Department name change announced

It's official! We are now in the Department of Mathematics, Statistics, and Computer Science!

The department's name has been Mathematics since the math major was approved in 1903-04. As you may know, the Mathematics Program has a strong national reputation, and is known for its unusually large number of majors (about 60 math majors graduate per year), the high proportion of undergraduate math majors who go on to earn a Ph.D. (tops among small colleges and eleventh among all institutions during the 1990s), as well as its ability to draw students who don't fit the stereotypes of a mathematics major (you don't have to be a nerd to major in math here).

But Mathematics, Statistics, and CS are three different academic disciplines. When the programs in Statistics and CS began in the mid-1970s, their connections with mathematical thinking and mathematics professors made the Department of Mathematics a natural home for them. But nobody can consider Statistics or CS as sub-disciplines of Mathematics nowadays: Statistics seeks to learn from data, drawing motivation from interdisciplinary applications, and relying on experimental design and computation as well as Mathematics; and anyone familiar with the nature of CS knows that theory is only one aspect of CS, along with design and abstraction. Both Statistics and CS emerged with more and more distinct disciplinary identities at the undergraduate level throughout the last half of the 20th century.

This change in our department name recognizes evolutionary changes that have already taken place among our three programs, Mathematics, Statistics, and CS. But we remain the same department, still committed to serving all students interested in any of our three disciplines, whether as a major/concentration or just for a course or two.