Departmental News

Shuyang Ling, who just completed his PhD under the supervision of Prof. Thomas Strohmer, was announced as one of the recipients of the SIAM Student Paper Prize for 2017, awarded annually by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), for his paper "Self-Calibration and Biconvex Compressive Sensing" coauthored with Prof. Strohmer. The prize will be awarded in July during the 2017 SIAM Annual Meeting in Pittsburgh, where Shuyang will also present his prize-winning paper. Congratulations Shuyang!

This 2017 Bay Area Optimization Meeting is dedicated to Professor Roger J-B Wets on the occasion of his 80th birthday, and to honor his fundamental contribution to Mathematics, particularly his work in variational analysis and optimization.

This is the third event in the series of regional meetings, (San Francisco) Bay Area Optimization, held since 2015. Decision makers and policy analysts face increasing uncertainty, but also increasing availability of data and information. This conference brings together researchers from a variety of disciplines who work on mathematical methods that can be used to analyze large amounts of data and be applied to decision problems faced by government and industry. Recorded lectures will be available through the conference website.

This year's 2017 Thurston Lectures will be delivered by Dylan Thurston, a professor of mathematics at Indiana University, Bloomington, and recently named Fellow of the American Mathematical Society. This is the first year of an annual series of lectures, delivered by distinguished mathematicians in honor of William P. Thurston.

A summer school and international workshop on water waves and related models. Our objective is the formation of an annual summer school and workshop on waves and fluid dynamics for advanced undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral scholars. This event will take place at the Bodega Marine Laboratory (BML) which is part of the University of California at Davis, June 5-9, 2017.

Our faculty member Jesús De Loera was awarded the MAA Golden Section Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics for 2017. The award, given annually by the Mathematical Association of America's (MAA) "Golden Section" regional section comprising the MAA's member institutions in Northern California, Nevada and Hawaii, was awarded to Prof. De Loera at a ceremony held at the annual MAA Golden Section meeting, held on March 4 at Santa Clara University. Congratulations Jesús!

Our faculty member Dan Romik was interviewed by video-maker Brady Haran, creator of the popular Numberphile series of online videos, for one of his videos recently uploaded to the Numberphile YouTube channel. The video, titled "The Moving Sofa Problem," concerns Romik's recent work on the intriguing unsolved geometry problem of finding the shape of the "sofa" (two-dimensional shape) with largest area that can be moved around a right-angled turn in a corridor of unit width. Click on the link below to watch the video.

Our faculty member James Bremer was named one of eleven UC Davis Chancellor's Fellows for 2016-17. The goal of the fellowship is to honor the achievements of outstanding faculty members early in their careers. Faculty members who are selected to be Chancellor’s Fellows receive a one-time award of $25,000, and can designate the title "Chancellor’s Fellow" for a period of five years from the date of the award. Congratulations James! See the link below for the announcement of the 2016-17 UC Davis Chancellor's Fellowship recipients.

The much awaited 7th Davis Mathematics Conference will held on Thursday January 12th from 9:30 AM-3:15PM in MSB 1147. The conference showcases the range of research in the Davis Mathematics Department, with the aim to strengthen intra- and inter-departmental connections in the dynamic UCD research community. Both professors and graduate students will present their cutting-edge mathematics in a series of 5 sessions organized by topic:

• Geometry & Topology,
• Analysis & Mathematical Physics,
• Statistics & Optimization,
• Mathematical Biology,
• Algebra & Discrete Mathematics.

There will be a light breakfast and lunch for all who register.

We encourage every Aggie mathematician and scientist to attend, including graduate students, researchers, and professors. First years and second year grads in particular, we strongly encourage you to attend. This is a good opportunity to scope out future avenues of research.

The DMC 2017 Organizers: Robert Bassett, Kirill Paramonov, Dmitry Shemetov

Read about new faculty, learn about current research, and keep up with the news of the Department.

Our faculty member Naoki Saito this week received two awards from The Japan Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (JSIAM). His paper "Hierarchical graph Laplacian eigen transforms", coauthored with Jeff Irion, published in JSIAM Letters in 2014, received the 2016 JSIAM Letters Best Paper Award; and he received the 2016 Bulletin of JSIAM Best Author Award for his 2015 Bulletin of JSIAM paper "Applied harmonic analysis on graphs and networks".

