News

As many of us know, Steve Shkoller's life revolves around surfing and mathematics. To see how these two passions build on each other, take a look at Greg Watry's discerningly written feature in UC Davis' Letters and Science Magazine. “The best wave you can get as a surfer is what’s called getting barreled, where the wave pitches over you and the crest falls in this cylindrical shape. You’re inside that cylindrical tube and then the wave crashes and when that wave crashes, that’s a singularity.” — Shkoller

Together with an international group of collaborators, postdoctoral scholar Luze Xu has won the INFORMS Optimization Society 2024 Young Researchers Paper Prize for the paper "On the column number and forbidden submatrices for $\Delta$-modular matrices." SIAM J. Discrete Mathematics, Vol 38, No 1, pp. 1-18, 2024. The group of authors comprises Joseph Paat (Sauder School of Business, University of British Columbia, Canada), Ingo Stallknecht (Isha Foundation, India), Zach Walsh (Department of Mathematics and Statistics, Auburn University, USA), and, of course, Luze Xu (Department of Mathematics, University of California, Davis, USA). Congratulations to Luze and collaborators!

The 2024 UC Davis Graduate Program Advising and Mentoring Awards have been formally announced and Anne Schilling is among the recipients! She follows in the footsteps of Rishi Chaudhuri, Jesús de Loera, Zhaojun Bai, and Eugene Gorskiy, who received this award in the past two years. In the words of Grad Studies: "Every year, outstanding individuals are recognized for their dedication to guiding and mentoring graduate students. Their exceptional guidance and unwavering support have profoundly impacted the lives of those they have mentored." Congratulations to Anne!

The T. Christine Stevens Award, named after one of Project Next's cofounders, is awarded by the MAA to recognize persons who have made significant and sustained contributions to cultivating leadership skills within the mathematical sciences. This year, Jesús De Loera has been honored with this award in recognition of his ongoing efforts in training a new generation of leaders in mathematics, and, more specifically, for providing tiered mentoring and networking opportunities for Latinx and Hispanic early career researchers. In the words of Jesús De Loera: "Currently, too much mathematical talent is wasted. Mathematicians need to lead the change and help more people enjoy Mathematics." Congratulations, Jesús!

Mariel Vazquez has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). She was selected based on her contributions in both outreach and research. Her research spans a broad area of mathematics including low-dimensional topology and knot theory with a view towards applications in molecular biology. She is part of the 150th cohort of inductees, and one of ten at UC Davis. Congratulations, Mariel!

Adam Jacob, as one of the co-authors of a paper entitled "(1,1) forms with specified Lagrangian phase : a priori estimates and algebraic obstructions," CJM vol. 8 (2020) no. 2 article 4 by Tristan C. Collins, Adam Jacob, Shing-Tung Yau, has been selected by the International Congress of Basic Science (ICBS), as a recipient of the 2024 Frontiers of Science Award (FSA) in Mathematics.

The FSA was inaugurated in 2023 during the first ICBS. As an FSA award recipient, Jacob is invited to the ICBS to accept the award in person in July 2024, in the Great Hall of People of China in Beijing. The award includes $25,000 divided among the authors of a winning paper. Inaugurated in 2023, the first round of FSAs was conferred on one hundred thirty-two awards in three subjects: Mathematics, Theoretical Physics, and Theoretical Computer and Information Sciences.

In addition, a paper by Jaroslav Trnka entitled "The Amplitudohedron," Journal of High Energy Physics, volume 2014, article 30 (2014), has been selected as the FSA recipient in Theoretical Physics. Trnka is part of QMAP, associated with many Department members.

We applaud our colleagues for this recognition of their research.

The UC Davis College of Letters and Science regularly publishes an online magazine to showcase the lives, contributions, and achievements of UC Davis College of Letters and Science faculty. A recent edition of L&S Magazine features an in-depth look at the work of our very own Javier Arsuaga entitled "Math All the Way Down," describing the intersection of mathematics and molecular biology and how that's driven his research. Take a look and be inspired!

The XXI International Congress of Mathematical Physics, scheduled for July 1-6, will be taking place in the beautiful city of Strasbourg, France, and speakers have been announced. We are delighted to see that Steve Shkoller will be a plenary speaker and that Martin Fraas will be an invited speaker in the session on Many-body Quantum Systems & Condensed Matter Physics. According to the official ICMP2024 website: "The International Congress on Mathematical Physics, on its three year cycle, is the most important conference of the International Association of Mathematical Physics, currently presided over by Kasia Rejzner. It will be a major event, where new results and future challenges will be discussed, illustrating the richness and vitality of Mathematical Physics. We highly encourage/appreciate your attendance and contribution to ensure the success of this meeting." Strasbourg is easily reachable by train (about 2 and half hours from CDG airport) in addition to having its own minor international airport (SXB), so you might just be able to fit this into your travel plans!

Alex Wein has won a prestigious NSF CAREER award. He explains: "I'm very grateful to receive this funding, which will support two lines of research that I'm excited about. The first involves understanding fundamental tradeoffs between statistical resources (e.g. quantity of data) and computational resources (e.g. runtime) in large-scale statistical inference problems. The second involves finding optimal algorithms for various inference problems on tensor-valued data (e.g. an n-by-n-by-n array), including the 3-dimensional reconstruction problem that arises in cryo-electron microscopy."