher level, theoretical math, and found the concepts fascinating. I learned
that "proof" is not a bad word...