Owen Byer
DEPARTMENT: Mathematical Sciences Dept
POSITION: Department Chair and Professor of Mathematics
LOCATION: Main Campus, Harrisonburg | AN 100
PHONE: (540) 432-4642
EMAIL: byer@emu.edu
Owen earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics with secondary certification at Messiah College in Grantham, Pa., and a master’s degree and Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Delaware. He taught for three years at Northwestern College before coming to EMU, where he is now teaching his 20th year. Owen’s graduate training is in combinatorics (graph theory, specifically), and he recently finished writing a Discrete Math textbook to explain all he knows about the subject! His hobbies include playing basketball, bridge, and a variety of board games. Owen and his wife Barbara have two teenage children, Cameron and Lily.
Owen is the chair of EMU’s Mathematical Sciences Department, which includes the mathematics, computer science, and engineering programs.
Education
- B.A. in Mathematics, with secondary education certification, from Messiah College, 1989.
- M.S. and Ph.D. in Mathematics from University of Delaware, 1996, under the direction of Felix Lazebnik. Thesis: Several Results on Extremal (v,e)-graphs.
Publications
- Journey into Discrete Mathematics, under revision (joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer and Kenny Wantz)
- Finding polygonal areas with the Corset Theorem, College Mathematics Journal, May 2017 (joint with Stuart M. Anderson)
- A Guide to Mathematics Competency, 6th edition_, a 100-page text used in EMU’s Foundations of Mathematics course, August 2016, (The first four editions were joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer)
- Mutually Tangent Spheres in n-space, Math Magazine, April 2015 (joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer)
- “A 3-D Analog of Steiner’s Porism” Math Magazine, Volume 87 (April 2014), pp. 95-99. (joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer)
- “Methods for Euclidean Geometry”, a 480-page book, Mathematical Association of America, 2010 (joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer and Felix Lazebnik).
- Exploring Loci in Geometry, Proceedings of the Sixteenth Conference of the ACMS (2007), pp 114-140. (joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer)
- “Edge bounds in nonhamiltonian k-connected graphs”, Discrete Mathematics 307 (2007), pp.1572-1579. (joint with Deirdre L. Smeltzer)
- “Observations on the Indeterminacy of the Sample Correlation Coefficient”, College Mathematics Journal, Volume 33 (September 2002), pp. 320-322.
- Mental Arithmetic, Finding Squares, Mathematics Teacher, Volume 6 (September 2002), page 406.
- “Maximum Number of 3-paths in a Graph”, ARS Combinatoria, Volume 61 (2001), pp. 73-79.
- “Two Path Extremal Graphs and an Application to a Ramsey-type Problem”, Volume 196 (1999), pp. 51-64.
- “Some New Bounds on the Maximum Number of Vertex Colorings of a (v,e)-Graph”, Journal of Graph Theory, Volume 28 (1998), pp. 115-128.
- Maximum Number of 4-cliques in a 4-partite Graph, Volume 21 (1997), pp. 27-32.
