David Vella

Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
Department Chair Fall 2014-Spring 2018
Director, Skidmore Honors Forum Fall 2007-Spring 2011

Email: dvella@skidmore.edu
Personal Webpage: David Vella

Professor Vella received his Ph.D. from the University of Virginia in 1983 and after visiting positions at the University of Notre Dame, Bowdoin College, and a post-doctoral fellowship at the California Institute of Technology, began teaching mathematics at Skidmore College in 1988.  Except for a semester at Union College, he taught at Skidmore until he retired in 2024, teaching a wide variety of courses for the department, as well as developing several of his own courses, including a Scribner seminar on game theory and voting theory.

Outside of the classroom, Prof. Vella organized the Skidmore Problem Group – a team of students who compete in the annual Putnam mathematical competition, and this group has also had solutions to problems published in various undergraduate journals.  In 1997, Vella helped establish Skidmore’s chapter of the national Mathematics Honor Society Pi Mu Epsilon, and beginning in 1993, he helped found and organize the Hudson River Undergraduate Mathematics Conference (HRUMC), which annually brings together mathematics students from all over the Northeast to share their work and has become a model undergraduate mathematics conference.

Vella’s main research interests include algebraic groups, Lie algebras and combinatorics.  His publications in these areas include a book in the Memoirs of the American Mathematical Society series, as well as papers with student co-authors Julia Varbalow '92 and Madeleine Burkhart ‘15.  In 2021, Cambridge University Press published his introductory textbook ‘Invitation to Linear Programming and Game Theory.’ He is currently writing another book on combinatorics and generating functions.