Our Department of Mathematics faculty member Eugene Gorskiy was selected as one of 12 UC Davis Assistant Professors to receive the 2016 Hellman Fellowship. The goal of the fellowship is "to promote the scholarly growth of faculty members at the Assistant Professor rank who exhibit the potential for great academic distinction, and for whom Hellman funding can significantly stimulate productivity in research and other creative scholarly activities." Congratulations Eugene! See the link below for the announcement of the 2016 Hellman Fellowship recipients.

The conference "Geometry, Topology and Complexity of Manifolds, and applications to Biology" will be held at UC Berkeley on May 20-22, 2016. The conference was organized to honor our faculty member Joel Hass on the occasion of his 60th birthday. Speakers will include well-known mathematicians and computer scientists, including Michael Freedman (recipient of the 1986 Fields Medal) and Ian Agol (recipient of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics).

The Department of Mathematics and Department of Statistics will be holding a career panel on Tuesday, May 3rd 5:30-8PM in Mathematical Sciences Building 1147. Pizza will be provided. Please RSVP at the link below.

Mariel Vazquez, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, was announced as the recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia prize for 2016. As the award announcement explains, this prize is awarded every other year in honor of the legacy of David H. Blackwell and Richard A. Tapia, two distinguished mathematical scientists, and recognizes a mathematician who has contributed significantly to research in his or her field of expertise, and who has served as a role model for mathematical scientists and students from under-represented minority groups or has contributed in other significant ways to addressing the problem of the under-representation of minorities in math. The prize will be presented at the Ninth Blackwell-Tapia Conference, which will take place on Oct. 28-29, 2016 at the University of Knoxville, Tennessee. Congratulations, Mariel!

5 excellent lectures, Poster session for students, A math art exhibit. Details and online Registration at: http://sections.maa.org/golden/MeetingMAA-UCD.html

Register for lunch and refreshments. Questions deloera@math.ucdavis.edu

This is an introductory textbook designed for undergraduate mathematics majors with an emphasis on abstraction and in particular, the concept of proofs in the setting of linear algebra. The purpose of this book is to bridge the gap between the more conceptual and computational oriented undergraduate classes to the more abstract oriented classes. The book begins with systems of linear equations and complex numbers, then relates these to the abstract notion of linear maps on finite-dimensional vector spaces, and covers diagonalization, eigenspaces, determinants, and the Spectral Theorem. Each chapter concludes with both proof-writing and computational exercises.

Our faculty member Kevin Luli has been awarded the Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award from the National Science Foundation (NSF) for his proposal, titled "Variational Problems on Arbitrary Sets". The CAREER awards are NSF's "most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research". Dr. Luli's award is for 5 years, and will provide funding to support miscellaneous research- and education-related activities. Congratulations, Kevin!

Robert Hildebrand receives the prestigious Herman Goldstine Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at IBM Research for 2015–2016.

Hildebrand received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2013. His thesis, Algorithms and Cutting Planes for Mixed Integer Programs, was supervised by Professor Matthias Köppe. After graduation, he spent two years in Switzerland as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Operations Research in the Department for Mathematics at ETH Zürich.

Ian Agol, a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, was awarded the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in a ceremony last Sunday. Professor Agol spent the years 1998-2000 at UC Davis as a Visiting Research Assistant Professor, under the mentorship of Joel Hass. The prize was awarded to him "for spectacular contributions to low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtual Haken and virtual fibering conjectures."

Mariel Vazquez, our faculty member who holds a joint appointment between the Mathematics Department and the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology, was recently interviewed by Brady Haran for his highly successful educational video series Numberphile. The interview formed the basis for a two-part video titled "The Shape of DNA" and "How DNA unties its own knots". Watch the videos here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

The Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics (QMAP) is a new initiative at UC Davis, aimed at fostering a vibrant research environment for addressing foundational questions in modern theoretical and mathematical physics. We welcome this joint Math and Physics venture!

Our graduate student Axel Saenz has won a fellowship from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of Califonia, Santa Barbara. The fellowship will enable him to spend 6 months at the Institute in 2016. His stay at KITP will coincide with the research program "New approaches to non-equilibrium and random systems: KPZ integrability, universality, applications and experiments" that will bring to the Institute many leading researchers in the field. Congratulations Axel!

Our 2011 graduate Tom Denton has published an interesting article in the August 2015 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society describing his experiences working on mathematics education and research in Kenya in 2012-2013.