A personal page for Mike May, S.J.

I received my B.A. in philosphy from Saint Louis University in 1981 and my Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California (Berkeley) in ring theory in 1988.  As a Jesuit, after teaching at Saint Louis University for a year I went to Weston School of Theology to study for an M.Div.  Since my ordination in 1993, I have been teaching at Saint Louis University.  I became department chair in 2000, with a 2 year break from that position to be interim dean of the college of Arts and Sciences.  As of July 1, 2011, I have happily joined the ranks of former chairs.

I have a longstanding interest in using technology in the teaching of mathematics.  My department adopted graphing calculators about the time I started teaching here.  I also started working with the CAS package Maple at about that time.  I have written several sets of Maple worksheets and have co-authored a book on using Maple.  With Dr. Blyth, I have co-presented 3 PREP workshops on using Maple to teach undergraduate courses.  We also co-presented PREP workshops on GeoGebra the last two summers.  Over the past 3 years I have run about 20 GeoGebra workshops in a number of settings.

While on sabbatical in 1999-2000 I taught myself JAVA in order to be able to write applets for use in teaching.  That started a process of accumulating applets and finding ways of creating and using them.  My current applet technologies are the use of Eigenware from Brown University for multivariable applets and GeoGebra for functions of a single variable.  Both of these technologies allow the creation of applets without working with JAVA directly.

In the department, we have been working with WebWork and MyMathLab for homework.  I am a WebWork trainer for the MAA.  I am starting to play with Sage.  One of my other projects is to develop material to teach business calculus assuming that the students all have laptops and are using a spreadsheet as their computational engine.