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Not surprisingly, Sam Vandervelde enjoyed taking math contests while in high school and college. He is proud of winning ARML his senior year while attending Amherst County High School, as well as being selected for the 1989 IMO team which took 5th place in West Germany later that summer.
Dr. Vandervelde received his doctoral degree from the University of Chicago in June 2004 and is currently on the math faculty at St. Lawrence Univesity, New York. He teaches number theory, college geometry, combinatorics, and coaches the Putnam team, among other things. He also hopes to meet many past Mandelbrot participants and work together with them developing fascinating research projects. His mathematical interests include number theory, graph theory, and integer partitions. He also enjoys playing pickup soccer and singing in his church choir.
He resumed his graduate studies in 2001 after a five year stint teaching mathematics at The Roxbury Latin School, a private boys school in Boston for grades seven through twelve. While Dr. Vandervelde likes to think that his students will remember him for his lucid presentation of astoundingly interesting mathematical concepts, he suspects that they will sooner recall his somewhat creative teaching techniques, which included such events as the fall Bulls-eye Tic-tac-toe tournament, calculator licenses, and the ever popular game of Minions.
| As if dreaming up fiendishly difficult questions for the Mandelbrot Competition were not enough to keep him occupied, Sam is also the proud father of two not-so-little boys, born in August 2001 and April 2004. His older son's latest exploits include reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone on his own and creating fantastic flying machines out of Legos. Meanwhile the younger one proudly cruises the neighborhood on his bike, discusses words like “esophagus” with his summer camp soccer coach, and is looking forward to kindergarten this fall. July 2009 |
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