Barnes, Julia

Published in the Mathematics Magazine from 2003 was an article called “A Julia Set That Is Everything.” The co-authors Julia Barnes and Lorelei Koss both have their Ph.D in Mathematics. Having had the same advisor in graduate school, the co-authors met as graduate students and have stayed in touch ever since.They have written a couple other articles together as well.

Julia Barnes grew up in Ocala, Florida and attended grade school there. She kind of always liked math and helped a lot of friends with their homework. She started officially tutoring in fourth grade. She always thought that she wanted to be a teacher when she grew up, specifically a math teacher. While in 4-H and leading workshops for younger kids, she developed a strong urge to go into education.

She then went on to earn her Bachelor of Science in Mathematics from the University of Central Florida in Orlando. Starting out a math education major, she planned on teaching high school. Preparing for her teaching career, she worked as a camp counselor at Camp Lutherock near Boone, NC. After completing almost all of the math requirements of a math education major, she switched to a mathematics major but still planned on teaching through lateral entry into the Florida public school system. But then early in her senior year, a professor took her aside and convinced her to go to graduate school. He believed she would be happier teaching college rather than high school.

So instead of student teaching, she applied to graduate schools. She graduated in 1990 with a BS in mathematics and it turned out the professor was right. While she still loved working with kids, she was meant to be at the college level. So continuing on to graduate school, she went for her Ph.D. at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill also in mathematics. She finished in 1996.

Since graduating, Dr. Barnes is a very involved member of the mathematical community. She is currently working on a book addressing tactile learning activities. She is the Associate Director for Project NExT—a professional development program for new university math faculty. It is a program of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA). She has also been in charge of coordinating a mathematical treasure hunt for the Southeast section of the MAA for almost a decade now. With the help of many volunteer faculty, they get around 90 student participants.

While not focusing completely in one area, Dr. Barnes likes to jump around to different areas of mathematics, depending on what seems interesting to her at the time. She has a written a wide variety of articles. Some of her articles are more a survey of topics, while others cover more research depth. She also has some articles that are teaching related. For her, the best part is working with a wide variety of people.

Most recently she has been working with a graduate school office mate named Beth (Drews) Schaubroeck who happens to be a Wartburg College graduate from 1993. Currently Dr. Schaubroeck is a civilian at the Air Force Academy. With Dr. Barnes specialty in complex dynamics and Dr. Schaubroeck’s specialty in complex analysis, they decided to collaborate—hoping to find some common ground. While leaning more towards the dynamics side, they were not able to generalize their work.

Yet they still presented their work at an MAA conference and a graduate student who was doing research in the area they had been dabbling in, had an idea on how to go further with their work. The three of them ended up collaborating on an article titled “Real and imaginary parts of polynomial iterates” published in the New York Journal of Mathematics. This led to the integration of another collaborator Elizabeth Russell, who was working at West Point at the time. Being in three different time zones between the four of them, they mostly did work or presentations at national meetings in subsets.

Dr. Barnes and her co-author Lorelei Koss have written three articles together, including “A Julia Set That Is Everything.” This and one other one, “Ergodic Theory Carnival” are survey articles. She is proud to say that the latter has been translated into Chinese. While she is unable to read any of the Chinese characters, she still can recognize the diagrams. As mentioned before, Dr. Koss and Dr. Barnes met in graduate school and have stayed in touch. All of their publications have been written through email since graduating.

Outside of mathematics, Dr. Barnes remains busy with other projects. For five years she lived in a residence hall on campus as a Faculty in Residence working to increase faculty to student interactions. She mostly worked with faculty to bring them into the residence halls for programs. For eight years, Dr. Barnes was a teacher in a program for gifted high school students in a program of earth science. It was a four week program where kids would stay on campus and conduct research in stream ecology. She taught the statistics part of it in the mornings, and then helped in collecting data every afternoon. This was one summer job she really enjoyed.

More personally, Dr. Barnes enjoys cooking, sewing, and forestry judging. Also, she was a high school youth leader at her church for five years. She is currently a Sunday School teacher. In addition, she has done a lot of home renovations with her father who is a retired building contractor. Together they have re-roofed her house, resided it, renovated the kitchen and bathroom as well as completely repainted the interior.

While there is not much information on Dr. Koss, it is known through correspondence with Dr. Barnes that they have remained good friends since graduate school. Dr. Koss’s undergraduate degree in mathematics was accomplished at Columbia University in 1989. Her master’s and Ph.D. were attained at the University of North Carolina in 1992 and 1998, respectively. She is currently employed at Dickinson University as a Professor of Mathematics and has been there ever since finishing her Ph.D. Her personal work focuses on ergodic theory and complex dynamical systems with special attention to parametrized dynamics of meromorphic functions.

Bibliography

Barnes, Julia. "Re: Biographical Request." Message to the author. 7 Oct. 2013. E-mail.

Barnes, Julia. "Re: Biographical Request." Message to the author. 9 Oct. 2013. E-mail.

Faculty. Dickinson U, 2013. Web. 6 Nov. 2013. http://www.dickinson.edu/academics/Faculty/