Dr. Macauley's Home Page

Greetings! I'm an Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University, in Clemson, SC. I am interested in algebra, combinatorics, discrete dynamical systems, and mathematical biology. I have a special affinity for problems in the intersection of these topics. For more details, see my Research page.

I got my Ph.D. at the University of California, Santa Barbara. As a graduate student, I spent two summers at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, before my research group at LANL moved to the Virginia Tech to become the Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory (NDSSL; now NSSAAC), at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute (now the Biocomplexity Institute, at the University of Virginia). I spent two more summers with them, before moving to Virgina full-time in 2007, and then to South Carolina in 2008. I have also had 3-month research visits at Ilya Shmulevich's research group in 2009, at the Institute for Systems Biology in Seattle WA, and at the Mathematical Biocomplexity group at the University of Southern Denmark (now at Virginia) in 2014.

In October 2019, I started writing a textbook on a "visual approach" to abstract algebra using Cayley diagrams and subgroup lattices—like Nathan Carter's popular book Visual Group Theory, but at a level of Dummit and Foote. It took on a life on its own, and several years and 700 pages later, it is so much different and bigger than I had ever envisioned, with hundreds of colorful pictures that I never could have dreamed of when I began. I have since taught Undergraduate Algebra 1 & 2, and Graduate Algebra 1, using this approach. For more infomation, see the Visual Algebra webpage, where I post all of my materials for anyone interested in using them. If this describes you, don't hesitate to get in touch! I should be finished writing the book in Summer 2023.

I have taught 18 different classes at Clemson, ranging from 1000-level Calculus to 9000-level graduate classes, and including diverse subjects such as algebra, analysis, geometry, topology, mathematical modeling, PDEs, and probability. My educational YouTube Channel has (as of May 2023) over 22K subscribers and 2 million views. It has six complete courses: Calculus 2, differential equations, advanced engineering mathematics, abstract algebra, discrete mathematical structure, and advanced linear algebra.