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[Davide P. Cervone]
Davide P. Cervone

Title: Postdoctoral Fellow
Dates: August 8, 1993 -- August 8, 1996
Currently at: Union College
E-mail: dpvc@geom.umn.edu
Personal Homepage: http://www.union.edu/~cervoned/

Activities at the Geometry Center

Aside from Davide's research and teaching duties, he was active in several software development projects, including: the Pisces project, where he designed an adaptive-mesh algorithm for computing level-sets of functions in arbitrary dimension and co-dimension that pays particular attention to singularities; and the Geomview project, where he developed external modules for Geomview that provide a scripting language for making videotapes and electronic movies, and for manipulating parametric surfaces in arbitrary dimensions.

Davide was in charge of the Web project at the Center. This involved overseeing our entire web site, from its day-to-day maintenance to planning future initiatives. He is particularly interested in issues of communicating mathematics electronically, and has supervised several efforts in this direction, including the beginnings of an electronic reference library that features geometric facts and formulas, a graphics archive, and an interactive "visual dictionary" of important mathematical objects. Davide was also involved in a joint project between the Geometry Center and the MAA to implement a totally electronic journal specifically for developing innovative techniques in communicating mathematics using hypertext and multimedia documents.

In the 1994-95 academic year, Davide taught a section of third semester calculus for the University of Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Program (UMTYMP) that included a strong geometric outlook, and a computer-based lab component. Students prepared final group projects using technology, and several are available from our pages that feature student work.

Background

Davide received his B.A. from Williams College in 1984. His undergraduate thesis concerned short cycles and graph coloring on the torus. After graduating from college, Davide was hired as a consultant at the User Services division of the University of Rochester Computing Center. He was promoted to VAX/VMS Group Leader and then Consulting Group Leader before he left the Computing Center to attend graduate school. He recived his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1993 under the direction of Thomas Banchoff. His thesis investigated polyhedral immersions of surfaces with a minimum number of vertices. He joined the Geometry Center as a postdoc in the fall of 1993.

Education

Ph.D. in Mathematics, 1993
Brown University, Providence, RI
Thesis: "Vertex-minimal simplicial immersions of surfaces in three-space"
Advisor: Thomas F. Banchoff

B.A. in Mathematics, 1984
Williams College, Williamstown MA
Thesis: "Graph coloring and short cycles on the torus"
Advisor: William Lenhart

Professional Experience

Employment

8/93 -- 8/96, Postdoctoral Research Fellow
The Geometry Center
University of Minnesota

6/92 -- 8/92, Research Assistant
9/89 -- 9/90, Department Computing Coordinator
Department of Mathematics
Brown University, Providence, RI

10/85 -- 7/88, VAX/VMS group leader, consulting group leader
8/84 -- 10/85 User Services consultant
University of Rochester, Rochester, NY


Publications

A tight polyhedral immersion of the real projective plane with one handle, submitted for publication in Commentarii Mathematici Helvetici;
see also the URL "http://www.geom.uiuc.edu/locate/rp2-handle".

"Tightness for smooth and polyhedral immersions of the real projective plane with one handle", to appear in Tight and Taut Submanifolds, Proceedings of the Mathematics Sciences Research Institute, ed. T. E. Cecil and S.-S. Chern.

Tight immersions of simplicial surfaces into three-space, to appear in Topology.

Vertex-minimal simplicial immersions of the Klein bottle in three-space, Geometriae Dedicata 50 (1994) 117-141.

with T.F. Banchoff, Illustrating Beyond the Third Dimension, Leonardo, special issue: Visual Mathematics, 25 (1992) 273-280.


Recent Talks and Presentations

"A surprising tight polyhedral immersion: mathematics on the web", invited lecture
Visualizing Geometry conference, Rutgers University, Camden, March 1996.

"A tight polyhedral immersion of the real projective plane with one handle",
Joint Meetings of the AMS-MAA, Orlando, FL, January 1996.

"Gutenberg today: communicating mathematics in an electronic age", invited lecture
Mathematics Colloquium, St. Olaf College, 19 October 1995.

"A surprising tight polyhedral immersion", invited lecture
Meetings of the Clavius Group, University of Notre Dame, 13 July 1995.

"The National Science and Technology Center for the Computation of Geometric Structures: a postdoc's perspective", invited lecture
Texas Geometry and Topology Conference, Texas A & M, 12 November 1994.

"Tight immersions of simplicial surfaces into three-space",
Geometric Analysis seminar, University of Minnesota, 14 January 1994.

"Vertex-minimal immersions of simplicial surfaces into three-space",
Geometric Analysis seminar, University of Minnesota, 7 January 1994.

"Vertex-minimal immersions of the Klein bottle into three-space",
Joint meetings of the AMS-MAA, San Antonio, CA, 15 January 1993.

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Created: Nov 19 1995 --- Last modified: Oct 24 1997