Canisius College, Buffalo, New York
Personal Web Page
Dr. L. Christine Kinsey
Title: Professor
Department: Mathematics & Statistics
phone:(716) 888-2814
Email : kinsey@canisius.edu
Current courses, Fall 2011
MAT 150: Math and Politics
MAT 181: Symmetry
MAT 331: Geometry
Upcoming courses, Spring 2011
MAT 150: Math and Politics
MAT 230: Logic, set theory, and proofs
HON 346: Mathematical Literature and Literary Mathematics (joint
with Dr. Rita Capezzi from the English Department): In this honors seminar we will explore some writers
who used mathematics and mathematical structures in their works. Among these writers are Raymond Queneau,
Georges Perec, Italo Calvino, Tom Stoppard, Claude Berge, and other members
of the Oulipo group.
MAT 380-381-480: Mathematics Seminar
This series of 1-credit seminars is taken during the junior and senior years.
They have been approved for Oral Communication credit.
In these courses, students are required to attend all of the talks given by the
seniors in MAT480 as well as occasional talks given by faculty and visitors.
They also meet once a week with the faculty supervisor and discuss and
evaluate these seminars. In addition, students will prepare and present
at least two 10-minute talks or one 20-minute talk accompanied by a
written paper covering the topic in more detail. These talks are to
be given to the other students in their section in MAT380-381 and to
the whole department in MAT480. Students will be instructed on information
literacy as it applies to mathematics and statistics and will develop skills
in reading mathematics and in presentation of ideas. Technical tools will be
demonstrated and the students will begin to use them, such as PowerPoint and
Beamer for presentations, LaTeX for writing complex mathematical expressions,
and Mathematica, MATLAB, Maple, and Geometer's Sketchpad for computation
and graphics. In addition, professional topics will be discussed, such as
careers in mathematics, graduate study, the GRE's, actuarial exams, and
the procedure for applying to summer research programs and graduate schools.
For more information, see
Seminar resources.
Textbooks
Topology of Surfaces, Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics, Springer-Verlag,
1993:
A text suitable for a sophomore-junior course in topology, including an
introduction to point-set topology, geometric topology of surfaces, and algebraic
topology in the form of integer homology groups.
Table of Contents for Topology of Surfaces
Symmetry, Shape, and Space (with Teresa Moore of Ithaca College), originally from
Key College Press, 2000, now published by John Wiley & Sons:
A text suitable for a liberal arts mathematics course or a course in geometry for
elementary education majors or students of the arts.
Table of Contents for Symmetry, Shape, and Space
Geometry and Symmetry (with Teresa Moore of Ithaca College
and Efstratios Prassidis of Canisius College and University of the Aegean), John Wiley & Sons, 2011: a textbook for
a junior-senior level geometry course for mathematics and math education
majors, including classical euclidean and non-euclidean geometry as well as
symmetries and transformation geometry.
Table of Contents for Geometry and Symmetry