Faculty Bio

Sean T. McCulloch

Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science

Education

B.A. (Computer Science), B.A. (Mathematics), State University of New York at Geneseo
M.C.S., Ph.D., University of Virginia

About

Sean McCulloch joined the faculty in 2001, and teaches a wide variety of computer science courses. He participates in Ohio Wesleyan's Summer Science Research Program that provides summer research opportunities for OWU students. From 2007-2019, he participated in OWU's National Science Foundation sponsored Research Experiences for Undergraduates program.

Check out my 2017 I^3 video on "Problem Solving With Ghostbusters"

Current Areas of Interest:

• I maintain the Discussions of NP-Complete Problems site, where I discuss the problems in Garey and Johnson's classic book Computers and Intractability: A Guide to the Theory of NP-Completeness.  I explain the reductions for the problems from the point of view of an educator who teaches these kinds of problems in an upper-level Analysis of Algorithms class.
  
• I coach the OWU Programming Contest teams, accompanying them to several contests throughout the year.  I also run a local contest here at Ohio Wesleyan each spring.
  
• My current research interest is in designing programs to intelligently play "modern" board games, where classical techniques are not appropriate.
  
• My previous research topic was in "Shared Shortest Paths"- using game theoretic techniques to investigate a situation in which the cost of a path in a graph could be shared among cooperating agents.
  
• For a complete list of publications and courses taught, see my CV

Outside Interests

• Strategy games
• Reading
• Chasing my two kids around
• Collecting useless trivia