Mathematician Colin Adams wins National Great Teacher Award

Media contact: Noelle Lemoine, communications assistant; tele: (413) 597-4277; email: [email protected]

WILLIAMSTOWN, Mass., April 28, 2003 — Williams College has received word that mathematician Colin Adams has been selected as the recipient of Baylor University’s Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teachers.

He was chosen on the basis of his “extraordinary teaching ability, record of positive, inspiring and long-lasting effects on students and his national and international achievements.” Adams will receive a prize of $15,000 and deliver a series of lectures at Baylor in September.

Adams previously was awarded the Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Distinguished Teaching Award of the Mathematics Association of America, recognizing Adams as “an innovative, demanding, and very popular teacher who has played a crucial role in the doubling of the enrollments in Williams mathematics classes and the tripling the number of majors.”

Adams specializes in topology, the study of those properties of geometric figures, which remain unchanged under distortion. His most recent research is in hyperbolic three-manifolds, curved 3-dimensional spaces that could model the spatial universe, and knot theory, a branch of mathematics that seeks to understand and categorize knots.

His 1994 book “The Knot Book: An Elementary Introduction to the Mathematical Theory of Knots” explains some of the more complex knot theory problems in accessible terms, as well as the application of this work to DNA research and synthetic chemistry.

He is also the humor columnist for the Mathematical Intelligencer, an expository mathematics magazine, and the co-author of “How to Ace Calculus: the Streetwise Guide,” a humorous supplement to calculus.

Adams has been teaching at Williams College since 1985. He has also taught at Oregon State University, the University of California at Santa Barbara and at Davis, and the Mathematics Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He received his B.S. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1978 and his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison in 1983.

The Cherry Award program is designed to honor great teachers, to stimulate discussion in the academy about the value of teaching, and to encourage departments and institutions to value their own great teachers. The first Robert Foster Cherry Award was made in 1991 and has since been awarded biennially.

Adams is the second professor from Williams College to win the Cherry Award. Robert Bell, the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of English, received the award in 1998.

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Published April 28, 2003