Faculty Bio

Sean T. McCulloch

Professor in the Department of Mathematics & 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