Spring 2002 Newsletter

Contents

• National Rankings:
  • The latest rankings of graduate programs by USNews rank us in the top 20 programs in both mathematics and applied mathematics.
• Special Conferences:
  • The 9th Workshop on Numerical Methods for Free Boundary Problems is being held under the joint sponsorship of the Mathematics Department, the Institute for Physical Sciences and Technology, and the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, at the University of Maryland campus, January 9-12, 2002.
  • The biannual Finite Element Circus met in the department, March 8-9, 2002.
  • The annual Spring Dynamics Conference in March, 2002, was held in part celebrate the accomplishments of Joe Auslander, on the occasion of his completing 40 years of service to the mathematics department.
• Faculty Awards:
  • Stuart Antman has been named a Distinguished University Professor, the university's highest academic honor, in view of his world-wide reputation as an expert on continuum mechanics.
  • Stephen Kudla has been awarded a Year 2000 Max-Planck-Forschungspreis by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung in Germany for his research in number theory. See the prize citation for a more detailed description. Kudla gave one of the Issai Schur Memorial Lectures in Tel Aviv in March, and the 17th Kuwait Foundation Lecture at the University of Cambridge in June.
  • Sijue Wu has been awarded the Satter Prize of the American Mathematical Society, which is given every two years to recognize an outstanding contribution to mathematical research by a woman in the previous five years. Sijue was honored for "her work on a longstanding problem on the water wave equation." In articles that appeared in Inventiones and the Journal of the AMS, Sijue established the well-posedness of the full water wave problem. This resolved a problem in fluid mechanics that had been open and actively investigated for a hundred years.
  • Assistant Professors Jiu-Kang Yu and Konstantina Trivisa have just been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships. Only 20 of these prestigious fellowships are awarded each year to the best mathematicians no more than six years past the date of Ph.D.
  • Four faculty members, Steve Kudla, Rich Schwartz, Dan Rudolph, and Sijue Wu, have been invited to address the next International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing in 2002.
  • One of the June 2001 talks in the Séminaire Bourbaki in Paris dealt in part with the research of Dave Levermore on the Boltzmann equation.
  • At the recent CMPS Academic Festival, Duane Cooper was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award for regular faculty and Justin Wyss-Galifant was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award for lecturers.
  • Ricardo Nochetto has been awarded one of the SIAM Outstanding Paper Awards for 2001 for his paper with Pedro Morin and Kunibert G. Siebert entitled "Data Oscillation and Convergence of Adaptive FEM", SIAM J. on Numerical Analysis 38(2) (2000) pp. 466-488.
  • Brian Hunt, along with Istvan Szunyogh from IPST, has been awarded a $450,000 21st Century Science Research Award (distributed over 3 years) from the James S. McDonell Foundation for study of "Weather forecasting, complexity, and chaos".
  • At the Second International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians in Taipei in December, 2001, Sijue Wu was awarded the 2001 Morningside Silver Medal in Mathematics for her work on water wave problems, and Jiu-Kang Yu was awarded the Chern Prize for his work in number theory, algebraic geometry, and representation theory. We congratulate both of them on these exceptional honors.
• Staff Awards:
  • Stephone Goodman, in charge of printing and duplicating, and Haydeé Hildalgo, from the Graduate Office, were among only 11 non-exempt employees of CMPS honored this year for exceptional performance.
• Student Awards:
  • Jonathan A. Pindrik, an undergraduate mathematics major, won an Honorable Mention in the national 2001 Goldwater Scholarship competition.
  • The UMCP team came in 22nd in the country in the 2000-01 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, our third straight year in the top 25 nationally. Congratulations to our team members. Chad Groft finished in the top 25 nationally in the individual competition, and also finished 4th in the Virginia Tech Regional Mathematics Contest. Raymond Cheong, Pat Hooper, and Bobby Rhode all finished in the top 20 in the Virginia Tech competition.
• Alumni Awards:
  • Simon Levin and Grace Wahba were recently elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Simon Levin received his PhD from our Department in 1964. He is presently the Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University. Grace Wahba received a Masters degree from our Department in 1962. She is the Bascom Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin. She is the principal developer of two important areas of statistical research: curve-fitting using splines and generalized cross-validation, a data-based method of selecting the best estimation rule from a family of possibilities. At the CMPS awards ceremony on May 4, 2001, she received the department's first annual Distinguished Alumni Award.
