{"id":81668,"date":"2014-10-16T15:00:02","date_gmt":"2014-10-16T19:00:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/?p=81668"},"modified":"2016-07-01T11:14:09","modified_gmt":"2016-07-01T15:14:09","slug":"bates-welcomes-new-faculty-katharine-ott-mathematics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/10\/16\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-katharine-ott-mathematics\/","title":{"rendered":"Bates welcomes new faculty: Katharine Ott, mathematics"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_81669\" style=\"width: 630px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-81669\" class=\"size-large wp-image-81669\" src=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/10\/140819_Katharine_Ott_Tenure_43-Lo-620x413.jpg\" alt=\"Katharine Ott, assistant professor of mathematics. (Sarah Crosby\/Bates College)\" width=\"620\" height=\"413\" srcset=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/10\/140819_Katharine_Ott_Tenure_43-Lo-620x413.jpg 620w, https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/files\/2014\/10\/140819_Katharine_Ott_Tenure_43-Lo-300x200.jpg 300w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 620px) 100vw, 620px\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-81669\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Katharine Ott, assistant professor of mathematics. (Sarah Crosby\/Bates College)<\/p><\/div>\n<p>In July, Katharine Ott taught at a weeklong math retreat for high school girls.<\/p>\n<p>The Brown University retreat was intended to bolster girls&#8217; enthusiasm for math at the age when, research indicates, they often start losing it. The curriculum combined mathematics and computational studies.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;A lot of the girls had not done computer programming,&#8221; says Ott, who joined the Bates math faculty this fall as an assistant professor. &#8220;It was a great environment for them to get a taste of that and to see how mathematics and computation go together.&#8221;<\/p>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\" width=\"100%\" \/>\n<p><em>Read more profiles of tenure-track faculty new or returning to Bates in 2014:<\/em><\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/10\/24\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-brett-huggett-biology\/\">Brett Huggett, assistant professor of biology<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/09\/24\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-genevieve-robert-geology\/\">Genevi\u00e8ve Robert, assistant professor of geology<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/09\/17\/bates-welcomes-new-faculty-michael-rocque-sociology\/\">Michael Rocque, assistant professor of sociology<\/a><\/li>\n<li><a href=\"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2014\/10\/02\/bates-welcomes-returning-faculty-nathan-tefft-economics\/\">Nathan Tefft, assistant professor of economics<\/a><\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<hr style=\"width: 100%;\" width=\"100%\" \/>\n<p>Ott and her retreat students devoted a day to computer imaging. &#8220;That was really exciting,&#8221; she says, &#8220;because they see it all around them.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;We talked about image filters. You know, here they are, using Instagram on their smartphones all day long. But none of them thought that math had anything to do with it.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Ott is eager to contribute to Bates&#8217; strong track record in bringing more women into math, as well as students from other groups underrepresented in the field. She considers that work as much a part of her job as research and teaching. &#8220;Women are making slow gains&#8221; in the profession of mathematics, &#8220;but any way you look at it, women are not equally represented,&#8221; she says.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;Obviously there is no clear answer why \u2014 otherwise we would have fixed it,&#8221; she says. &#8220;I certainly want to do what I can to encourage girls, especially middle school and high school girls. That&#8217;s an age, perhaps, where we can make a difference.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>Active in the Association for Women in Mathematics, in 2011 and 2013 Ott organized a Sonia Kovalevsky High School Mathematics Day, the AWM&#8217;s longstanding workshop program for teenage girls, at her previous institution, the University of Kentucky.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;You don\u2019t expect them all to pursue math,&#8221; she allows, &#8220;but if they have a positive experience, then you hope that they&#8217;ll go to college and take that first or second math class. Then from there we can keep pushing things forward \u2014 and start evening things out.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A theoretical mathematician, Ott researches partial differential equations using tools from a branch of mathematics known as harmonic analysis. Partial differential equations can be used to understand dynamic phenomena in which multiple factors change at the same time &#8212; manifestations of sound, elasticity or heat, for instance.<\/p>\n<p>Supported by a three-year individual investigator award from the National Science Foundation, Ott studies &#8220;boundary value&#8221; problems. &#8220;I know certain information on the boundary of a domain,&#8221; she explains, &#8220;and I want to see if I can use that information to learn about what is happening inside the domain.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>For instance, if one knows the temperature of the walls, ceiling and floor of a room, and knows the physical laws that govern the transfer of heat, can an equation be devised to determine the temperature at any point inside the room?<\/p>\n<p>Ott relishes the potential for new discoveries in this branch of mathematics \u2014 as well as the creative and intellectual challenge of making those discoveries.<\/p>\n<p>As a teacher, she hopes to share the rewards of this process with her students. &#8220;You build a foundation of tools and knowledge,&#8221; she explains, &#8220;and you practice and train yourself to look to that toolbox to enable those leaps of understanding. That&#8217;s a hard place for students to get to,&#8221; she says.<\/p>\n<p>&#8220;So when students can do that, they get very excited, and as their teacher, I get pretty excited too. It&#8217;s fun to watch. I mean, it&#8217;s very rewarding to make those breakthroughs in mathematics.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p>A native of Cumberland, Maine, Ott earned a bachelor&#8217;s degree at Middlebury and a doctorate at the University of Virginia. She was at the University of Kentucky as a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow and an assistant professor of mathematics from 2008 until this year.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>New at Bates as an assistant professor of mathematics, Katharine Ott is eager to contribute to Bates&#8217; strong track record in bringing more women into math. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":105,"featured_media":81669,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[4,14],"tags":[10523,5764],"class_list":["post-81668","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-academic-life","category-faculty-staff","tag-katharine-ott","tag-mathematics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81668","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/105"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=81668"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81668\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":81848,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/81668\/revisions\/81848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/81669"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=81668"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=81668"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=81668"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}