News

Dan Romik and Anne Schilling have been awarded Simons Fellowships in Mathematics for 2012-13

The US Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent on the image compression/decompression algorithms invented by Naoki Saito and his collaborator Katsu Yamatani (Meijo Univ., Japan). Their algorithms use the discrete cosine transforms and Poisson's equation with the Neumann boundary condition to reduce the blocking artifacts that often occur on images encoded by the JPEG standard with low quality factor. The Japan Patent Office also granted them this patent in 2009.

The Editorial board of Annales Henri Poincare has awarded the 2010 "Distinguished Paper Award" to a paper coauthored by Alessandro Pizzo, along with Wojciech De Roeck and Juerg Froehlich. The paper is titled "Absence of Embedded Mass Shells: Cerenkov Radiation and Quantum Friction", and the prize will be presented at a ceremony in 2012. See

We are pleased to announce that the 2012 workshop in Mixed Integer Programming (MIP 2012) will be held July 16-19, 2012 at the University of California, Davis. The 2012 Mixed Integer Programming workshop will be the ninth in a series of annual workshops held in North America designed to bring the integer programming community together to discuss very recent developments in the field. The workshop series consists of a single track of invited talks and also features a poster session as an additional opportunity to share and discuss recent research. Registration details and a call for participation in the poster session will be announced later.

We are pleased to announce that the 23rd biannual Bay Area Discrete Math Day will take place Saturday, October 15 at UC Davis. This fall our speakers are Amitabh Basu (UCD), Felix Breuer (SFSU), Nathan Ilten (UCB), Svante Linusson (KTH), Assaf Naor (Courant Institute/MSRI) and Kate Poirier (UCB).

Registration is open, and those interested are encouraged to check it out.

Using criteria such as number of publications, awards, and citations, the Center for World-Class Universities at Shanghai Jiao Tong University produces an annual list of the world's leading universities. In 2011 the UC Davis Mathematics Department was ranked 30th. It was ranked 22nd among US universities.

Jessica Potts has received an individual 2011 Citations for Excellence Award. The individual award is given for excellence in general contributions, campus service, and/or supervision. The Distinguished Citations for Excellence Awardees will also be recognized system wide by the Council of UC Staff Assemblies.

Yuji Nakatsukasa, who recently received his 2011 Ph.D. in the Graduate Group in Applied Mathematics, has won first prize in the competition for the 2011 Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis. A report on the prize and the runners up can be found at

Mohamed Omar from the Department of Mathematics awarded the 2011 MPS Dean’s Graduate Student Prize

Krener Assistant Professor Amitabh Basu and graduate student Stephen Ng have each been awarded the AMS-Simons Travel Grant.

Professor Emeritus Art Krener has been appointed a Fellow of the International Federation of Automatic Control.
The International Federation of Automatic Control is a multinational federation of National Member Organizations, representing the engineering and scientific societies concerned with automatic control in about 50 countries.
The citation reads:
For contributions to the geometric theory of nonlinear control and estimation
The Fellow Certificate and Fellow Pin will be presented at the IFAC World Congress in Milan, Italy on Thursday, 1 September, 2011.

Assistant Professor Fu Liu has been selected to be a 2011-2012 UC Davis Hellman Fellow. The UC Davis Hellman Fellows Program provides support for the research of promising Assistant Professors who exhibit potential for great distinction in their research.

Four graduate students in Graduate Group in Applied Mathematics will be supported by prestigious national fellowships next year. Continuing students Charlie Brummitt and Jeff Irion will hold NDSEG fellowships. Incoming students Calina Copos and Swati Patel will hold NSF graduate fellowships. Congratulations to them all.

A special conference in honor of Professor Blake Temple's 60th birthday will be held in Ann Arbor at the University of Michigan. Young researchers and graduate students are especially invited to participate and apply for funding.

First year GGAM graduate student Jeff Irion has been awarded a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate (NDSEG) Fellowship. This is the Department of Defense equivalent of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship. Irion is working under Naoki Saito's supervision on image analysis projects.

Professor Craig Tracy has been named as one of the 2011 Class of Fellows of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. This Fellowship honors SIAM members who have made outstanding contributions to the fields served by the organization. Professor Tracy will be recognized at the SIAM, CAIMS, and MITACS Joint Awards Luncheon which will take place on Thursday, July 21, during the 2011 International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Optimization in an Uncertain Environment Workshop, on March 25-26

Ali Dad-Del has been awarded the 2011 Academic Federation Excellence in Teaching Award. This award is given in recognition of the contributions made by non-Senate faculty members to the teaching mission of the UC Davis campus, and it carries with it a stipend of $500 to the recipient.

Michael Kapovich wins a 2011-2012 Faculty Development award.

Mathematician rated 2nd best job of 2011 by CareerCast.

UC Davis placed 29th in mathematics among the world's top 100 universities in the recently published Academic Ranking of World Universities, issued annually by China's Shanghai Jiao Tong University.