Beneficiaries of Support
Duncan Melville holds the first Peterson Endowed Chair. A graduate
of the University of London, Melville earned two master's degrees and
the Ph.D. at Yale University. He joined the faculty at St. Lawrence
in 1991, and has published widely in mathematics, mathematics
history and philosophy.
Specific research fields of Melville's
include Lie algebras, Mesopotamian mathematics and ancient and classical
mathematics, and many of his most recent publications are on the
topic of quantum deformations.
Melville was the Frank P. Piskor Faculty Lecturer for 2005,
and gave a campus lecture in on the topic "Teaching
and Learning Mathematics in Mesopotamia."
“Scribes in Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) wrote on clay, which does
not perish when discarded, and so much of their writing has been preserved
for archaeologists to discover, including a number of mathematical
texts. In recent years, there has been a tremendous development in
understanding how mathematical knowledge was organized and transmitted the
ways in which students learned mathematics, the techniques used to
approach different mathematical problems, and the kinds of pedagogies
used by their teachers," he says.
The Piskor Lectureship itself is the result of philanthropy,
created to honor the late President Emeritus Frank P. Piskor upon
his 1980 retirement.
