2012-04-04: UofA Dept of Mathematics prof Pham Tiep has received an NSF grant..

Pham Tiep has received an NSF grant to research: important problems in representation theory of finite groups and its applications. This proposal focuses on several important problems in representation theory of finite groups and its applications. Many of these problems come up naturally -- some long-standing and playing a central role -- in group representation theory, and others are motivated by various applications. The proposal ties together different areas of mathematics, such as finite groups and algebraic groups, finite permutation group theory, group cohomology, combinatorics, operator algebras, and algebraic geometry, with the main unifying ingredient being the representation theory.

For more information go to:

http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1201374

2012-03-08: U of A Math major Jason Xu has been selected as the recipient of the College of Science Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Spring 2012. .

Candidates for this award have shown outstanding achievement in independent, undergraduate research. In general, the student's work is a significant contribution and shows originality, creativity, and a level of independence appropriate to chemistry/biochemistry. The criteria for this award do not include a minimum GPA, substantial outside activities, or other criteria used for the Outstanding Senior Award.

Once the winner is chosen at the Department level, the application packet is forwarded to the College of Science for college-wide competition. At a special College award reception, the Department and College award recipients are presented with their awards. Each recipient is also mentioned in the Commencement Booklet at the College of Science graduation ceremony.

2012-03-01: Visiting Faculty,Cody Patterson has received a grant from the Department of Education..

The University of Arizona has been awarded a U.S. Department of Education Transition to Teaching grant to help address the shortage of secondary math teachers in Tucson. The Southern Arizona Inducting New Teachers (SAINT) Program, a collaboration between the Center for Recruitment and Retention of Mathematics Teachers (CRR) and the Teach Arizona Master's Program, will assist high-need schools in Tucson by recruiting and inducting fifty new teachers over the next five years.

SAINT participants will be recent college graduates and mid-career professionals with substantial experience in mathematics. Each participant will receive $5000 in tuition assistance to complete the Teach Arizona program and teach for three or more years in a high-need school while taking part in the CRR Induction Program, content workshops, and professional learning communities.

The million-dollar grant will not only provide tuition assistance for prospective math teachers, but also support an expansion of the Induction Program, which helps new teachers navigate the highly demanding first year in the classroom. Over 75% of teachers who have participated in the Induction Program have remained in the teaching profession for three years or more; many graduates of the Induction Program have gone on to become leaders in their schools and at the district level.

2012-03-01: Mathematics Professor Robert Sims has received an NSF grant for the Arizona School of Analysis and Mathematical Physics.

his award provides support to defray expenses of participants in the week-long Arizona School of Analysis and Mathematical Physics to be held at the University of Arizona on March 12-16, 2012. Much of the funding will be directed to young mathematicians (i.e., postdocs, graduate students, junior faculty) who do not have their own support.

For more information please visit: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1162637

2012-03-01: Department faculty member Moshe Shaked has received a grant from NSA for Projects in Stochastic Orders and Reliability Theory..

The proposal is split into three parts; the purpose of the first part is to describe two novel ideas, of defining global dependence stochastic orders, and also to describe various problems associated with these that may be investigated as part of the proposed research. The proposed research potentially has applications in Bayesian inference and in econometrics, as well as in reliability theory. The second part of the proposal involves the study of ordering partial sums of random variables. The last part involves a study of the so-called generalized total time on test transform orders with respect to some function.

2012-03-01: UofA Math faculty Helen Zhang has received a grant from NSA for research on Computational Approaches to Feature Selection for Massive Data.

Information extraction from high dimensional data is a fundamental problem and has many important applications. Due to rapid advances of scientific techniques and computing resources, overwhelmingly large data are collected in various fields of sciences and industries, such as image data, internet documents, and genetic data. How to build accurate, interpretable, and computationally efficient statistical models is a key question for high dimensional data analysis.

The proposed work is expected to make a significant impact on variable selection, by providing a fundamentally new arsenal in a statistician's toolbox. An integral part of the proposal is student advising, both at graduate and undergraduate level. Students will be trained in problem solving, communications, and research publications. Moreover, a special topic course on variable selection techniques will be developed and taught by investigators in their graduate programs.

2012-03-01: UofA Mathematics Dept faculty Bryden Cais has received an NSA grant for research on Integral p-adic Hodge Theory, Geometry, and Arithmetic.

Broadly speaking, number theory is the study of integers, equipped with their usual arithmetic of addition and multiplication. From this structure, the Greeks were naturally led to consider equations with integer coefficients, and tried to understand the integer solutions to such equations. Their quest has been taken up by every generation of mathematicians since that time, and continues to be an extremely active fruitful line of research today.

The proposed research would advance the state of the art in integral /p-/adic Hodge theory through a number of specific projects, and would apply these advances to fundamental constructions and problems in number theory. This research could lead to progress on several important problems and conjectures, including the construction of 2-variable /p-/adic /L/-functions, the understanding of specializations of Hida families to non-classical weights, the /p-/adic Langlands program, and the Manin conjecture. As part of this research, we will investigate integral comparison isomorphisms in /p-/adic co-homology and will use the resulting link with geometry to suggest and pursue new directions in integral /p/-adic Hodge theory for families of Galois representations.

2012-02-16: Lynette Guzman, UA undergraduate math major,placed among the top 15% of poster presentations at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings..

Lynette Guzman, UA undergraduate math major, won an Outstanding Presentation award at the 2012 Joint Mathematics Meetings MAA Undergraduate Poster Session for her poster, "Optimizing Algorithm for Reliability Assessment of Radial Lifeline Systems." Lynette placed among the top 15% of poster presentations - Congratulations!

2012-02-13: Undergraduate Mathematics Major Jason (Qian) Xu selected as the 2011-2012 recipient of the departmental Excellence in Undergraduate Research award..

Fri, 10 Feb 2012: Undergraduate Mathematics Major Jason (Qian) Xu has been selected as the 2011-2012 recipient of the departmental Excellence in Undergraduate Research award. A College of Science Awards committee will select an overall award recipient from among the departmental award winners. Congratulations, Jason!

2012-01-25: Applied Mathematics Graduate Student Brenae Bailey is awarded the prestigious Marshall Foundation Dissertation-Fellowship for final-phase dissertation support..

The Graduate College is pleased to announce that six graduate students will be receiving the prestigious Marshall Foundation Dissertation-Fellowship for final-phase dissertation support. In addition to a $10,788 stipend beginning in Spring 2012, each student will receive a tuition scholarship for two semesters.Brenae Bailey, Applied Math was awarded her scholarship for her work in "Stochastic Modeling of -1 Programmed Ribosomal Frameshifting".

2011-09-28: Sunder Sethuraman has received an NSF grant to research: Connections between tagged particles and hydrodynamics in some interacting systems..The proposed project considers problems with respect to various scaling limits of a tagged, or distinguished particle, the space-time evolution of the mass density of particles, or hydrodynamics, and their underlying connections in certain systems of interacting random walks such as simple exclusion and zero- range processes. The proposal will concentrate on relevant but less studied situations when these systems are out of equilibrium, when particles interactions are not finite-range, and when the systems are disordered. For more information go to: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1159026

2011-09-28: Rabindra Bhattacharya has received a supplement for his current NSF Grant for Collaborative Research: Nonparametric Theory on Manifolds of Shapes and Images, with Applications to Biology, Medical Imaging and Machine Vision..Much of the focus of this collaborative project is on the analysis of landmark based shapes in which a k-ad, i.e., a set of k points or landmarks on an object or a scene are observed in 2-D or 3-D, usually with expert help, for purposes of identification, discrimination, or diagnostics. Depending on the way the data are collected or recorded, the appropriate shape of an object is the maximal invariant specified by the space of orbits under a group G of transformations. In particular, Kendall's shape spaces of k-ads are invariant under scaling and Euclidean rigid motions. While this is a proper choice for many problems in biology and medical imaging, other notions of shape such as affine shape and projective shape are important in machine vision and bioinformatics. All these spaces are differentiable manifolds, often with natural Riemannian structures for measuring lengths and angles. The statistical analysis based on Riemannian structures is said to be intrinsic. In other cases, proper distances are sought via an equivariant embedding of the manifold M in a vector space E. Corresponding statistical analysis is called extrinsic. Finding proper Riemannian structures and equivariant embeddings is one of the objectives of this project, which is crucial for the statistical inference proposed. Establishing broad conditions for the existence of the FreZchet mean, as the unique minimizer of the FreZchet function the expected squared distance from a Q-distributed random shape is important for statistical inference; and it is a goal of the project to pursue, especially for intrinsic analysis where it has remained an outstanding open problem from the inception of shape theory. For more information go to: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=0806011

2011-09-21:

UofA Math Profs Juan Restrepo and Shankar Venkataramani have received an NSF Grant to conduct joint research in Lagrangian data blending for hurricane tracking and source estimation

.