• Personnel Changes:
  • Celso Grebogi left the university during the 2000-2001 academic year, in order to take up a new position at São Paulo in his native country of Brazil. We wish him well in his new position.
  • Two new Avron Douglis Lecturers joined us in fall 2001. They are recent Ph.D.'s who join us for two years, while developing both their research programs and teaching credentials. One of them is Marta Asaeda, trained in operator algebras at Penn State. Here you can view a lecture she gave at MSRI recently. The other new Douglis Lecturer is Wojciech Czaja, a harmonic analyst trained at Washington University, currently at Wroclaw University in Poland. And so far one Douglis Lecturer has been hired effective fall of 2002: Özgür Yilmaz. He is a student of Daubechies at Princeton and will come to work with John Benedetto and Dennis Healy. The Douglis Lecturer program is named in memory of our distinguished late colleague, Avron Douglis.
  • A few administrative changes are taking place during the 2001-2002 academic year. Chair Mike Fitzpatrick is taking a one-year break before assuming another term as Chair. Meanwhile Dan Rudolph is Acting Chair for a year. Mike Boyle is replacing Bill Adams as Undergraduate Chair and Becky Herb is serving for one year as Graduate Chair, to be succeeded next summer by Jonathan Rosenberg.
  • So far, two new faculty members have been hired for 2002-2003: Dimitry Dolgopyat, currently at Penn State University, an expert in dynamical systems, and Thomas Haines, currently at Toronto University, an expert on automorphic forms. Dolgopyat joins us as an Associate Professor; he will be on leave in 2002-2003 at the Institute for Advanced Study. Haines joins us as an Assistant Professor.
• Reorganization of the Applied Math Program:
  • The Maryland Applied Mathematics (MAPL) Program has changed its name to the Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation (AMSC) Program. This change reflects the fact that the Program now offers Ph.D. and M.S. degrees with concentrations in either applied mathematics or scientific computation, as well as a post-baccalaureate Certificate in Scientific Computation. It also reflects that the fact that the Program now receives substantial support from both the Department of Mathematics and the new Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling (CSCAMM). The AMSC offices are located on the third floor of the Mathematics building.
  • The Concentration in Applied Mathematics basically contains the old MAPL program. Through this concentration, the AMSC Program continues to offer students great flexibility in designing a program that combines a firm foundation in mathematics with advanced study and research in an area of application. Mathematics will likely remain the department with the largest connection to this component of the Program. Historically, about half of all MAPL Ph.D. graduates had supervisors in Mathematics. Moreover, the vast majority of the courses taken by MAPL students were taught by Mathematics Faculty. These patterns are expected to continue for Applied Mathematics students.
  • The Concentration in Scientific Computation is new. It emphasizes computation and its use in the physical sciences, life sciences, engineering, business, and social science. Students will receive training in the use of computational techniques and associated information technology with correspondingly less emphasis on mathematical analysis in comparision to the Concentration in Applied Mathematics. Every Scientific Computation student is required to apply the training in computation to a problem in a specific scientific discipline. Through CSCAMM these students will be supplied personal laptops and have access to state-of-the-art computational, visualization and networking facilities. Many of courses taken by these students will also be taught by Mathematics Faculty. It is hoped that this new concentration will enlarge the student base for the Program.
  • The main objective of the Program remains to promote training in interdisciplinary research. The Program is a unit of CMPS with close ties to both Mathematics and CSCAMM. There are fourteen participating departments and institutes on the College Park campus. The Program hopes to pay academic dividends to each of these units. In addition, there are links to various area research institutes: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of Standards and Technology, Naval Research Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These links should lead to greater resources and opportunities for students. For example, NASA Goddard has already agreed to sponsor four fellowships through CSCAMM that will be phased in over the next four years.

 

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