Mathematics at Westmont
You belong to a supportive community of mathematicians becoming fluent in the language of the natural world. You look beyond numbers and formulas to abstract patterns, using your imagination and stretching your creativity. As you develop deeper understanding of the fundamentals of mathematics, you’ll become a well-educated and well-rounded person. Through your classes and work on research projects, you’ll gain knowledge and skills that make you a better thinker and communicator and prepare you for interesting and rewarding careers.
Mathematics
Do you value rigorous academics? Like a challenge? Seek to understand the common threads running through every discipline?
Mathematics Education
Do you enjoy working with young people? Do you want to share your love of mathematics with others? Through the Math Education Fast Track you can earn a junior high and high school teaching credential in mathematics in just four years.
Faculty
The mathematics faculty at Westmont excel in both research and pedagogy. The department provides a world class education with innovative and evidence-based instructional practices designed to foster the ability to think critically and communicate effectively. Faculty are currently researching in the areas of machine learning, interpretable artificial intelligence, fractal processes, complex analysis, algebraic geometry, and the history of mathematics.
Highlights of Westmont Mathematics
RESEARCH
The mathematics faculty at Westmont are active researchers in their fields and are involved in many fascinating projects!
Dr. Aboud works with a research group studying heat diffusion across fractal domains. Remarkably, the same set of equations governing this process also dictates how information flows across computer networks and also how current flows through an electric network. These connections have led to fruitful and fascinating collaboration between mathematicians, engineers, and theoretical computer scientists.
Nonperiodic tilings, such as the Penrose tiling, have enjoyed fruitful study in Euclidean space where their structure can be studied from the perspective of algebraic topology. Dr. Hansen's research group has extended some of this theory from the "flat" world of Euclidean space to the "curved" world of what are called "nilpotent Lie groups." They plan to compute the cohomology ring of a tiling space on the Heisenberg group in an effort to better understand the properties of such tilings.
An interesting question grew out of an article published by Dr. Howell and three Westmont students in the February 2025 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly (doi=https://doi.org/10.1080/
Dr. Hunter researches and experiments with pedagogical methods related to inclusive teaching, active learning, and alternative grading.
Dr. van der Walt combines classical approximation theory with advances in machine learning, and uses these in applications in the medical field and signal processing space. She is also interested in dimensionality reduction and visualization of higher dimensional data.
STUDENT AWARDS & SCHOLARSHIPS
Howell Scholars Program
The Westmont Mathematics and Computer Science department will soon be opening applications for the Howell Scholars program for students who are considering attending Westmont in the fall of 2026.
This scholarship was created to attract passionate and talented students who want to attend Westmont to study mathematics. It is named in honor of Dr. Russell Howell, a beloved professor in the mathematics department who has worked tirelessly to support Westmont students in their pursuit of mathematics, including fundraising, pursuing excellence in the classroom, and regularly mentoring exceptional undergraduate research.
The application deadline will be announced soon.
Apply for Howell Scholars Program
2025 Howell Scholars
Congratulations to the 2025 Howell Scholars: Erik Potts, Riley Vaughan, and Asher Agol!
CAREER PATHS
Interested in pursuing a career based on solving complex problems?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment occupations that require a strong background in math or computer science continues to grow at faster than average rates. Our graduates find jobs in many areas, including:
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MATH FIELD DAY
Every year, Westmont students host a "Mathematics Field Day" for Santa Barbara high-school students.
Join us for challenging and thrilling events like Chalk Talk, College Bowl, Team Exam, and Awards Banquet.
Participants get an iconic shirt like one of these.
Learn More About Math Field Day
COMMUNITY TUTORING
The Mathematics Department maintains a list of Westmont students who are interested in tutoring community members in mathematics. For access to this list please contact our department administrator, Susan Leyva, at sleyva@westmont.edu.
ALUMNI HIGHLIGHTS
Bailey Hall ‘24 double majored in Mathematics and Data Analytics at Westmont. Her favorite memories in the department include attending the Women in Tech events, volunteering during the annual Mathematics Field Day, and the hours spent studying and chatting in the Math/CS lounge with other students and faculty in the department.
Currently, Bailey is at the University of Washington as a Postbaccalaureate Research Fellow through the Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery (A3D3) Institute. The research project she is involved in finds ways to implement variational recurrent neural networks (vRNNs) into FPGA systems for a real-time closed-loop Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) design, focusing on how Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems (LFADS) can interpret and predict neural activity data.
Looking forward, Bailey plans to build upon her foundation in Mathematics, Data Analytics, and research by pursuing a doctorate in Biostatistics.
MATHEMATICS NEWS
Bailey Hall ‘24 is at the University of Washington as a Postbaccalaureate Research Fellow through the Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery (A3D3) Institute. The research project she is involved in finds ways to implement variational recurrent neural networks (vRNNs) into FPGA systems for a real-time closed-loop Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) design, focusing on how Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems (LFADS) can interpret and predict neural activity data.
During Lauren Landa's internships at Toyota Racing Development, she worked on data analysis and automation projects to improve NASCAR race insights. In 2023, she cleaned and transcribed thousands of rows of race data to help train a live summary model and built a NASCAR crash prediction model with 96% accuracy. In 2024, she automated passing analysis with a new dashboard and continued working with live race data, while also meeting industry professionals to learn more about the field.
Kudos to Curtis Barnhart, Sam Tang (current students), and Isaac Jessop '23 who learned that a paper they submitted with Professor Russell Howell was accepted for publication by the American Mathematical Monthly, a highly-selective journal that has less than a 10% acceptance rate. Their paper was based on research that took place last summer with funds from Westmont to support their work. Entitled "Flip a Coin, Get an Annular Function?" their article investigates the probability of whether randomly-generated functions of complex numbers (sometimes called imaginary numbers) have a specialized property.
Ten students and three faculty members were among nearly 6,000 other mathematicians at the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings, hosted by the American Mathematical Society.
Russell Howell delivered a paper, “Revitalizing Complex Analysis,” at the 21st biennial conference of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences (ACMS) in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. At that meeting the ACMS board selected Russ to be the editor of their conference Proceedings, which has now become a peer-reviewed journal. Ray Rosentrater gave a talk at the same conference, “Bicycle Routes and Euler Double Paths.”
David Hunter’s research students from summer 2016 presented their work at the Southern California-Nevada Section Meeting of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) at CSU Northridge in spring 2017. McKalie Drown gave a talk, “Smoothing Binned Data by Recursive Subdivision: Estimating Income Inequality.” Emma Donelson and Bethany Le presented a poster, “Using Quaternions to Improve Statistical Analysis in SO(3): A New Two-Sample Hypothesis Test for Orientation Data.” MAA’s Tensor Foundation Women in Mathematics Grant provided partial funding for these research projects. In addition, Russ Howell’s student David Kyle gave a talk on his complex analysis research, “The Count of Monte Disco,” while Kyle Hansen, Olivia Hughes and Samuel Muthiah presented posters on their work in the 2016 spring semester Problem Solving seminar.
A MESSAGE FROM THE MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT
COME SEE FOR YOURSELF
Visit & Receive a
$1,000 SCHOLARSHIP
2025 applicants can receive $1,000 in additional aid for coming for an official admissions visit to campus!