A Lagrangian methodology based on a Discrete Kernel Filter (DKF) and the Ensemble Bred Vector (EBV) that uses local estimators that preserve significant dynamical features, detected by observations and in numerical simulations, is developed for the Forward Lagrangian Trajectory Prediction (LTP) and inverse source estimation problems that are fundamental in many different scientific disciplines. These nonlinear filtering problems are non-Gaussian and can have large-dimensional state spaces. DKF is based upon a particle filter and it does not suffer ensemble collapse because it has a built-in regeneration process in the parameterization of the diffusion process that defines the primary branches for prediction. The method linearizes about branches of prediction, yet makes no Gaussian assumption in the analysis stage. The EBV algorithm is used to find the best choices for branches of prediction, thus increasing the efficiency of the method significantly for application to important real-world problems such as oil spill modeling and pollution source identification, transport and dispersion of radioactive gases in the atmosphere, fish larvae transport and fishery connectivity, predicting sea ice motion, human colonization, mapping invasive species, and monitoring asteroid movements, to name a few.

For more information see:http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1109856"

2011-09-21:

UofA visiting Math Prof Alan Lindsay has received an AMS - Simons Travel grant for early-career mathematicians research related travel.

.

The AMS-Simons Travel Grant is a two year award of $4000 made to early-career mathematicians for research-related travel. The purpose of the funds is to foster research interaction and collaboration in mathematics for recent Ph.D recipients.

For more information visit:http://www.ams.org/programs/travel-grants/AMS-SimonsTG.

2011-09-21:

Campus Newspaper Profiles Multidimensional UofA Math Professor Bruce Bayly.

.

Bruce Bayly has been a UA math teacher for many years, but he's also developed a side persona in the science field that he's gradually moving into the math realm, where he's most comfortable.

He presented his new Arizona Mathematics Road Show at a recent presentation of Flandrau Science Center's monthly Science Cafe. Normally, the road show involves bringing a bus full of math-related activities to grade-school students and letting them find the fun without realizing they're actually doing math. Something as seemingly silly as dropping a ping pong ball through the spaces between several rows of nails nailed into a large board, to see whether they will bounce to the right or the left when it hits a nail, is math.

Favorite TV character: SpongeBob SquarePants. He's very real and open and you know what you're getting with him. ... Plus he's very mathematical. He's square.

For the full article please follow this link:http://lqp.arizona.edu/node/4256.

2011-09-02: Vladimir Zakharov has received an NSF Grant for Collaborative Research: Deterministic and Statistics Theory of Wind Driven Sea of Finite Depth.

Development of self-consistent statistical description of ocean waves in the coastal area is an important problem in physical oceanography. On deep water the main nonlinear effect is the four-wave resonant interaction described by Hasselmann kinetic equation for spectrum of wave action. Three-wave interaction becomes also important at finite depth, and comes to dominate in shallow water. Three-wave interactions of gravity waves are non-resonant; they become almost resonant on very shallow water only. This fact makes the development of consistent, well-justified analytical statistical theory of gravity waves at finite depth a difficult problem. It is unlikely to be solved by any heuristic modification of the Hasselmann equation that is written for time evolution of the pair correlation function. For the proper description, one has to derive a coupled system of equations for time evolution of pair and triple correlation functions. This project will derive, justify, and study these equations through the following steps: (1) derive the coupled system of equations for pair and triple correlation functions and make sure that this system preserves energy and on deep water goes to the classical Hasselmann equation; (2) generalize the obtained equation for the case of varying bottom topography and presence of current; (3) develop the numerical code for solution of equation for correlations, including into equations the input from wind and the dissipation of this input due to white-capping; (4) perform a massive numerical simulation of primordial dynamic equations in full 3-dimension geometry and use the obtained data for justification of statistical equations; and (5) on the base of deterministic numerical experiments find the function of dissipation due to white-capping on shallow water.

For more information visit:
http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1130450

2011-08-29: Brie Finegold has received an EAF Grant for an AIBL project.Finegold was awarded a $5,000 grant by the Academy of Inquiry Based Learning <http://www.inquirybasedlearning.org/AIBL/Home.html> for developing a course guide for teaching an inquiry based Introduction to Topology course for undergraduates. The guide will be based off of a course (432/532) Dr. Finegold taught this last Spring, and it will include sample student work, photos of student presentations, and notes (in lieu of a text). It is also a goal to submit the notes to the Journal of Inquiry Based Learning <http://www.jiblm.org/>, a refereed online resource.

2011-08-22: Robert Sims has received an NSF Grant to research "locality and randomness in non-relativistic systems".

Dr. Sims' research will focus on two major topics of interest. The first explores a quasi-local structure of the dynamics corresponding to non-relativistic systems. Due to the fact that such systems have no equivalent to a finite speed of light, the dynamics associated with, for example, a nearest neighbor Hamiltonian does not generally preserve locality in the strict sense. An approximate form of locality, or quasi-locality, has been demonstrated for many systems governed by Hamiltonians with short-range interactions. Recent developments have shown that these estimates, known as Lieb-Robinson bounds, are valid in a variety of contexts and useful in a number of important applications. Dr. Sims proposes the study of several systems for which there are no known quasi-locality results. Given these estimates, certain intriguing questions may be within reach of rigorous and detailed analysis. The next area of focus concerns random perturbations of specific quantum spin systems. For single particle systems, it is well known that disorder leads to localization: a metal with sufficiently many impurities loses its conductance properties. This phenomenon should persist in many-particle interacting systems, and Dr. Sims proposes to analyze the emergence of localization in random quantum spin systems. In fact, a dynamical form of localization, in terms of explicit Lieb-Robinson bounds, is proposed as a possible means of quantifying and thus further investigating this predicted behavior.

For more information visit:
http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1101345

2011-08-12: Deborah Hughes Hallett recipient of the College of Science Distinguished Career Teaching Award.

It is my pleasure to announce that Deborah Hughes Hallett has been selected as this year's recipient of the College of Science Distinguished Career Teaching Award. This award acknowledges the dedication with which Deb has served students throughout her teaching career in the department.

The award will be presented at the Annual College of Science Faculty Reception on Tuesday, September 20, 2011 at 5:00 P.M.

Congratulations to Deb on this impressive achievement!

2011-08-03: Cactus Mathematics. For more info: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/maths-eye-view/201107/cactus-mathematics.

2011-07-13: UA Algebra Academy Adds New Variables . For more info: http://uanews.org/node/40625.

2011-07-13: Three UofA Math majors selected for NASA parabolic micro-gravity flights..UofA Math majors, Michael Iuzzolino,Nathan Mogk,and Kyle Rine are part of Team ANGEL which was selected to participate in a series of NASA micro-gravity flights. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/40626.

2011-05-23: Bhattacharya funded by NSF for project: "Collaborative Research: New directions in nonparametric inference on manifolds with applications to shapes and images".

Digital images today play a vital role in science and technology, and also in many aspects of our daily life. The present proposal seeks to advance the analysis of digitized images via the statistical study of shapes. Nonparametric statistical methods developed for distributions on general manifolds over the past twelve years by the PIs and others have had a significant impact on statistical inference for shape spaces with applications to morphometrics, bioinformatics, medical diagnostics and many other forms of image analysis. The bulk of this work has focused on the use of manifolds of planar similarity shapes originally introduced by D.G. Kendall. The extension of inference to Kendall type 3-D similarity shapes runs into serious technical difficulties, which were only recently overcome by the introduction of reflection-similarity shapes and the Schoenberg embedding by the PIs. Although the present proposal seeks in part to consolidate this theory which has been based on the indices of Fre'chet means and dispersions on these manifolds, its main objective is to turn a page in nonpara- metric inference for shapes by focusing largely on (1) non-Kendall landmarks-based shape, most important among them being projective shapes, (2) estimation of, and inference for, Fre'chet means of continuous shapes, defined by boundary countours , and (3) functional inference, such as density estimation, regression, and classification, via the development of nonparametric Bayesian methods on manifolds. The principal investigators have made some initial progress recently on some aspects of these broad topics, but many important problems-geometric as well as statistical-remain to be solved.

