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University College Faculty

William Waller

Professor & Associate Dean

Office: S655
713-221-8404
wallerw@uhd.edu

Scholarships

I transferred from Eastfield Community College in Dallas to the University of North Texas in 1979, where I majored in mathematics. I completed my Master's degree in Mathematics at North Texas in 1983. I moved to Houston on the same day I took my last final exam at North Texas, in order to teach freshman mathematics and computer science at UHD. While serving as a lecturer at UHD, I also pursued my Ph.D. in mathematics at UH under the supervision of Siemion Fajtlowicz. I am the first person to write a dissertation proving a computer-generated conjecture. Upon finishing my degree in 1989, I was promoted to Assistant Professor, eventually becoming full professor in 2010. I have maintained a strong interest in teaching freshmen, serving as Director of UHD's first Quality Enhancement Plan. I became Associate Dean for the First-Year Experience in UHD's University College in 2012.

My mathematical research focuses on extremal graph theory involving classical graph invariants and automatic conjecture generation. My pedagogical research focuses on improving student success in freshman and sophomore barrier courses, particularly those in mathematics.

1. On two conjectures of Graffiti (with S. Fajtlowicz), Congressus Numerantium 55 (1986) 51-56.
2. Independence, radius, and Hamiltonian paths (with E. DeLaViña and R. Pepper), MATCH Commun. Math. Comput. Chem. 58 (2007), 481-510.
3. On some conjectures of Graffiti.pc on total domination (with E. DeLaViña, Q. Liu, R. Pepper and D. B. West), Congressus Numerantium 185 (2007), 81-95.
4. Spanning trees with many leaves and average distance (with E. DeLaViña), Electronic Journal of Combinatorics 15 (2008).
5. A note on dominating sets and average distance (with E. DeLaViña and R. Pepper), Discrete Mathematics 309 (2009), 2615-2619.
6. Lower bounds for the domination number (with E. DeLaViña and R. Pepper), Discussiones Mathematicae Graph Theory, 30 (2010), 475-487.
7. A characterization of graphs where the independence number equals the radius (with E. DeLaViña, C. Larson and R. Pepper), Graphs and Combinatorics 28 (2012), 315-332.
8. Investigating the influence of four interventions on College Algebra achievement (with D. Corkin and I. Grau), Proceedings of the 10th Annual National Symposium on Student Retention, (2014), 598-608.

Last updated 9/13/2018 5:35 AM