Who Will Be My Instructor?

Head Professor: Robert R. Curtis, Ph.D.

Robert completed his B.A. with Highest Honors in Mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 1987, followed by his M.A. and Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of California, San Diego, in 1993, writing in algebraic geometry with advisors George Kempf and Adrian Wadsworth.

Robert began 1991 teaching at Delta College in California, traveling one day to visit master teacher Phil Smith in his new mathematics computer lab at American River College in Sacramento. Phil's students were learning Calculus II using a new graphical computer algebra program called Theorist, accomplishing long u-substitution integration problems with drag-and-drop ease on the Macintosh, a coupling of computer algebra usage with visual and symbolic learning. The new field of Distance Mathematics Education was born from a single Mac computer in Delta colleague Chris Barker's office, empowering Theorist files to be click-launched on the World-Wide-Web via the new Netscape (now Firefox) browser.

In 1995, Robert moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to found MathMonkeys, and purchased Theorist in 1999, rebranding it to LiveMath. Robert continues to lead the programming team working on a Qt-based LiveMath to return it full multiplatform glory.

Robert co-founded the Distance Calculus program in 1997, originally at Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts; later moved to Shorter University in Georgia, and now at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island, USA, where Robert is the Head Professor and Program Director of the University College program.

Robert adapted the Calculus&Mathematica courseware series into LiveMath, as well as adding to further development of this wonderful curriculum series originally written by Bill Davis and Jerry Uhl, et al. Robert is currently working on the adaptation of the Alfred Grey's Differential Geometry Using Mathematica text to the Distance Calculus platform.

On a good day at low tide, Robert can be found at sunrise on a long beach walk with a thermos of coffee percolating new and interesting ways to experience mathematics empirically with computer algebra.

Primary Email: robert@distancecalculus.com

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Visiting Instructor: Samuel Hambleton, Ph.D.

Sam completed his B.Sc. with Honors in Mathematics at the University of Queensland, Australia (UQ), and his Ph.D. in Mathematics at UQ on algebraic number theory and geometry.

Sam completed a Graduate Diploma of Education at the same time and then began teaching Numerical Analysis and other Mathematics courses at UQ for several subsequent years.

From 2015, Sam worked with Hugh C. Williams on Cubic Fields with Geometry, published in 2018 on Algorithms for Cubic Number Fields, Algebraic Number Theory and some Algebraic Geometry in the special case associated with cubic fields.

From 2018, Sam started making YouTube videos on Mathematica and Mathematics teaching in his spare time, and plans to continue.

In 2021 Sam left the city for Queensland's Sunshine Coast and contributes to the local university UniSC and occasionally works for UQ. Sam has teaching experience in Calculus and Multivariate Calculus, Discrete Math, Differential Equations and Systems of ODEs, PDEs, Numerical Analysis, Linear Algebra, Abstract Algebra, Mathematics for Data Science, and more.

Dr. Hambleton is developing and co-teaching the new DMAT 225 - Computational Discrete Mathematics course.

Primary Email: sam@distancecalculus.com

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