News

We are pleased to announce that Mathematics graduate student Alex Black has been selected as a finalist for the INFORMS 2022 George Nicholson Student Paper Competition. The competition, organized by the Institute for Operations Research and Management Sciences (INFORMS), takes place annually. As one of 6 finalists, chosen from 129 submissions, Alex will present his paper at the Nicholson Student Paper special sessions at the INFORMS Annual Meeting in October. The winner(s) will be announced at the Awards Ceremony at the Annual Meeting. Alex's presentation will be on lattice polytopes. We wish him all the best!

Our colleague Gary Kurowski passed away peacefully at his home on July 26, 2022. Born on March 22, 1931 in Fargo, North Dakota, he attended Ford High school. He then attended the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1954 before being drafted into the army during the Korean War.

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 and Travis Scrimshaw are among the 10 awardees of this new prize, created to acknowledge and encourage contributions to the Sage codebase and third party ecosystem, along with spreading the use of Sage via workshops and other mechanisms, maintenance of infrastructure, and organization and funding of Sage development. From 2022 onward, at least two prizes will be awarded each year.

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.

Alex Black has won the Best Poster Award for his poster on Small Shadows of Lattice Polytopes, about his and his co-authors investigation into novel pivot rules, at the 2022 Mixed Integer Programming Conference (MIPC). The Mixed Integer Programming Conference is held annually and is currently in its 19th year, centering on discussion of optimization. It is one of the largest of its type in North America.

Roger Casals is among the winners of this year's College of Letters and Science Teaching Award at UC Davis. The awards were recently announced by committee chair Yaroslav Trnka and include, along with Roger, Eugenia Fernandes, Lecturer in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Liza Grandia, Associate Professor in the Department of Native American Studies, Ozcan Gulacar, Associate Professor of Teaching in the Department of Chemistry, and Camelia Hostinar, Assistant Professor in the Department of Psychology.

Together with two UC Davis Health PIs--Racheael Callcut, professor of surgery and chief research informatics officer, and Jason Adams, associate professor and physician of pulmonary, critical care and sleep--Thomas Strohmer was awarded a $1.2 million grant from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The grant aims to fund the generation of high-quality synthetic data using artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to potentially help physicians predict, diagnose and treat diseases. The Center for Data Science and Artificial Intelligence (CEDAR) at UC Davis, launched in 2019 by Thomas Strohmer, promotes interdisciplinary research. The results are beginning to show. Congratulations Thomas!

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.

Caitlin Brown, a recent graduate of our Applied Math undergraduate program, is one of two UC Davis students who interned at national labs through DOE's Science Undergraduate Laboratory Internship program last fall. She attributes her love of mathematics to the UC Davis Mentorships for Undergraduate Research in Agriculture, Letters and Science (MURALS) program she attended: "It really opened up my mind to the possibilities of applied math in the scientific realm ... Math is like a language we learn to speak, and it’s nice to use it to speak to things in the real world". We look forward to hearing more from her as she explores the world after graduation.

US News & World Report has released their 2022 rankings of graduate programs. The Department of Mathematics at UC Davis has been placed at #32 among graduate programs in mathematics, tied with Indiana University—Bloomington, The Ohio State University, Penn State University—University Park, and Texas A&M—College Station! These rankings are based entirely on peer reviews. As expected, MIT, Princeton, Harvard, Stanford, and Cal took the lead. Congratulations to us all!

Chancellor Mays has announced this year's cohort of Chancellor's Fellows! Supported by the UC Davis Annual Fund, the Davis Chancellor's Club, and the UC Davis Parents Fund, the program has supported 178 Fellows since its inception in 2000. Eugene Gorsky has been named Chancellor's Fellow in 2021-2022. He will carry the Chancellor's imprimatur for 5 years and receive $25,000 of unrestricted funds to support his research.