Benjamin Marlin, who joined the College in 2006, is an Associate Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department. He oversees both the Applied Mathematics and Conceptual Mathematics tracks of the Mathematics major, advising most of those majoring in mathematics as well as guiding those casually visiting the field of mathematics.

He teaches a diverse collection of mathematics courses at all levels, including calculus, statistics, and topology. Because of his interest in technology, he also teaches courses for the Analytics and CTIS majors. In mathematics pedagogy, he is a proponent of inquiry-based learning, a student-centered approach that teaches mathematical proof by centering the students' own work and critique.

His research interests lie in chaos theory and dynamical systems. His published work has been studying strange attractors, specifically examining attracting sets by identifying inverse limits of functions acting on the stable and unstable manifolds. Interestingly, he published what may have been the first paper on the dynamics of an inverse limit of an upper semicontinuous function.

In less academic circles, Ben advises the satyrically named Guilford College Yachting Club. The club supports students playing roleplaying games, computer games, anime, and LARPs as well as other nerdy pursuits. The students affectionately named him their "Yachtfather".

Before Guilford, Ben spent seven years teaching at Northwestern Oklahoma State University in Alva, Oklahoma. While there, he taught mathematics courses from College Algebra to Advanced Calculus and computer programming courses in C++, HTML, Java, and Visual Basic.

Areas of Interest
    dynamical systems
    topology
    computer programming
    inquiry-based learning