Ethan Gwaltney

Assistant Teaching Professor
Department of Mathematics
Rice University

Email: (first name).(last name)**at**rice.edu
Office: HBH 322
Mailing Address: 6100 S. Main St., MS 136, Houston, TX 77005, USA
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Ethan Gwaltney

About Me

I’m an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Mathematics at Rice University. My primary focus is the early undergraduate experience, specifically the path into and through the foundational calculus sequence. I am particularly interested in summative assessment in this pathway; to that end, I developed, and now help run with colleagues, the Midweek Math Training (MMT) program, which provides peer-led supplemental instruction to equip students for exam performance in single-variable calculus. I am also actively exploring alternative assessment methods (such as oral exams) and tools for programmatic assessment (like course evaluations).

Before joining the faculty in 2023, I received my Ph.D. at Rice under the advisement of Milivoje Lukić. My mathematical research studies the spectrum of self-adjoint Dirac operators. If that sounds exotic to you, you can compare these operators to the Hermitian matrices you might see in linear algebra (MATH 354/355). While the spectrum of a Hermitian matrix is a finite set of real eigenvalues, the spectra of self-adjoint Dirac operators can include infinitely many eigenvalues, or even continuous spectrum, on the real line.

Soon, I will also be serving as a Natural Sciences Divisional Advisor for Baker College. If you are a Baker student considering a major in the Natural Sciences—or if you just want to chat about math at Rice, pedagogy, or something else—please reach out!

Education