The department would like to welcome Assistant Professor Adrianna Gillman to the Applied Mathematics faculty. Dr. Gillman received her B.S. and M.S. in Mathematics at California State University, Northridge (CSUN), then received her Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics here in the Department at CU in 2011. After being a Research Instructor at Dartmouth College, Dr. Gillman became an Assistant Professor at Rice University until this Fall when she joined the Applied Mathematics Department here at CU.
When asked about her work, Professor Gillman explained that her work “lies in the intersection of numerical PDEs and numerical linear algebra. What [she tries] to do is design algorithms that allow people to model things they couldn’t model otherwise or allow them to do simulations on a desktop computer that they would normally ship out to a supercomputer.”
Dr. Gillman is currently teaching Intermediate Numerical Analysis 1 and has taught many courses at Dartmouth and Rice, including Numerical Linear Algebra, Numerical Methods for PDEs, Differential Equations in Science and Engineering, Calculus, and Chaos Theory.
“I like teaching classes like numerical analysis and teaching calculus can be fun. I try to bring the applications in so that you can see where things are being used. Even in Calc 2, when we compute arc length, we compute the length of a slinky. We do it the engineer way, you have a circle and you count the number in the stack, and we do it the math way. I like classes where it’s easy to engage the students and show them where it’s easily applied.”
About her return to Colorado and to CU, Dr. Gillman expressed “I had wanted to come back to Colorado: I love it here and my family is here. The environment in the department is very unique; it’s very open, and as a grad student, I feel very well supported, and as a faculty member, I feel like all of my colleges appreciate my contributions and that everyone’s looking to move the department forward.”
If you would like to learn more about Dr. Gillman, check out her Profile in Applied Math.