THE INFORMER PAGE 5

DECEMBER 3, 1991

Pure & Applied Sciences:
Professional Development

The past year has been an active one in the area of
professional development for a number of faculty in the
Pure and Applied Sciences Division. Because these
activities cover a wide spectrum, we thought the College
community might be interested in some of the projects
that have recently been completed or are underway.
Some of these have been at least partially funded by the
College through grants from the Professional Develop-
ment Committee, individual department travel and
conference budgets, or both, and we would like to
acknowledge the College’s role in making these funds
available. Several of our faculty have travelled exten-
sively this past summer as advisors or teachers in their
disciplines, while others have been engaged in innova-
tive and highly interesting projects closer to home.

Three faculty members in the Pure and Applied
Sciences Division participated in the Eastern Indonesia
Universities Development Project (EIUDP), an aid
project jointly funded by the Government of Canada,
through the Canadian International Development
Agency (CIDA), and the Government of Indonesia.
Each partner in the five-year project is contributing
$25,000,000. The principal aims of the project are to
raise the level of basic sciences and to improve English
language education in universities in Sulawesi (ex
Celebes), Irian Jaya (western half of New Guinea) and
other eastern Indonesian islands. To this end, faculty
in those universities have taken short courses, seminars
and other kinds of training in Indonesia. Other faculty
have come to various universities in Canada as fellow-
ship students to take graduate degrees and diplomas.
Simon Fraser University, which is under contract to
CIDA to provide short-term and long-term advisors to
the project, selected three members of the College’s
Pure and Applied Sciences Division to assist with the
project.

Ted Bentley (Mathematics) has been working on the
pre-calculus video tape series, “The Video Tutor”, which
was described in the last edition of The Informer.

For some time Mike Freeman (Physics) has been
studying fractals, a new kind of mathematical object
that is used in modelling nature (mountains, clouds,
etc.) or that is interesting to study in its own right.
Mike has been exploring a group of fractals called the
Mandelbrot Set, a structure that is too exotic to be a
model for anything in nature but which can yield stun-
ning images when generated on a computer. To create
such an image, one evaluates a simple mathematical
function over and over again, feeding the result of one
evaluation into the next. Mike has been using a some-
what obscure elliptic function which was developed in

Dr. Keith Wade with rare endemic green sword plant, Waimea
Canyon, Kauai. May 1991

the 19th century and has been neglected since then.
Mike’s work and images will be published in Amygdala,
a journal which provides a forum for non-mathemati-
cians interested in the Mandelbrot Set. If you would
like to explore fractals on your IBM or Macintosh, Mike
has some excellent public domain software which he
would be happy to share.

Mike Freeman, Stan Greenspoon and Dan
Ciarniello (Physics) attended the summer meeting of
the American Association of Physics Teachers (AAPT)
at the University of British Columbia and the meeting
of the B. C. section of the AAPT at the University of
Victoria.

Alan Gilchrist (Chemistry) attended the 18th annual
College Chemistry Canada Conference at Champlain
College in Quebec City from June 13 to 15. The theme
of the conference was “Chemistry and the Environ-
mental Challenge.” Alan gave a talk, entitled “Chemis-
try in a Canadian Context,” which he presented as two
distinct parts, “Canadian Chemistry as a Teaching
Aid?” and, in keeping with the conference theme,
“Environmental Aspects.”

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