As computer scientists have long recognized, projective shapes are the ones most appropriate for general image analysis involving scene recognition, machine vision or robotics, etc., not the Kendall type similarity shapes. The present project will develop registration free nonparametric in- ference by constructing an appropriate equivariant embedding of the full projective shape manifold, and by providing two-sample and multi-sample inference based on the corresponding extrinsic mean shape. Secondly, continuous shapes such as boundary contours of objects in 2-D will be investigated as elements of (infinite dimensional) Hilbert manifolds, and also as limits of (finite-dimensional) landmarks-based shapes. Finally, the proposed development of nonparametric Bayesian procedures for density estimation, regression and classification of shapes, will be a significant point of depar- ture from the inference based so far primarily on Fre'chet means and dispersions. Together these projects aim at providing comprehensive and robust procedures for inference on shapes which are of wide applicability in many fields of science and engineering.

Intellectual Merit. The project seeks to greatly expand the horizon of nonparametric shape and image analysis in a number of novel directions, with important applications in mind. Here challenging problems in statistics, geometry and functional analysis arise. The PIs' initial work on some of these new sets of problems show the promise of meeting these challenges.

Broader Impact.The project has far reaching potential applications in biotechnology, health sciences, machine vision and robotics, e.g., for industrial production of machine parts. The PIs propose to develop computational algorithms and make the codes available to the general public. They will also train graduate and undergraduate students in this fascinating field.

2011-04-26: UA Preparatory Math Goes Virtual. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/38806.

2011-04-25: Tucson Weekly Q&A with William Velez. For more info: http://www.tucsonweekly.com/tucson/t-qanda/Content?oid=2683522.

2011-04-18: UofA Mathematics Professor Alan Newell to speak at University of Arizona Science Cafe..

Join University of Arizona Mathematics Professor Alan Newell at the cafe at Saddle Brooke resort April 18th. Pfofessor Alan C.Newell, Regents' Professor of Mathematics will present Nature's Patterns: From Sunflowers to Fingerprints. The event is free. Arrive early as seating is limited.

Monday, April 18, 2011 6:00 PM

Mountian View Country Club Ballroom

38759 South Mountian View Blvd. SaddleBrooke

For full details call the Flaudrau Planetarium 520-621-7827.

For more info: http://www.flandrau.org.

2011-04-18: UA Math and Physics undergraduate Derek Huang is awarded Goldwater Scholarship for excellence in education..

This year, 275 students were awarded the $7,500 scholarship, which goes to top university sophomores and juniors in the mathematics, science and engineering disciplines.

Huang, a mathematics and physics major, has been engaged in research since his first semester at the UA.

"The most exhilarating aspect of doing research is feeling like there are no boundaries to what you can do and how well you do it," Huang said. "Excelling in a class means getting an A and leaving with a solid grasp of an established body of knowledge. Research, on the other hand, is endless."

Huang worked with Srinivas Manne, an associate professor of physics, on the “pursuit-evasion problem,” a project he tackled for 12 weeks before presenting his research, ultimately winning an award for his talk.

“What really sets Derek apart from his intelligent cohorts is the research maturity he already shows at his tender age,” Manne said.

Huang’s is currently serving as an undergraduate researcher in the lab headed up by Arvinder Sandhu, a UA assistant professor of physics.

For more info: http://uanews.org/node/39276.

2011-04-13: University of Arizona Dept of Mathematics' Math Center is lauded by the AMS..

The Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department was established by the AMS Council in 2004 and was given for the first time in 2006. The purpose is to recognize a department that has distinguished itself by undertaking an unusual or particularly effective program of value to the mathematics community, internally or in relation to the rest of society. Departments of mathematical sciences in North America that offer at least a bachelor's degree in mathematical sciences are eligible. Through the generous support of an anonymous donor, the award carries a cash prize of US$5,000.

For more information see the following URL's

http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500718p.pdf

http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500716p.pdf

2011-04-08: Bill Velez advises that for the academic year 2011/2012, of the eleven departments in the College of Science who nominated 19 students for outstanding researcher and outstanding graduating senior awards, seven of the nominees were math majors and two were math minors..

We would like to congratulate Robert Muth, our Outstanding Senior, and Andrew Binder, who was our choice for Excellence in Undergraduate Research. Other Math Majors who were nominated:

1. Felicia Werchan, Outstanding Senior for Computer Science
2. Jennifer Sierchio, Outstanding Senior for Physics *and* Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Astronomy
3. Gregory Phelps, Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Physics
4. Michael Mitchell, Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Biochemistry
5. Benjamin Salazar, Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Computer Science

Math minors who were nominated:

1. Beryl Jones, Outstanding Senior *and* Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award for Ecology & Evolutionary Biology
2. David Schenck, Outstanding Senior from Astronomy

2011-04-05: The Science Communications Program at UCSC interviews UA Math professor Alan Newell..The swell of a wave right before it crashes, the complex whorls of flower petals, the distinctive lines of our fingerprints—Alan Newell studies all of them. A professor of mathematics at the University of Arizona in Tucson, Newell has revealed how simple mechanical and biochemical forces give rise to such a variety of natural shapes. For more info: http://scicom.ucsc.edu/Q&A/2011/newell.php.

2011-03-08: UA Math Department Professor Pham Huu Tiep has been appointed to the Editorial Board of the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society..

2011-03-01: UA Math Dept Professor Allen Newell's talk "The Universal Nature of Fibonacci Patterns," featured in "Astrobiology" magazine.. For more info: http://www.astrobio.net/pressrelease/3795/how-natures-patterns-form.

2011-02-21: How Nature's Patterns Form:Perspectives on nature by UA mathematics professor Alan Newell..When people on airplanes ask Alan Newell what he works on, he tells them "flower arrangements." For more info: http://www.uanews.org/node/37978.

2011-02-14: School on Theory and Mathematical Modeling of Ultrashort Pulse Propagation. For more info: http://acms.arizona.edu/MURI/.

2011-02-10: Prof Ibrahim Fatkullin awarded NSF grant to addresses problems in liquid-crystalline and bacterial systems related to formation, evolution, and interaction of singularities and defects..

The investigator addresses problems in liquid-crystalline and bacterial systems related to formation, evolution, and interaction of singularities and defects. Such singularities manifest themselves in mathematical equations when the underlying physical models lose validity on a given scale. To study such systems, one must connect often quite disparate physical models arising at different length and time scales. The investigator employs a combination of modern analytical and numerical methods introduced by him for the Onsager model of nematic liquid crystals and Keller-Segel model of bacterial chemotaxis. In particular, he investigates liquid-crystalline systems such as polydisperse and biaxial nematics, smectics, and elastomers; phenomenon of formation and interaction of particle aggregates in bacterial chemotaxis. He creates the Multiphysics Modeling Lab: a center for research and education in methods of mathematical modeling and computer simulations. This establishes a collaborative environment involving students at the University of Arizona as well as (utilizing the close connection of the investigator with the Tucson Math Circle) the local K-12 students in projects on modeling and simulation of complex systems.

For more info: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1056471.

2011-02-03: A brief overview of the academic job market during the 2009-2010 academic recruitment and hiring cycle..

Highlights of 2009-2010 Recruitment Cycle

Positions Under Recruitment

During the 2009-2010 academic recruitment cycle, the total number of positions under recruitment by all mathematics departments combined was 1,081. This number is down 26% from the 2008-2009 total and down 46% from the 2007-2008 total.

The percentage decline in (full-time) positions under recruitment varied significantly among the various reporting groups. There was a 6% decline for the doctoral math departments combined, a 14% decline for masters mathematics departments (Group M) and a 43% decline for bachelors mathematics departments (Group B). Similarly, the decline in tenure-track positions under recruitment for these same department groupings was 25%, 27% and 44% respectively.

Positions Filled

A total of 960 positions were filled during the 2009-2010 academic cycle by all mathematics departments combined. This total is down 25% from the 2008-2009 total and down 47% from the 2007-2008 total.

The decline in positions filled for fall 2010 also varied widely among the various reporting groups. For the doctoral mathematics departments combined, the number of positions filled was 458, unchanged from the fall 2009 count. For Group M the count was 135, down 11% from fall 2009, and for Group B the count was 367, down 45% from fall 2009.

The total tenure-track positions filled during the 2009-2010 academic cycle by all mathematics departments combined was 479, down 33% from the 2008-2009 total of 710. This total is down 51% from the 2007-2008 figure of 978, the highest total over the past ten years.

