James Callahan

Professor
Department of Mathematics and Statistics
Clark Science Center
Smith College
Northampton, MA 01063

Office

306 Burton Hall
VOICE: (413)-585-3863
FAX: (413)-585-3786

E-mail

My email address is callahan at math dot smith dot edu

The figure above shows portions of several hyperboloids (of one and two sheets) that occur as level surfaces of the function
f (x, y, z) = x2 + y2 - z2.

Fall 2009

Courses

MTH 114, Calculus: Differential Equations and Power Series, MWF 1:10-2:30

MTH 212, Calculus III, MWF 11:00-12:10

QBasic


Calculus in Context
The Five College Calculus Project

The complete text is now available here for free download online.

View the text and download individual chapters


The Geometry of Spacetime
An Introduction to Special and General Relativity
An Undergraduate Text in Mathematics

Listing by Springer Verlag

Errata file (to 12 July 2003), in PDF format.

Solution to Exercise 2, Section 6.5, page 326 (Proposition 6.14: The mixed Riemann curvature tensor is a (1,3) tensor), in PDF format


The four-vertex theorem

Evolute of an ellipse
Evolute of a tri-lobed curve
When the evolute has an inflection point
An evolute with only two vertices

Anamorphic chalk drawings


Instrumentation and Laboratory Improvement

The National Science Foundation awarded Smith College an ILI grant, Visualizing and Writing Mathematics, to equip computation classrooms for mathematics courses.


Protein Geometry

Protein Function and Structure


Distribution of Amino Acids

Here are two Mathematica notebooks that render Ramachandran plots as histograms. One has a resolution of 5 degrees and the other has a resolution of 10 degrees. The second is easier to view.

Here is a Perl script, IZAAK, that computes the dihedral angles Phi and Psi in a Ramachandram plot.

These files give the frequency of consecutive triplets of amino acids in proteins. The proteins in each case contain more than 100 amino acids.

The files in this directory identify the proteins in the SwissProt databank that contain identical triples of amino acids. For example, the file LLL-AC lists all proteins, by accession number, that contain a sequence of three Ls in a row. The number of proteins containing a given triple is shown below. (The full databank contains about 75,000 proteins.)

AAA 14883 CCC 365DDD 4729 EEE 9298 FFF 2008
GGG 9835 HHH 996 III 4339 KKK 7075 LLL 16740
MMM 536 NNN 3391 PPP 5475 QQQ 3676 RRR 6310
SSS 12189 TTT 6277 VVV 7819 WWW 96 YYY 1317


The Holy Grail

The geometry of the classification of real binary quartics

f(x, y) = ax4 + bx3y + cx2y2 + dxy3 + ey4


PolyServe, Melmark, and UNM Geology

PolyServe, a developer of high-performance network server software.

Melmark New England

The Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences of the University of New Mexico.

A view of the earth at night.

paintings


References