Departmental News

Math and Physics major Nicholas Sherman has been named a Finalist in the APS LeRoy Apker Award competition. He will compete for the top prize in Washington DC on August 13. Being a finalist is considered an honor by itself. Nick wrote a senior thesis with Bruno Nachetergaele and will be continuing studies at UC Berkeley for a PhD in Physics.

Tudor Dan Dimofte, assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics in the UC Davis College of Letters and Science, has received a prestigious CAREER award from the National Science Foundation’s Computer and Information Science and Engineering directorate. The NSF Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) program supports junior faculty who perform outstanding research, are excellent educators, and integrate outreach in their work.

The 2018 Thurston Lectures at the Mathematics Department will be presented by Prof. Thomas Hales. He will give three lectures, primarily on the way computers are helping, and changing, mathematical research, but with applications to classical problems in discrete geometry.

UC Davis News summarizes recent research by faculty Blake Temple and past graduate Dr. Zeke Vogler, as well as a regular visitor, Dr. Smoller. They provide an alternative to cosmic expansion or acceleration to dark matter.

Read about how research on Quantum States has progressed; insight into budding research on Yang-Mills; and exactly what shape that sofa really ought to be!

Also, all the details on the Department in our year-in-review newsletter.

Our Department's own Korana Burke, editor of SIAM's Dynamical Systems Online Magazine, wrote this graduate student feature on recent UC Davis math graduate Shuyang Ling. After Shuyang was awarded the SIAM Student Paper Prize in 2017, he has joined the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences and the Center for Data Sciences.

Professor Albert Schwarz has been selected as a 2018 Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), for his contributions to mathematical physics. The Fellows of the American Mathematical Society program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics.

Our Department of Mathematics faculty members Tudor Dimofte and Adam Jacob were selected as part of 14 UC Davis Assistant Professors to receive the 2017 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." Professor Dimofte was selected for his research "Vortices and Geometric Representation Theory," and Professor Jacob for his research "The Yang-Mills Equations and Geometry." Congratulations to both! See the link for the announcement of the 2017 Hellman Fellowship recipients.

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.