Bio

Bruce Torrence is the Garnett Professor of Mathematics and Chair of the Mathematics Department at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He has been teaching undergraduate mathematics with Mathematica since 1991, and is coauthor (with his wife and colleague Eve Torrence) of The Student’s Introduction to Mathematica. His interests include algebra and combinatorics, and the communication of mathematical ideas. He is currently co-editor of Math Horizons magazine.

Project: Operator Systems—An Initial Investigation

The purpose of this project is to investigate operator systems in an effort to understand the threshold between orderly and complex behavior. That is, some systems produce orderly behavior in the sense that the trees they produce exhibit a recursive regularity. But because operator systems are generalizations of systems that are known to be complex, there are instances that will exhibit complex behavior. What are the simplest such systems?

Favorite Three-Color Cellular Automaton

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