Jeffrey Wheeler

Dr. Wheeler has 36 years of experience teaching college mathematics with the last 16 years here at Pitt. His Ph.D. thesis involved extending what had been a long-standing conjecture of Paul Erdős and Hans Heilbronn from integers to groups. The Combinatorial Number Theory conjecture had been open for over 30 years and was established in the mid-90s, with Wheeler and his supervisor Paul Balister (Oxford UK) extending the result to finite groups.

Dr. Wheeler's teaching has earned awards at all three major universities in which he has taught, culminating with the Tina and David Bellet Teaching Excellence Award from Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts and Sciences in 2019. In addition to classroom excellence, he has supervised Master's Theses and served on Ph.D. committees as well as supervising B.Phil. Theses for the David C. Federick Honors College. His numerous undergraduate directed studies have resulted in papers, posters, and presentations at conferences. The Allegheny Mountain Section of the Mathematical Association of America has recognized Dr. Wheeler's influence on his students by presenting him with their Meritorious Mentoring Award in 2024.

Past professional activities included writing reviews for the American Mathematical Society, serving as the Calculus 2 liaison for Pitt's College in High School Program, and refereeing papers.

Additionally, Dr. Wheeler has designed for the department the courses Math 0480 - Applied Discrete Math, Math 1101 - An Introduction to Optimization, and Math 1103 - Mathematical Problems in Business, Industry, and Government. Dr. Wheeler's first-of-its-kind survey text in Optimization is available through CRC Press.