TFBCON2003 (Students)

Steve then Steve now

Steve Lovett '95 I still remember with great fondness my first math class at Brown as a thought-he-knew-it-all freshman. Prof. Banchoff strode in the classroom, lectured for an hour with more vim than I'd ever seen in a professor, and concluded by posing the following riddle: what television series does the following surface z = -x4 + 4x2 - y2 correspond to? The fact that I still remember what happened during my first encounter with Prof. Banchoff is only a small symbol of how much I learned with him and how much he shaped me in the future. After that first math course, he invited me to work with him on his electronic math books project. As a student, I took three courses with Prof. Banchoff (Multivariable Calculus, Differential Geometry, Combinatorial Topology) and I can say without reservations that the Differential Geometry course stands in my memory as my favorite class out of all undergraduate and graduate life. As an assistant, I wrote some of the text and a large number of fnord modules for the electronic books which Prof. Banchoff — I still have trouble calling him Tom — used in differential geometry, Calculus 3 and the topology classes. The my research took me away from geometry and into algebraic geometry and representation theory, the problems Prof. Banchoff posed at various times still resurface in my mind from time to time. I still remember how to create out of those mathematics tinker sets the projection of a five dimensional cube into R3; Air France cups still linger in the back of my mind and you know, I still haven't found a torus knot with a torsion function that is negative everywhere. Furthermore, I continue to aspire to Prof. Banchoff's superior example of teaching and have tried to adopt some of his techniques. I have tried to imitate his ability to learn students' names within one or two days (I'm still working on it!); whenever possible, I try to spark an interested student to get beyond what one learns in class to exploring small research problems. . . When I think of someone I wish to model after, I always think about Prof. Banchoff. After a three year hiatus from academia after Brown, I started a graduate program at Northeastern University, completing my Ph.D. in June of 2003. Right now, I teach at Eastern Nazarene College in Quincy, MA. My research currently includes representations of quivers, orthogonal and symplectic representations of symmetric quivers, nilpotent orbits, quiver classes. . . — Steve Lovett October 2003 [Steve's web home page at Northeastern has additional information about him and his work.]

TFBCON2003 Web Pages Created: 11 Oct 2003 Last modified: Oct 27, 2003 8:20:20 AM Comments to: dpvc@union.edu

David Margolis, ScM '82 Student Assistants of TFB Emily Leventhal '00