Mark Watkins, Professor
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Mark Watkins grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. He earned his AB at Amherst College in 1959, and MA in 1961 and Ph.D. at Yale University in 1964, working under Öystein Øre. He was an instructor 1963-1964 and assistant professor 1964-1968 at the University of North Carolina (Chapel Hill), then joined SU as Associate Professor in 1968 and was promoted to professor in 1976. He was a visiting associate professor at the University of Waterloo (Ontario) in 1967-1968, Gastprofessor at Technische Hochschule (now Technische Univeristät Wien) in Vienna 1973-1974, visiting professor at Waterloo in winter 1980, and professeur associé sur contingent national at Université Paris-Sud in January-June 1986. His research interests are combinatorics and graph theory. In addition to 53 papers, he has coauthored with Jack Graver the graduate text “Combinatorics with Emphasis in the Theory of Graphs” [Graduate Texts in Mathematics no. 54, Springer 1977 (351 pp.] and “Locally Finite, Planar Edge-Transitive Graphs” [Memoirs of the AMS vol. 126 no. 601, 1997 (75 pp.)]. The text was reviewed in the Bull. Amer. Math. Soc. 1 (1979), 380-388. The main result of his doctoral dissertation is a characterization of finite planar geodetic graph. His early papers concern connectivity in graphs, which evolved into the interaction of the connectivity and the automorphism group of a graph. He named the class of “generalized Peterson graphs”. Much of his work in the 1970’s concerned the graphical regular representation (GRR) problem, another term in use which he coined. By 1980 he had become interested in infinite graphs, and most of his work of the 1980’s concerns their end-structure and their automorphism group action. From the mid-1990’s onward, he has been especially interested in infinite planar graphs. He attended Oberwolfach May-June 1982, July 1984 and July 1986, made study-visits to West Berlin through German Academic Exchange Service in May-June 1980 and July 1989 and had a research grant from the Canada Council in 1968. He organized the 3rd and 11th Northeast Symposium on Combinatorics and Graph theory held at SU in 1988 and 1996, respectively, gave a minicourse of five lectures at the NATO advanced study institute in Montréal in 1996, and gave plenary lectures at the meetings: “Algebraic and Topological Methods in Graph Theory” in Aukland, New Zealand, 2000; “Colloque International en Théorie des Graphes et Combinatoire” in Marseille-Luminy, France, 1986; and “International Conference on Combinatorial Theory” in Canberra, Australia, 1977. He presented at a special session of the AMS at the annual meeting in Atlanta 1988. He is fluent in French and conversant in German and lectures in these languages in the appropriate venue. He is a member of AMS and a reviewer for Mathematical Reviews and Zentralblatt für Mathematik. He has been a reviewer for a number of grant applications for the National Security Agency, NSERCC (Canada), and FCAR (Québec). His four Ph.D. students have been James Uebelacker (1972), Alwin Green (1972), John Kevin Doyle (1976) and Jennifer Ann Bruce (2002). In the Mathematics Department he has been a faculty member in the Future Professoriate Program (1995-present), mentoring Helene Tyler and Markus Reitenbach, and has given the French and German reading exams numerous times over the years. He was a member of the Executive Committee (1984-1985 and 1986-1988), the Graduate Committee (1993-1994) and the Undergraduate Committee (1978-1981 and 1990-1992) and served as the Director of the Undergraduate Major (1981-1992). Most importantly, he served as Associate Chair for Graduate Studies (1994-2001), and has done an unusually fine job of recruiting graduates and designing our graduate brochure. In the College of Arts and Sciences, he was a member of the Student Standards Committee (1991-1994 and 2002-present), the Curriculum Committee (1983-1986), and the very first CAS Committee on Tenure (1974-1977), which he chaired in 1975-1976. As Chair of the Curriculum Committee (1984-1985), he proposed the plus/minus grading system adopted by the College and still in use. For the Graduate School he was a member of the University Fellowship Committee (1995-1996), the Outstanding TA Award Committee (1996) and the Board of Graduate Studies (1980-1981). He has also been a member of the CIS affiliated faculty and served on the CIS tenure and promotions committee (1993-1996). For the University, he has served in the Senate (1977-1979 and 1981-1983), the Senate Committee on Curriculum (1984-1985), the Senate Committee on Teaching Assistants (1980-1981), the Chancellor’s Citation Committee (1983-1985), the Soling Committee (1984-1987), and the Honors Council (1977-1980). Mark has three daughters. Sarah is a corporate lawyer living in New York City, and her husband has a Ph.D. in anthropology and published in a variety of topics (e.g. slavery in colonial Rhode Island, early Italian communities in NYC, Japanese baseball, the Negro baseball leagues, etc.). They have two sons. Rebecca and her family live in Red Hook in Duchess County and have a son and two daughters. She grooms and trains dogs and her husband is a limnologist (a fresh water biologist) who works for the New York City water department. Michaela is an actress living in LA and has appeared in nationally televised shows and commercials. Mark’s wife Brenda is a sociologist and social worker. She earned a BA in 1967 at Ohio State University, and her Ph.D. in 1979 and MSW in 1993, the last two degrees at SU. They were married in July 1990. Mark is an accomplished musician, playing oboe and English horn. He performs as both soloist and member of the wind quintet "The Lake Effect Winds." In another collaboration with Jack Graver, Mark and Jack have taken a number of graduate students on overnight canoe-camping trips to the Adirondacks and Ontario in May and in the Fall. |
