 Dr. James Rauff
Professor of Mathematics
Academic Biography
Dr. James Rauff, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, was born and grew up in Detroit, Michigan where he attended public schools and graduated from Cass Technical High School. He went to Albion College (Albion, Michigan) where he earned a B.A. in mathematics with honors. His honors thesis described his algorithm for constructing ternary rings from fields of finite order. After graduation from Albion, he went to graduate school at the University of Wyoming (Laramie, Wyoming) where he earned an M.A. in mathematics. His specialty was mathematical logic and his thesis investigated some closure properties of existential Horn classes. He taught mathematics and astronomy in Wyoming and also worked in the University planetarium.
Rauff left Wyoming to take a position as a mathematics instructor at the College of Lake County (Grayslake, Illinois). While at the College of Lake County, Rauff used a sabbatical leave to earn an M.A. in anthropology at Loyola University-Chicago. His thesis was a commentary on the katun prophecies of the Paris Codex, a Maya hieroglyphic text. He also did archeological field work in Guatemala where he worked on the ceramic sequences at El Balsamo.
Professor Rauff took another leave of absence to attend Northwestern University (Evanston, Illinois) where he earned a Ph.D. in linguistics. His specialty was formal and computational linguistics. His dissertation explored the use of two-level grammars to automatically translate Chinese into English. He also did research on the formal syntactic patterns in the Harappan sign system. He taught introductory linguistics at Northwestern.
Rauff spent 15 years at the College of Lake County teaching courses in mathematics, computer programming, statistics, logic, anthropology, and archeology. He created several new courses for the college including discrete mathematics, anthropology and archeology.
Dr. Rauff came to Millikin as an associate professor in 1988. He teaches a wide variety of courses in mathematics including the liberal arts mathematics course (Math in the World), calculus, the theory of computation, the history of mathematics and the senior mathematics seminar in mathematical logic. He also teaches two mathematics seminars in the Honors Program. The infinity seminar examines the concepts of mathematical infinity, while the ethnomathematics seminar looks at mathematical ideas across cultures. Dr. Rauff received the Alpha Lambda Delta Outstanding Faculty Award in 1990 and the JMS Educator of the Year Award in 2003.
Dr. Rauff has directed nine James Millikin Scholars projects in mathematics and computer science and has served as secondary director on three other JMS projects. He serves as the faculty advisor for Amnesty International and Pi Mu Epsilon (the mathematics honorary).
Rauff served as the Director of the Writing across the Disciplines Program (1991-1994) and the Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science (2003-2006). He has served on many University councils, task forces and committees (including over a decade on the Honors Committee). In 1994 -1995 he directed an ethnographical study (funded by the Lilly Endowment) of Millikin student life. The resulting ethnography, written by students, has served as a model for similar studies at other Universities. In 1999 he delivered the Distinguished Faculty Lecture at Millikin's Honors Convocation.
Professor Rauff is a member of several professional organizations. These include the International Study Group on Ethnomathematics, the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, the Société Canadienne d'Histoire et de Philosophie des Mathématiques, the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics and the American Anthropological Association.
Professor Rauff is book review editor and referee for Mathematics and Computer Education, a book reviewer and referee for The Mathematics Teacher and a book reviewer for the American Mathematical Monthly and SIGACT News. He currently serves on the Advisory Board of the American Mathematical Competitions.
Professor Rauff has published 30 papers and 93 book reviews in state, national and international journals. He has written on a variety of topics including computer programming, automata theory, context-sensitive grammars, modeling ground-level ozone, ethnomathematics, the mathematics of language, using writing to learn mathematics, how belief effects mathematical reasoning, Warlpiri iconography, mathematics and religion, DNA computing, medicine wheels, and Papua New Guinea body counting systems. He has also published two books: Math Matters (Wiley 1996) and A Discrete Mathematics Study Guide (MacMillan, 1990). Dr. Rauff has given presentations on linguistics, computer science, mathematics, ethnomathematics and mathematics education at many state, national, and international conferences. He is currently studying how mathematical ideas are manifested in mythic narratives and artifacts in the ethnographical and archeological record.
Program of Research Achievment
Dr. James Rauff, a mathematician and anthropologist with 20 years of teaching and research experience at Millikin, has been engaged in the study of ethnomathematical topics beginning in 1981 as evidenced by his 7 conference presentations, 14 published journal articles, and 27 published book reviews of ethnomathematical topics.
As Dr. Rauff nicely documents his exploration of new scholarly territory, when he first began his work in ethnomathematics the field didn’t have a name. The term “ethnomathematics” was coined in 1984 and the first academic journal in the field appeared in 2006. Dr. Rauff’s work has contributed to both to the development of culturally-informed mathematics education as well as development of mathematical ideas in traditional and non-western cultures. He has had a particular focus on mathematical ideas found in iconography and mythic structures.
In addition to his publications, recognition of his work by peers is evidenced by an invitation from the editor of Natural History to write a review essay on ethnomathematics and his work as a reviewer for grant proposals in the field of ethnomathematics. Dr. Rauff’s scholarly work has also benefited Millikin students both through the development of two Honors Seminars in Mathematics and the JMS projects in ethnomathematics he has supervised. His recognition in 2003 as Educator of the Year by the JMS program was based upon student appreciation of one of the Honors Seminars. The committee felt Dr. Rauff’s scholarly work epitomized the criteria for the Research Achievement Award. |