This survey is part of the Annual Survey of the Mathematical Sciences. All 2010 numbers are estimates based on an overall response rate of 53% from the 1369 departments that received the survey (via email) in September 2010.

James W. Maxwell
Associate Executive Director
American Mathematical Society

2011-01-28: David Savitt has received an NSF Early Career Grant to research *p-adic and mod p Galois representations*.. Dr Savitt's research is in number theory and representation theory; its goal, broadly, is to understand the Galois representations associated (sometimes conjecturally) to automorphic forms and automorphic representations. Dr Savitt will undertake several projects related to the conjectures of Serre, Fontaine-Mazur, and Breuil-Mezard (and their generalizations) as well as to the emerging p-adic and mod p Langlands correspondences. Dr Savitt will study the weight part of Serre's conjecture for reductive groups over number fields, with the goal of giving an explicit Serre weight recipe in considerable generality. The investigator will produce evidence for generalizations of the Breuil-Mezard conjecture, and will prove some cases of such a generalization, with applications to the Langlands program. Another component of the project involves the explicit reduction modulo p of certain p-adic Galois representations. For more info: http://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1054032.

2011-01-18: Record power in the terahertz gap. For more info: http://blogs.physicstoday.org/update/2011/01/-the-universe-teems-with.html.

2011-01-18: Citation - University of Arizona Mathematics Department for the Exemplary Program or Achievement in a Mathematics Department Award .The American Mathematical Society is pleased to recognize the undergraduate Math Center at the University of Arizona with the 2011 Award for an Exemplary Program or Achievement by a Mathematics Department. The Math Center is a national leader in the effort to recruit, mentor and graduate undergraduate math majors,especially those students from backgrounds traditionally underrepresented in mathematics.

2010-12-03: UA Math Dept Professor Alan Newell will hold a conversation on nature's patterns..

Cushing St. Bar. 6pm, December 14th 2010

You see nature's patterns all over the place, as sandripples on sandy beaches and on desert dunes, in the cloud streets you see through an airplane window, in geological formations such as the Giant's Causeway, as epidermal ridges on the tips of your fingers or palms of your hands, on animal coats, on fishskins, on the surfaces of saguaro and barrel cacti, on sunflowers, even in megalithic art stone etchings. In the laboratory, one sees very similar patterns in experiments on the convection of fluids, on buckling shells, in chemical mixtures, on flame fronts and on laser beams. What is remarkable is that the pattern textures (stripes, hexagons, even the defects) seen in very different contexts have much in common. I hope that our conversation will give you some idea why it is that the same pattern features occur again and again and encourage you to look for and wonder about examples of self organized behavior in this marvelous universe and world around us.

For more information see the following link.

Flandrau Planetarium Article.

2010-11-30: Lauren Myers Named College of Science Outstanding Senior.

We are happy to announce that Ms. Lauren Myers, Outstanding Senior in both Mathematics and Molecular and Cellular Biology, has been selected as the College of Science Outstanding Senior for Fall 2010.Ms. Myers, who has worked on independent research projects in laboratories at the UA and elsewhere, was both a National Merit Scholar and a Flinn Scholar.In addition, she has been a member of the UA Science Ambassadors and has given numerous presentations about her research and about the University of Arizona.She has studied abroad in Vietnam, Cambodia and China and served as a columnist for the Arizona Daily Wildcat.She is passionate about science, math, writing and travel, and after graduation hopes to become a teacher with Teach for America.She would eventually like to become a science writer, making science and mathematics enjoyable to all.Please join us in congratulating Ms. Lauren Myers.

2010-11-15: UA math professor Velez featured in MIT publication for work with minorities.. For more info: http://www-math.mit.edu/news/integral_2010.pdf#page=4.

2010-11-13:

The Southwestern Group Theory Day

.

All of the talks will be in room 501 of the Math Building on the University of Arizona campus. The address is 617 N Santa Rita Ave.

Scheduled Speakers:

• Jonathan Brundan, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
• James P. Cossey, University of Akron, Akron, OH
• Simon Guest, Baylor University, Waco, TX
• Robert M. Guralnick, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA
• David Hemmer, University at Buffalo, SUNY, Buffalo, NY
• Alexander S. Kleshchev, University of Oregon, Eugene, OR
• Monica Vazirani, University of Calfiornia, Davis, CA
• Hung N. Nguyen, University of Akron, Akron, OH
• Ryan Vinroot, College of William and Mary, Williamsburg, VA

For more info: http://math.arizona.edu/~grouptheory/grouptheoryday2010.html.

2010-10-21: UA Math Professor a Champion for Higher Education.

Velez recently was honored by The Victoria Foundation for his efforts to inspire Hispanic students in Arizona to pursue higher education. He was one of four people to receive a First Annual Arizona Higher Education Award from the foundation, which supports university students as part of its mission to promote the lifelong education of Latinos.

For more info: http://lqp.arizona.edu/node/3169.

2010-10-04: Brookhill Foundation funds Bill McCallum's proposal entitled "Progressions Documents for the Common Core Math Standards.".

Introduction

The Common Core State Standards in mathematics were built on progressions: narrative documents describing the progression of a topic across a number of grade levels, informed both by research on childrens’ cognitive development and by the logical structure of mathematics. These documents were spliced together and then sliced into grade level standards. From that point on the work focused on refining and revising the grade level standards. The early drafts of the progressions documents no longer correspond to the current state of the standards.

It is important to produce up-to-date versions of the progressions documents. They can explain why standards are sequenced the way they are, point out cognitive difficulties and pedagogical solutions, and give more detail particularly knotty areas of the mathematics. This would be useful in teacher preparation and professional development, organizing curriculum, and writing textbooks. Progressions documents also provide a transmission mechanism between math- ematics education research and standards. Research about learning progressions produces knowledge which can be transmitted through the progresssions document to the standards revision process; questions and demands on standards writing can be transmitted back the other way into research questions.

Proposed Work

We propose to organize the writing of final versions of the progressions doc- uments for the K-12 Common Core State Standards. The work will be undertaken by members of the original workteam of the progressions and also by prominent mathematicians, educators, and teachers not involved in the initial writing. The involvement of the latter group will be important in extending ownership of the Common Core State Standards to a wider group of practitioners than initially had a stake in the them.

2010-09-13: UA Mathematics & Sciences 18th out of 500 Best Universities Worldwide.

According to a pilot project "High Impact Universities" conducted by the University of Western Australia to "benchmark the research performance of the world's top universities," the University of Arizona Mathematics & Sciences are placed at 17th. The University of Arizona as a whole placed 39th.

For more info: http://www.highimpactuniversities.com/index.html.

2010-09-10: Professor Bill McCallum, Dept of Mathematics, has been named the Mathematic Association of America's James R.C. Leitzel lecturer for 2010..

The James R.C. Leitzel Lecture was established by the Board of Governors in 1998. It provides a forum for the presentation and discussion of "issues or innovations in mathematical sciences education at the undergraduate or graduate level," and, in so doing, honors the many contributions of James R.C. Leitzel to the improvement of mathematical sciences education.

For more info: http://www.maa.org/mathfest/ia.cfm#mccallum.

2010-08-23: William Yslas Velez has been appointed the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.Visiting Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology for the Spring semester, 2011. He will be at MIT from January to June, 2011..

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology established the Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Visiting Professor Program to enhance and recognize the contributions of outstanding scholars. The program honors the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. by increasing the presence of such scholars at MIT. Since the first appointments in 1995, fifty-four Visiting Professors and sixteen Visiting Scholars have been named.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors enhance their scholarship through intellectual interactions with MIT peers, and enrich the intellectual life of MIT with their participation in MIT research and academic programs. They are expected to be deeply engaged in the life of the Institute through teaching, research and other scholarly interactions with the MIT community. Their presence gives them the opportunity to make a significant impact on the growth and awareness of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as the MIT community as a whole. Appointments as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Visiting Professors have been in all of MIT's academic areas of Architecture, Engineering, Humanities, Management and Science.

For more info: http://web.mit.edu/mlking/vpp_index.html.

2010-08-20: MAA posts presentations given at MathFest2010..

This year, for the first time, the MAA recorded many of the invited speakers, and are making the recordings available, on a trial basis, to share a part of MathFest with our members (and others) who were unable to attend, as well as to allow those who joined us in Pittsburgh to revisit their favorite lectures.

The folders on the left each contain one or more lectures from MathFest2010. To watch, simply select a folder and click on the lecture you want to watch.

Enjoy the lectures!

