"The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world for ugly mathematics." - from A Mathematician's Apology by G. H. Hardy

"Mathematics is a creative art. Words and symbols are used in its compositions and, like all art, it is limited only by the potentialities of its practitioners. Few people possess the gifts required to produce great mathematics, but almost every student can share the creative spark." - from Mathematics: A Creative Art by Julia Wells Bower

Christopher Hammond
Assistant Professor of Mathematics

• Operator theory
• Complex analysis

Professor Hammond's research belongs to an area of analysis known as function-theoretic operator theory.  In essence, this subject seeks to relate problems of current interest in operator theory to questions in the more "classical" context of complex analysis.  (This type of intersection is a common theme throughout mathematics, and greatly enriches the aesthetic dimension of the discipline.)  Hammond's own work pertains to a particular class of vector spaces whose elements are analytic functions, and certain linear transformations on these spaces.

While pure mathematics occupies a great deal of Professor Hammond's attention, he also maintains an active interest in the liberal arts, particularly in topics relating to literature and religion.  He is delighted whenever he can find connections between mathematics and the arts.  He has given several talks on Dante's use of mathematical imagery in The Divine Comedy, as well as a lecture on the place of science and mathematics in Gulliver's Travels.

Professor Hammond's current publications include the papers "Composition operators with maximal norm on weighted Bergman spaces" and "Zeros of hypergeometric functions and the norm of a composition operator," as well as "Adjoints of composition operators with rational symbol," which is soon to appear. He has given numerous talks on his research, most recently at the Sixth International Conference of the International Society for Analysis, its Applications and Computation (ISAAC) in Ankara, Turkey, and the Classical Analysis Conference in Chapel Hill, North Carolina.

He has taught a variety of courses at Connecticut College, including calculus, linear algebra, differential equations, real analysis, and topology. In the fall of 2005 he introduced an interdisciplinary freshman seminar entitled "Intimations of Infinity."

He is currently serving as chair-elect of the Academic and Administrative Procedures Committee (AAPC).

View the department of mathematics Web site, where he maintains a personal Web page.