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University of Waterloo -- Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
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Wednesday, August 13, 1997

Math competition founders honoured

Three UW professors and a high school colleague who initiated the Canadian Mathematics Competition have been honoured by the Canadian Mathematical Society.

Winners of the 1997 Adrien Pouliot Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education are Ron Scoins, associate dean of math (external relations), retired math faculty members Ed Anderson and Ron Dunkley, along with retired high school teacher, Don Attridge, for "...the UW team's pioneering work in the creation and development of the Canadian Mathematics Competition, and their central and essential role in its growth to the present -- contributions that have spanned 35 years. The various contests now involve over 200,000 student participants in schools across Canada, and many teachers in various schools and universities".

The foursome were all high school teachers when they started the competition in 1962 as the District 10 Mathematics Contest -- of which Jim Robinson, then a Grade 10 student at Wingham District High School, and now chair of the environment and resources studies department at UW, was the first winner. Over the years the contest has expanded to include the Gauss (grades 7 and 8), Pascal (grade 9), Cayley (grade 10), Fermat (grade 11), Euclid (grade 12), Descartes (OAC), Invitational (grades 10, 11), and the Canadian Open, a new pre-Olympiad competition.

"...There has been a huge contribution of voluntary time -- countless weekends and evenings...(and) the logistical support required to run this operation is phenomenal," the CMS noted. In addition to enrichment benefits for high school students, the competition has fostered closer contact between the high school and university communities. "It has rested on the energies and imagination of this core team of individuals to make this work and keep it going over such a long time".

The Adrien Pouliot Award will be presented at the winter meeting of the CMS in December at the University of Victoria.

On Annie Oakley's birthday

Seek and ye shall find religious studies undergraduate officer, Cristina Vanin, in her new office at her new telephone extension number. She is now located at ext. 266 at St. Jerome's College room 113B, or at email cdvaninb@watarts.uwaterloo.ca.

A glitch on the news server trashed all postings on news.uwaterloo.ca from mid-afternoon Monday to mid-afternoon Tuesday, including Tuesday's Daily Bulletin. According to David Canzi, Information Systems and Technology systems programmer, "This was a result of an attempt to improve the performance of the news server so that it might be able to keep up with the news coming into UW from outside. We are about 32 hours behind. A fix has been applied to recognize locally created articles and handle them differently. Several test articles have been posted successfully since then".

Positions available this week

The human resources department is now accepting applications for these staff positions: The following temporary positions are also available: For more information, phone ext. 2524.

Waterloo Web site of the day

FROM BERLIN TO KITCHENER
http://www.lib.uwaterloo.ca/tour/Berlin/Berlin.html

Not so much a Web page as "an on-line exhibit", this site was created in 1995 when William Chadwick, of the department of drama and speech communication, gave the annual Faculty of Arts Lecture under the title "Turning History into Theatre: the Making of The Berlin Show." The lecture was based on Chadwick's experience in reseraching and writing first a book and later a play about the change of name from Berlin to Kitchener during the First World War.

Says Susan Saunders Bellingham, of the UW library's special collections department:

Among the archival documents consulted by Chadwick during his research were manuscript diaries, photographs, newspaper clippings and letters in the Breithaupt Hewetson Clark Collection in the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room. Acquired in 1989, this collection is rich in original and previously untapped resources and the on-line exhibit illustrates a sample of the first-hand evidence gleaned by Professor Chadwick from the these sources. The digitized pages from the May 1916 diaries of Willaim Henry Breithaupt, an opponent of the name change, describe the the destruction caused by soldiers at his Margaret Avenue house. Similarly, the February entries from the diary of his brother Louis Jacob Breithaupt describing one of the most infamous incidents that year -- the theft of the bust of Kaiser Wilhelm I -- make available for the first time to a world-wide audience original resources previously accessible only to on-site researchers.

Also available on-line are photographs from the Breithaupt family albums depicting soldiers marching down King Street and drilling in Victoria Park -- visual images which, due to their fragile nature, were limited in their availablity.

She says the site was created not just to show off Chadwick's research, but also "to make available for the first time a digitized selection of our paper-based archival and manuscript collections". The special collections department does have some other displays on the web, however, including "YWCA 1905-1995", presenting the history of the Kitchener YWCA.

Barbara Elve
bmelve@nh4.adm.uwaterloo.ca


TODAY IN UW HISTORY
August 13, 1962: Bob Mudie joins UW's staff as manager of food services.

Editor of the Daily Bulletin: Chris Redmond
Information and Public Affairs, University of Waterloo
credmond@watserv1.uwaterloo.ca -- (519) 888-4567 ext. 3004
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Copyright © 1997 University of Waterloo