For more info: http://www.globalpres.com/mediasite/Catalog/pages/catalog.aspx?catalogId=00282ad2-f5b5-4991-a75e-d4ac72b6196e.

2010-08-19: Mathematics professor Bill Velez has received the Victoria Foundation's, Dr. Alfredo G. de los Santos, Jr., Outstanding Latino/a Faculty Service/Teaching in Higher Education Award..

William Yslas Velez, Professor of Mathematics and University Distinguished Professor, has been intimately involved in promoting careers in the mathematical sciences for Chicano/Latino students for more than twenty years. The impact of his work has been felt both at the local level as well as on the national scene.

He is a Founding Member of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS) and served as its president from 1994-96. In his position as president of SACNAS he obtained funding to initiate the web-based SACNAS biography project, an effort that resulted in the publication of approximately 100 biographies of Chicano/Latino scientists aimed at middle school and high school students. He also made substantive changes to SACNAS annual meetings in order to encourage minority students to pursue graduate degrees in the sciences. SACNAS is now recognized as one of the premier minority scientific organizations in the country.

2010-08-11: Castravet receives funding from NSF for the project Mori Dream Spaces and Rational Curves.The project aims at understanding different aspects of the geometry of algebraic varieties and their moduli. The broader context of the project is the area of algebraic geometry. Algebraic geometry is the study of algebraic varieties, which are geometric objects defined by the zeros of systems of polynomial equations. The variation of algebraic varieties is captured by the so-called moduli spaces, which are themselves varieties with a very rich structure. The project aims at revealing the intriguing structure of various moduli spaces of curves (which are fundamental in many areas of mathematics and in theoretical physics). The project impacts arithmetic and computational algebraic geometry, areas which have increasing applications in coding theory, robotics, etc.

2010-08-11: University of Arizona researcher Jerome Moloney is leading a team that's investigating lasers with practical implications.. For more info: http://www.uanews.org/node/33051.

2010-07-29: $1.8 million Noyce Grant Received by Mathematics and College of Education.The proposal entitled, "Arizona Master Teachers of Mathematics (AZ-MTM)", under the direction of Marta Civil and Rebecca McGraw of the School of Mathematical Sciences (Department of Mathematics), and Erin Turner and Marcy Wood of the College of Education has been funded by the National Science Foundation's Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program. This $1.8 million grant will bring together the Department of Mathematics, the College of Education, the Tucson Unified School District, the Sunnyside School District, the Pima County Regional Support Center and the Arizona K-12 Center to create 20 Master Teachers. These Master Teachers will provide school, district and state-level leadership in K-8 Mathematics. The project provides extensive training to Master Teacher Fellows in the leadership of professional learning communities, analysis of authentic artifacts of practice, coaching and mentoring strategies, equity in mathematics teaching and learning, organization structures and systems thinking, and pre-service teacher education. The program uses an apprenticeship model, with Master Teacher Fellows taking increased leadership roles and responsibility for professional development in mathematics within their schools and districts as the program progresses. For more information please see http://uanews.org/node/33005. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/33005.

2010-07-08: Sean Howe wins undergraduate research award.. For more info: http://ur.arizona.edu/studentHighlights.cfm.

2010-06-14: Math Faculty receive notice of HHMI grant funding. For more info: http://www.uanews.org/node/32073.

2010-06-10: Shiffler and Soto Accept Raytheon Scholarships.Stacy Shiffler who majors in Applied Math & Physics, and Robert Soto, majoring in Math and Chemistry have accepted Raytheon scholarships of $5,000 each for the academic year 2010-2011. The scholarships are part of the new (2010) Raytheon Scholars program, supporting four Raytheon scholars from the UA: two from the College of Science and two from Engineering. In addition, during the summer of 2011, these scholars will be eligible to receive a Raytheon paid summer internship. While notifying our Department of the awards, Cheryl Tomoeda of the College of Science Development office said that Raytheon was "pleased with the caliber of students selected from the College of Science."

2010-04-14: University of Arizona professor William Yslas Velez speaks about minorities in math .

William Yslas Velez, a mathematician, University of Arizona Distinguished Professor and former president of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science, spoke at MIT on Monday about how to make his field more representative of the United States as a whole. To read more about this subject please follow this link.

2010-04-07: Three math majors, one math minor are Goldwater Scholarship recipients. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/31023.

2010-04-07: University of Arizona team (Sean Howe, Derrick Sund, and Jeffrey Truman) placed 40th among competing institutions in William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. For more info: http://math.scu.edu/putnam/.

2010-03-30: A surreal catastrophe: working with Salvador Dali.Nestled in the back of Paradise Cafe sat Thomas Banchoff of Brown University. In town for the Daniel Bartlett Memorial Lecture series this past Monday, Banchoff agreed to speak with me before he left. His laptop erect before him, Banchoff turned to his wife with a puzzled look, as she attempted to show him how to call someone on Skype. For a man who has been doing research in mathematics since 1964, this was a rare moment of befuddlement. For more info: http://wildcat.arizona.edu/wildlife/a-surreal-catastrophe-working-with-dali-1.1278558.

2010-03-25: Jerry Moloney and The Arizona Center for Mathematical Sciences has received approval of their recent proposal Ultrafast Nonlinear Optics on Macroscopic and Sub-Wavelength Scales. .This proposal addresses contemporary problems in the study of nonlinear optics on scales that are both much larger and much smaller than the wavelength of light. On macroscopic scales, we propose to study extreme nonlinear optics associated with ultra-short pulse propagation in extended media such as air, gases and condensed matter. Even at this level, the light matter interaction requires a microscopic quantum description. Another important open problem, is the nature of lasing at multiple wavelengths in vertical external cavity surface emitting lasers (VECSELs), these devices have recently been shown by us to emit THz waves at room temperature and at power levels six orders of magnitude stronger than the much touted quantum cascade lasers. A major challenge is the incorporation of the full many-body microscopic description in a multi-pass laser propagation problem. Past implementations have been restricted to single pass ultrashort pulse propagation through a single stack of quantum wells. The other extreme, we propose to study linear and nonlinear optics on sub-wavelength scales, the field of near-field optics. Recent developments in nanophotonics, plasmonics and metamaterials raise fundamental questions regarding the physics of light interaction with materials and with numerical approaches being implemented to study these phenomena. At the Arizona Center for Mathematical Sciences we have been developing computer codes that implement both time domain and frequency- domain, 3D Maxwell solvers.

2010-03-16: MAA approves Velez Proposal for Tensor-SUMMA Grant.We propose two projects, designed to encourage the pursuit of mathematics among minority students at two levels: calculus students at The University of Arizona; and mathematics majors at the University of Arizona. The University of Arizona is uniquely poised to increase minority participation among the Hispanic and Native American populations. The mathematics department has a strong history, dating back many years, of serving the minority community. The percentage of minority mathematics majors in the department has been over 20% for the last three years and the total number of mathematics majors has been over 550 for that same time- period. In 2008-2009, a record number of minority students, 14, received their undergraduate degrees. Half of these students have pursued graduate study in a variety of fields.

2010-03-12: Common Core Standards draft released on March 10, 2010.

A draft of the Common Core Standards, a project of the National Association of Governors and of the Council of Chief State School Officers, was released on March 10, 2010. The group who wrote the mathematics portion of this project was directed by Bill McCallum. The draft of the Common Core Standards is now available for public comment via a survey at Survey at this link. You can read the Common Core Standards news at CCSSO , Governor's , Huffington Post, AP, Monitor and many other sources.

2010-03-11: Beata Wehr's work featured at UA Museum of Art Exhibit.Today the UA Museum of Art opens its new exhibition "Sculptural Books: Memory and Desire." This exhibition, which runs through June 13, 2010, features Beata Wehr and a number of other artists. (One of Beata's larger paintings can be seen in Bill McCallum's office.) Please go to the link below for more information about the exhibit. For more info: http://artmuseum.arizona.edu/exhibitions/sculptural_books.shtml.

2010-03-01: Excellence in undergraduate research for Spring 2010 is awarded to Mathematics student..It is a great pleasure to announce that the Spring 2010 Excellence in Undergraduate Research winner for the College of Science is: Sean Howe, Mathematics! Thank you to everyone who prepared packets for all these great students!

2010-02-24: Associate Professor Romyar Sharifi's proposal entitled "Iwasawa 2010" will be funded by NSF. For more info: http://nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward.do?AwardNumber=1005225.

