News

After two years in the army, Gary pursued graduate studies in Mathematics at Carnegie Mellon. Throughout his life he remained interested in military applications of mathematics. He joined the UC Davis Department of Mathematics in 1963 after a brief stint at Duke University.

He is fondly remembered by his children, especially for always being available to help with their homework from the comfort of his recliner. He will be missed.

A video interview of Professor Kurowski was filmed in 2002, describing what inspired him to pursue math. Watch it on AggieVideo.

Professor Matthias Köppe's award is for "incredible and consistent contributions to the core Sage library, especially the modularization effort, which has the potential to massively extend the sustainability and broad impact of the Sage Python codebase."

Travis Scrimshaw received his Ph.D. from UC Davis Mathematics in 2015 under the direction of Prof. Anne Schilling. His award is for "major contributions to the core library, his excellent review of trac tickets, and his major long-term contributions to Sage's participation in Google Summer of Code." Scrimshaw is currently faculty at Osaka Metropolitan University.

SageMath is an open-source mathematics software system developed since 2005.

This Give Day 2022, generous donors have the opportunity to transform our students' lives. Please consider supporting one of the Department of Mathematics gift challenges.

Math Department Challenge

Val Chan and Jin Chang challenge YOU to support the Math Department on Give Day! Val was inspired to support her alma mater and the Mathematics Department because of her impactful experiences with Professor Abby Thompson and Sherman Stein. Join her in supporting the next generation. Ten gifts to the Mathematics Department will unlock their generous donation!

Donating to these funds will support outstanding academic programs, the pursuit of new knowledge, and students and faculty.

The Mathematics Research Prize Challenge

Support endowing the Craig A. Tracy Research Prize in Mathematics, which will be awarded annually for outstanding research to a postdoctoral research or Krener Assistant Professor. 10 gifts to this fund meets the challenge set by Professor Emeritus Craig A. Tracy and Barbara Nelson.

Our colleague Washek Pfeffer passed away on January 3, 2021, at age 84. Václav Frantiček Pfeffer, born in Prague on November 14, 1936, changed his name to Washek Pfeffer on becoming a US citizen in 1970. He joined the UC Davis Department of Mathematics in 1966, retiring in 1994.

Washek exemplifies the ideal of the quirky cosmopolitan intellectual who would be at home at any university, anywhere in the world. One of Washek's middle school classmates who later rose to prominence, Václav Havel, the famous playwright and President of Czechoslovakia (1989-1992) and of the Czech Republic (1993-2003), became a close friend in the 1950s.

Washek's zest for life translated into mathematical productivity: He published over 100 research articles, including one last year. I urge you to take a moment to read Richard Gardner's obituary.

Martin Fraas has been named a 2021 Hellman Fellow. The Hellman family inaugurated the Hellman Fellows Program in 1994 to support junior faculty research by making grants to junior faculty at 14 institutions: the ten campuses of the University of California along with the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Harvard Business School, Stanford University, and Williams College. Congratulations Martin!

Bruno Nachtergaele was selected as one of this year's recipients of the Carl Friedrich von Siemens Research Award. The award, given annually by Germany's Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, recognizes Nachtergaele's lifetime achievements in mathematics research and teaching.

The von Siemens award includes a cash prize and an additional stipend to fund a research stay of up to a year in Germany. Nachtergaele plans to use this support to continue his long-term collaboration on the mathematics of the fractional quantum Hall effect and other topics in mathematical physics with researchers Simone Warzel and Amanda Young at the Technical University of Munich.

Congratulations, Bruno!

Additional links: Article in Dateline (June 8), UC Davis College of Letters and Science announcement (June 1)

Eugene Gorsky was selected as one of the winners of the UC Davis College of Letters and Science Teaching Award for 2021. The award is given annually by the College to recognize outstanding teaching at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. Gorsky and four other recipients of this year's award will be presented with the award at the College Assembly on June 2. Congratulations Eugene!

This Give Day 2021, generous donors have the opportunity to transform our students' lives. Please consider supporting one of the Department of Mathematics gift challenges.

Math Department Challenge

Thanks to a generous gift from Val Chan '92 to establish this challenge, any gift received will support outstanding academic programs, the pursuit of new knowledge, as well as our talented students and faculty. Your contribution will also allow flexibility to address the greatest needs within the department, including graduate student recruitment and community building.

Eric C. Ruliffson Scholarship in Mathematics

Help support math students and honor the memory of Eric Ruliffson (B.S., mathematics, ’68). Eric excelled at problem-solving at UC Davis, which helped him to achieve life-long personal and professional success. This scholarship was established to support mathematics students, like Eric, to help them succeed. Once 15 gifts to this fund are received, $25,000 from Erica Ruliffson Schultz and Bryan Schultz will activate on Give Day.

Rishidev Chaudhuri is an applied mathematician. He joined UC Davis in 2019 with a joint appointment between the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Neurobiology, Physiology, and Behavior. His research deals with themes such as noise and variability in the brain, computation via dynamics in recurrent networks, and more. He plans to use the Sloan Fellowship funding to study how noise and randomness might play a role in neural computation, and to develop techniques to extract structure from experimental recordings of the activity of populations of neurons, and attempt to apply the resulting data to test and refine theories of decision-making.

Laura Starkston joined UC Davis in 2018. She is a pure mathematician specializing in low-dimensional topology. Her Sloan Fellowship work will focus on several research questions relating to symplectic 4-manifolds and singular submanifolds. In addition to the Sloan Fellowship, she is the recipient of a 2020 Hellman Fellowship and a 2021 Faculty Early Career Award from the National Science Foundation.

Congratulations Rishidev and Laura!