When the Borie Fund was established in the early 1970s, it was first used to provide scholarships for students, especially minorities, in our Master of Arts in Teaching (MAT) program. Since then, it has been used in several ways to invest in the mathematical future of all our students. It funds January internships, visits to prospective graduate schools, and summer research. The summer research component is by far the largest and most successful of these investments. The Borie Fund supplies a weekly stipend to each student. Many math majors were first introduced to research during the summer between their junior and senior years. More than a handful of the alumnae from this program have earned Ph.Ds in mathematics and become faculty colleagues at other institutions.
The Borie Fund underwrites The Alice B. Dickinson Lecture for undergraduates, to honor a good friend of Ellen Borie and a member of the mathematics department who taught Ellen during her years at Smith. The distinguished mathematicians who come to the campus to lecture also visit classes and interact with our majors. The Borie Fund provides indispensable support for other undergraduate lectures, including the Undergraduate Connecticut Valley Colloquium and the weekly talks and teas in Dialogues in Mathematics (MTH 200/300). In the spring of 2000 a new lecture series was created with Borie Fund resources to honor Neal McCoy, another mathematics professor who taught Ellen. The first lecturer was Professor Jean Taylor of Rutgers University, president of the Association for Women in Mathematics.
The Borie Fund also makes it possible for our students to attend and to lecture at the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference. The Fund has supplied emergency financial aid to enable a student to attend the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, and it has been used to pay fees for graduate school applications and tests for an international student in need. The Fund continues to fulfill its original role of providing scholarships for MAT students and it is now also supporting some aspects of the research programs of junior faculty in mathematics.
The mathematics department is grateful to the Borie family for its commitment to supporting the study of mathematics at Smith College in memory of Ellen Borie.