2010-02-22: Arshed Al-Obeidi and Alex Henniges receive Pillars of Excellence awards..Five University of Arizona professors and 12 Honors College students were honored Thursday Feb 18, during the annual Pillars of Excellence reception. President Robert N. Shelton, Provost Meredith Hay, Honors College Dean Patricia MacCorquodale and UABookStores executive director Frank Farias spoke at the event, which will recognized faculty members named Regents' Professors, University Distinguished Professors or University Distinguished Outreach Professors in 2009, as well as student scholars nominated by Honors College professors. Past honorees who attended the reception were presented with a copy of their Pillars of Excellence portrait.

2010-02-05: Today, the College of Science announced its Outstanding Seniors and Excellence in Undergraduate Research Winners..Today, the College of Science announced its Outstanding Seniors and Excellence in Undergraduate Research Winners. Along with Alan Mackey and Sean Howe, featured in the news previously, we'd like to congratulate Alex Henniges, Keeper Sharkey and Arshed Al-Obeidi who are also Mathematics Majors. The complete list of students are Outstanding Seniors: Jonathan Nation, Computer Science Shane Rightley, Physics Anne Purkey, Hydrology & Water Resources Allison Strom, Astronomy Lance Randall, Psychology Michele O'Shea, Molecular & Cellular Biology Dario Pasalic, Chemistry & Biochemistry Alan Mackey, Mathematics Matthew Thorry, Science Teacher Prep. Program Michael Weiss, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology Excellence in Undergraduate Research Winners: Sean Howe, Mathematics Alex Henniges, Computer Science Jason Dittmann, Astronomy Keila Gutierrez, Speech, Language & Hearing Sciences Keeper Sharkey, Chemistry & Biochemistry Andrew McCallister, Geosciences Arshed Al-Obeidi, Molecular & Cellular Biology Alexander Podolsky, Ecology & Evolutionary Biology

2010-01-29: The Undergraduate Committee has nominated Alan Mackey for the 2010 College of Science Outstanding Senior Award and Sean Howe for the 2010 College of Science Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award. .Undergraduate Committee Nominates Alan Mackey and Sean Howe The Undergraduate Committee has nominated Alan Mackey for the 2010 College of Science Outstanding Senior Award and Sean Howe for the 2010 College of Science Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award. The Outstanding Senior nomination is for "a student who excels in her⁄his studies, as evidenced by having a G.P.A. of 3.5 or better, is involved in research, and is also recognized as a leader within the campus or the larger community." Alan Mackey was selected for this nomination because he will earn degrees in mathematics and economics and has already been accepted to graduate school in mathematics. Alan took three graduate courses here, plus graduate level courses in Budapest. His research work ranges over the acoustic environment for people wearing headphones, to formal languages, to human evolution. The College of Science Excellence in Undergraduate Research Award honors a student whose research demonstrates "independence, initiative, significance, creativity and skill." Sean Howe has been active in research in mathematics since his sophomore year, and has worked on a wide variety of problems from mathematics and applied mathematics."  He has produced three papers in the area of differential geometry that will be published in international journals of high standing and will be going on to pursue a Ph.D. in mathematics.

2010-01-27: Professor Graham Wilks Visiting the Department.

Bio – Professor Graham Wilks: Graham graduated BSc and PhD in Applied Mathematics from Manchester University, England in 1963 and 1967 respectively. His thesis in Boundary Layer Theory underpinned his subsequent research career in fundamental and industrial fluid mechanics and in solution methods for parabolic differential equations. He has contributed particularly to the heat transfer fluid mechanics of convection and condensation, film inundation and drainage and jet assimilation into accelerating and decelerating ambient streams utilizing a variety of analytic and computational techniques.

Graham is particularly associated with Keele University, England where he served as Head of Department for 20 years. He also served as Dean of Natural Sciences and Pro Vice-Chancellor.

On the UK national scene Graham was also the Chair of the Conference of Professors of Applied Mathematics and Chair of the Heads of Department of Mathematical Sciences. His research standing was acknowledged when he was elected to the UK national Mathematics Research Assessment Panel 2001.

Graham is active in musical theatre and recently performed the role of the Major General in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. He was , with confidence, able to assure his audience that "I’m very well acquainted too with matters mathematical, I understand equations both the simple and quadratical."

2010-01-27: Prof Dinesh Thakur receives grant from the NSA to study Ihara Power Series.. The proposer will work on a project in function field arithmetic: a mixture of number theory and geometry,from which many important insights in number theory have arisen.

2009-12-15: Banff International Research Station Accepts Tiep's Proposal.March 13 - March 18, 2011; Global/Local Conjectures in Representation Theory of Finite Groups

2009-12-08: Sims and Ueltschi Receive NSF Funding for Arizona School of Analysis with Applications.The applicants intend to organize a school in analysis and its applications to be held in Tucson, Arizona, on March 15-19, 2010. A similar school was organized the previous year, and the participants generated so much positive feedback that it was decided to organize another school this year. This year’s goal is to introduce several topics to young mathematicians at the PhD or postdoctoral level. The main part of the school will consist of four lectures given by experts in their fields. More precisely, the program will include the following.

•Isoperimetric Inequalities for Eigenvalues of the Laplacian, by Rafael Benguria (Universidad Cat ?lica de Chile).

•Kinetic Theory and Kac’s Master Equation, by Michael Loss (Georgia Tech).

•Localization in Disordered Media, by G ? nter Stolz (University of Alabama,Birmingham).

A fourth minicourse will be decided later – Jan Philip Solovej (Copenhagen) has been contacted, but he has not firmly committed yet. All three confirmed speakers have expressed their enthusiasm in delivering these lectures. The organizers also expect the participation of several more senior scientists who will be asked to deliver talks in areas that are related to the main lectures.

2009-11-23: Prof. Matthew Papanikolas visits U of A Math Dept November 9 through December 5, 2009..Prof. Matthew Papanikolas is a research visitor to the department from November 9 through December 5, 2009. He is visiting to work with Dinesh Thakur from Texas A & M, and is located in Math 705.

2009-11-19: Shankar Venkataramani funded by US Israel Foundation for his proposal: EXPERIMENTAL AND THEORETICAL STUDY OF ACTIVELY DEFORMING SHEETS.Abstract Many natural structures are made of soft tissue that undergoes complicated continuous shape transformations that accurately and reliably serve specific elaborate tasks. Such processes can be slow, as in growth of a tissue, or rapid and be used for the production of mechanical work, as in the case of the action of the hart. In contrast, most man made "machines" are based on translation or rotation of rigid "driving" components that , in some cases, deform passive soft components. One can see the potential in mimicking natural shaping mechanisms with artificial materials. However, our ability to produce controlled motions of soft tissue is poor. The difficulties in controlling this type of shaping involve mathematical and experimental problems. Problems such as definitions of strains in evolving bodies, designe of responsive materials and understanding the underlying mechanical instabilities are of central importance. We propose a research that will join our expertise in mathematics, mechanics, experimental physics and chemical engineering (Ron correct), that will be focused on studying the principles of shaping via active growth and will take the first steps in implementing them. The work will consist of intensive interaction between theoretical and experimental work.

2009-11-19: Per Jakobsen visiting ACMS from Norway.*Per Jakobsen*, Associate Professor of Applied Mathematics, Institute for Mathematics and Statistics, University of Tromsø , Norway will visit the Arizona Center for Mathematical Sciences from November 23 through December 13. If you would like to meet with Professor Jakobsen, please contact Roxanne Pizano at rpizano@math.arizona.edu. Jakobsen will office in the Optical Sciences Building, Room 532. Jakobsen will be here for research collaboration with ACMS, which has expertise in computational electromagnetics and optics. Jakobsen is a former doctoral student at the UA and his research interests are in: The calculation of classical and quantum electrodynamically induced forces on wavelength sized objects in the linear response regime is a mathematically challenging problem of considerable technological interest. In this size regime the dipole and geometric optics approximations breaks down and the goal is to develop effective computational methods. For classically induced forces I am using a reformulation of the Maxwell equations in terms of a set of singular boundary integral equation. The challenge is to solve these integral equations effectively for complex geometries and material properties. For quantum electrodynamically induced forces(Casimir forces) the mathematical object of interest is the Feynman propagator. Because of the usual ultraviolet divergences of quantum fields, no boundary integral formulation for the propagator is known. My current research activity in this area is aimed at finding a boundary integral formulation for the electromagnetic Feynman propagator with the ultimate goal of developing an effective computational approach for the computation of Casimir forces.

2009-11-04: Student Assistant Megan John named Magellan Scholar.We are happy to announce that Student Assistant Megan John is a recipient of the Magellan Circle Scholarship from the College of Social & Behavioral Sciences (SBS). Megan, a Junior majoring in History, has been with our Department nearly two years. Please stop by Math 109 to congratulate her.

2009-10-29: Teaching for Excellence and Equity in Mathematics (TEEM)..The purpose of TODOS and of /TEEM/ is to "advocate for an equitable and high quality mathematics education for all students in particular, Hispanic/Latino students by increasing the equity awareness of educators and their ability to foster students' proficiency in rigorous and coherent mathematics." The debut issue (TEEM 2009 Vol.1 No.1) is now available. The full issue is generally accessible only to members of TODOS: Mathematics for All. Those who may be interested in the journal can access an excerpt from the issue at the link provided. For more info: http://www.todos-math.org/.

2009-10-15: UA prof William Yslas Vélez hailed for initiative on math education..

By focusing on student advising, especially with minority students, Vélez has nearly doubled the number of math majors at the University of Arizona in five years. Of the 538 math majors, 21 percent are minorities.

For more information see http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/byauthor/312820.

2009-10-14: Jim Cushing elected President of International Society of Difference Equations.In September 2009, Professor Jim Cushing was elected President of the International Society of Difference Equations. The goals of this Society are: - To promote difference equations and discrete dynamical systems, defined broadly, as two of the fundamental subjects in Mathematics. - To promote discrete models as models of premiere mathematical importance in the natural sciences, engineering, economics, etc. - To coordinate activities in the areas of difference equations and discrete dynamical systems such as organizing conferences, annual meetings, workshops, special sessions, etc. - To lend support to researchers in difference equations and discrete dynamical systems from developing countries and those who need help by making available copies of research articles, lecture notes, technical reports, journal articles, and books. - To promote the publication of books, monographs, lecture notes and expository articles in the areas of difference equations and discrete dynamical systems.

2009-09-22: College and Career Readiness Standards for Mathematics.William G. McCallum, a University Distinguished Professor and mathematics department head, was among 15 education leaders and researchers across the nation to draft, "College and Career Readiness Standards for Mathematics." A separate working group wrote the report on English-language art skills. For more info: http://www.uanews.org/forward/emailref/27366.

2009-09-16: Alan Newell has received funding for his grant entitled "Patterns in Nature and in the Laboratory.". Patterns of an almost periodic nature are to be found almost everywhere in nature and are the subject of many laboratory experiments. Open any journal these days in Physics, Biology, Chemistry, Optics and Geophysics and one will find articles on some remarkable aspect and utility of self-organizing patterns. One area of much current interest, especially given the new NSF supported iPlant consortium, has been the grand challenge of understanding how biological systems evolve and self organize. One of the new foci of interest is also one of the oldest, the appearance of organized patterns and configurations on the surfaces of plants near the shoot apical meristem. New experiments on the important role of auxin, many on the plant Arabidopsis, suggest that biochemical processes are involved in initiating the observed phyllotactic patterns. The PI, who has forty years experience in the field, and his former and current graduate students Patrick Shipman and Zhiying Sun (supported by NSF grant DMS 0501243), have built models involving both biochemical and mechanical processes which are inspired and informed by the experiments of Kuhlmeier et. al. and Meyerowitz et. al. which appear to give results in close harmony with observations. The proposal also addresses properties of patterns far from onset; gradient-like behaviors, condensation of the Gaussian curvature of the phase function and a remarkable correspondence between three dimensional line singularity loops and quarks and leptons.

2009-09-08: IM&E selected to be Intel National Training Agency.The Institute for Mathematics and Education has been selected by Intel Corporation to be the National Training Agency for the Intel Math program. Intel Math is a professional development program for K-8 mathematics teachers that focuses on content knowledge and emphasizes that mathematics is best learned by doing. The IM&E received a $150,000 grant from the Intel Foundation to establish the National Training Agency, whose principal role will be to disseminate the Intel Math program at the national level.

2009-08-27: *You like our 'gem?' We'll trade you * Re: the Aug. 21Arizona Daily Star article "'Modern' gems are cited.".I think I speak on behalf of everyone in the department when I say that we were honored to have our building recognized as a gem. So honored, in fact, that we would be delighted to trade it with anybody who truly appreciates it. In addition to its architectural distinction, the building solves an interesting mathematical problem: how to provide the least space for the largest footprint. I'm sure that one day we will miss its sloping floors, disintegrating walls and cranky elevator. But that day, long awaited, has not yet come. /William McCallum / /Chair, UA Department of Mathematics, Tucson /

2009-08-18: Cushing Funded for study of The Dynamics and Evolution of Semelparity. Intellectual merits. Biological semelparity is a life history adaptation in which an individual organism reproduces once and then, or shortly thereafter, dies. This reproductive strategy is found throughout the plant and animal kingdoms. The trade-offs between reproduction and survival and the distinctions between semelparous and iteroparous life cycles have long been recognized as key issues involved in the study of life history strategies. Major topics of interest are (1) the population dynamic consequences and (2) the evolutionary advantage or disadvantage of semelparity (versus iteroparity). Recent developments in the modeling of semelparity, using methods of nonlinear dynamics and bifurcation theory, have established a fundamental dynamic dichotomy that is of both biological and mathematical interest. From a mathematical point of view, models for the dynamics of semelparous species lie outside the standard theory of general structured population dynamics in that the primary bifurcation from extinction to persistence that occurs at R0 = 1 is of high codimension. The challenge of determining the dynamic consequences of this fact have been met only in the low dimensional cases (shorter maturation periods), and even then not thoroughly. These preliminary results establish a dynamic dichotomy for semelparous species that consists, roughly speaking, of an alternative between equilibration with overlapping generations or oscillations (not necessarily periodic) with non-overlapping generations. The nature of the oscillations in the later case, however, are not well understood, except in the lowest dimensional cases which show that they can be complex. The first goal of the proposed research is to carry out a mathematical study of this dynamic dichotomy that will clarify the nature of these oscillations. The methods will involve stability analysis, bifurcation methods, perturbation expansions, monotone semi-flow theory, the use average Lyapunov functions, persistence theory, and numerical simulations. The second goal of the proposed research is to address questions about the evolution of semelparity and the possibility of its being an ESS (evolutionary stable strategy). The method to be used is Darwinian dynamics (based on evolutionary game theory), a methodology that extends a population dynamic model to include the dynamics of an evolving (mean phenotypic) trait which in turn affects the population dynamics (through its influence on birth and death rates). Using biologically reasonable trade- offs to build sub-models for fecundity and survivorships as functions of an evolving trait, we will study the circumstances under which semelparity is evolutionarily favored and when it is not. The Darwinian dynamics approach allows the methods of nonlinear dynamics and bifurcation theory to be applied to these evolutionary questions. Broader impacts. The investigation of many problems in the biosciences is based on population dynamics, including problems concerning the spread of diseases, invasion of non-native species, the stability and diversity of ecosystems, endangered species, the management of agricultural systems, the operation of fisheries, and the design of nature preserves. The life history strategy of a species is, in turn, fundamental to understanding its population dynamics. A thorough understanding of the dynamics and evolution of semelparous (and iteroparous) species promotes a deeper understanding of those disciplines built on and related to population dynamics. Furthermore, the development of a modeling methodology for studying the dynamics and evolution of semelparous species allows for the construction of more accurate models for applications to specific species. For example, many diseases are spread by semelparous organisms, many parasites are semelparous, and many plants of agriculture importance are semelparous. The dynamic models to be used in this research are of types (difference equations) that are particularly accessible to those (including undergraduates) with a limited background in dynamical systems. Because of the quick learning curve for becoming adept at using these kinds of models, the proposed research provides abundant research opportunities for undergraduates and graduates that introduces them, an accessible context, to sophisticated concepts and methods in the theory of dynamical systems and permits them to make interesting applications that make solid contributions to biological problems.

2009-08-10: McGraw, Madden and McCallum receive Arizona Master Teacher Program grant.

The Institute for Mathematics and Education (IM&E) and the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona (UA) propose a planning grant to develop a Phase I Master Teaching Fellows proposal. A consortium of key stakeholders will participate in the program planning, including high-needs schools and districts, university departments and programs, local educational agencies, non-profits and businesses. The core partners that have identified so far are

• The Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona

• Sunnyside Unified School District

• Tucson Unified School District

• Tucson Values Teachers

Pima County Regional Support Center We anticipate adding partners during the planning period. During the planning period the consortium will collaborate to design a comprehensive program for the Arizona Master Teacher Program for Mathematics (AZ-MTM), making use of existing professional development opportunities, identifying and securing commitments for matching funds, and developing a comprehensive evaluation plan. Planning activities will include a one-day retreat to establish a timeline and process for a needs assessment regarding teacher shortages as well as an action plan for designing the AZ-MTM program. A second full day retreat will be used refine the program plan, including protocols for recruiting teachers, courses and professional development and comprehensive program evaluation.

INTELLECTUAL MERIT The Department of Mathematics has a well-established record of outreach, including three institutions and centers, The Center for the Mathematics Education of Latinos/as (CEMELA), The Center for Recruitment and Retention of Mathematics Teachers (CRR) and the Institute for Mathematics and Education (IM&E). An extensive list and brief descriptions of all the outreach projects can be found on our web pages (http://math.arizona.edu/outreach/ and http://math.arizona.edu/~merp/medra.html). The IM&E will coordinate the planning year. In the last two years the Institute has acquired a national reputation for bringing together mathematicians, educators and teachers for effective collaboration. The program will build on courses being developed under a NSF Math Science Partnership grant, the Arizona Teacher Initiative (ATI). BROADER IMPACT The AZ-MTM Consortium will bring together a wide group of stakeholders interested in the retention of mathematics teachers in low-income schools through the development of teacher leaders. Participants in the planning will include high needs schools and districts (Tucson and Sunnyside Unified School districts); experts in mathematics education and professional development (CRR, IM&E, and ATI); and regional education and business agencies: the Office of Pima County Schools, a State Education Agency (SEA), and Tucson Values Teachers, a regional business/education partnership working to provide incentives, internships and professional development opportunities for teachers.

2009-07-22: U of A Math Alum Selected for Sub-Orbital Astronaut Program..

TUSD University High School teacher and former UofA Math Dept ATI Education specialist Robert ”Mike” Schmidt is selected for suborbital astronaut teacher program.

For more info: http://teachersinspace.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/seven-astronaut-teacher-candidates-announced/.

2009-07-01: MAPPS Program conducts pecial sessions and workshops to teach parents math..

Title I resources were used during this school year to provide math opportunities for parents to develop math skills to better support their children with homework in math. Parents who attended math parent workshops and a mini-course earlier in the year found that math can be fun while exploring challenging math concepts.

For more information see pg 6 and 7 of online version of the May 2009 issue of TUSD's publication May 2009 issue of TUSD's Focus.

2009-06-23: Pham Huu Tiep&#39;s project "Group Representations and Applications" has been recently funded by the NSF..

This proposal focuses on several important problems in representation theory of finite groups and its applications. It ties together different areas of mathematics, such as finite groups and algebraic groups, finite permutation group theory, group cohomology, combinatorics and finite geometry, algebraic geometry, and string theory, with the main unifying ingredient being the representation theory. Many of the problems addressed in the proposal come up naturally – some long-standing and play a central role – in the group representation theory, and others are motivated by various important applications.

2009-06-23: David Savitt is funded by the NSF for p-ADIC AND MOD p GALOIS REPRESENTATIONS..

The PI's research areas are number theory and representation theory. In particular, the PI studies p-adic Galois representations and p-adic Hodge theory, with an eye towards applications to the modularity of Galois representations and the Langlands program.

Following the recent proof of the Fontaine-Mazur conjecture for GL2 (Q), attention to groups other than GL2 and fields other than Q has intensified. The PI proposes a number of projects that will contribute significantly to this effort, organized around the theme of p-adic representations and their reduction modulo p. The PI will study the weight in Serre's conjecture for arbitrary split reductive groups and arbitrary number fields, with the goal of giving an explicit Serre weight recipe in considerable generality. The PI will produce evidence for generalizations of the Breuil-M ́zard conjecture in both qualitative and quanetitative forms, and will prove some cases of such a generalization, yielding applications to modularity. A third component of the project involves the explicit reduction modulo p of p-adic Galois representations, again with applications to the Langlands program.

2009-06-19: William Yslas Vélez has been selected to receive the Peter W. Likins Inclusive Excellence Award for the 2008-2009 academic year. .William Yslas Vélez has been selected to receive the Peter W. Likins Inclusive Excellence Award for the 2008-2009 academic year. The Inclusive Excellence Award (IEA) recognizes individuals or groups who have demonstrated a significant contribution toward enhancing the academic distinction of The University of Arizona by creating a diverse and inclusive community. Peter W. Likins was the inaugural recipient of the IEA in 2005. As UA President, he led by example, demonstrating that diversity is an indicator of academic quality. President Likins further demonstrated his commitment to diversity through the creation and support of numerous diversity initiatives. Vélez is being recognized for continuing and extending Dr. Likins’ legacy of “excellence through diversity.” There will be a reception to honor the recipients on Tuesday, October 13, 2009, from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m.

2009-06-19: David Savitt Selected to Receive College of Science, Early Career Teaching Award .While still an untenured assistant professor, working on a research program in a very demanding area of modern mathematics, David has built up an astonishing record of accomplishment in education. While teaching the normal load of research active faculty (with excellent evaluations) David has implemented many programs that cover the range from high school to graduate school. The award will be formally announced at the annual College of Science Faculty Reception on September 9, 2009 at 5:00 pm at the Arizona Inn.

2009-06-15: U of A Math Dept graduate students and Tucson teachers collaborate to improve K-12 math education..U of A Math Dept graduate students and Tucson teachers collaborate to improve K-12 math education. For more info: http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/mailstory-clickthru/297034.php.

2009-06-04: McCallum Participates in Push for Common Standards.. For more info: http://www.edweek.org/ew/articles/2009/06/01/33standards.h28.html?tkn=ZRSFUUPjnNnFNHrwP7Ft2mT5MhAAc%2B8oqQ6g.

2009-06-03: NSF GK-12 Grant Teams Math Grad Students with K-12 Teachers..NSF GK-12 Grant Teams Math Grad Students with K-12 Teachers. For more information please visit this URL. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/25858.

2009-06-03: Yi Hu Funded by NSF for Projects on Modular Algebraic Geometry.. Continuing his previous work on elliptic stable maps, the PI's near-term objective is to complete his joint work on the structures of the moduli spaces of genus-two stable maps; then strengthen the results that they already obtained in high-genus cases; for any genus, they recently obtained the enumerative invariants using derived resolutions over the primary components of the moduli spaces of stable maps; these new invariants were then used to formulate a precise recursive relation for high-genus GW invariants of smooth quintic; these should be useful for verifying physicists' high-genus Mirror Symmetry prediction. Further, the PI plans to push and apply the techniques that they have developed to Gromov-Witten theory, to Mirror Symmetry, and possibly also to birational geometry. In addition to the above, the PI has introduced a modular compactification of the space of n points in general linear position on the projective plane; this potentially has significant consequences on singularity theory. Lastly, he is also working toward the weighted strong factorization for projective varieties with at worst finite quotient singularities through GIT approach.

2009-06-01: NSF Grant awarded to Romyar Sharifi for Iwasawa Theory and Galois Representations research project.The project involves a study of operations in the Galois cohomology of number fields and their application in Iwasawa theory. The PI has conjectured an explicit relationship between the values of a cup product on cyclotomic p-units and p-adic L-values, taken modulo p, of newforms that satisfy congruences with Eisenstein series at a prime above p. The proposed research relates to this through a number of distinct but intertwined sub-projects, including an algebraic study of the structure of the Selmer groups of the associated modular representations, the exploration of relationships with Kato's Euler system and classical main conjectures, and the precise formulation of certain generalizations. A remarkable aspect of algebraic number theory lies in the connections it finds between objects that appear to be of entirely different natures. These objects can roughly be described as falling into two classes: those that are algebraic, and those that are analytic. The algebraic objects are typically found by considering numbers that can be formed by applying the standard operations of arithmetic to the roots of polynomial equations, or by considering the symmetries of those roots. The analytic objects are often functions on interesting spaces with values that are complex numbers. The project concerns an unexpected direct comparison between the algebraic values of a function on pairs of numbers and the analytic power series attached to highly symmetrical complex-valued functions known as modular forms. The PI is exploring this and its many consequences in arithmetic.

2009-05-28:

UA Alumnus magazine articles feature Center for Recruitment and Retention and Graesser Endowed Chair

. For more info: http://www.arizonaalumni.com/Alumnus/sp09/endowed.html.

2009-05-26: Kevin Lin awarded NSF Applied Mathematics Grant for Computational Analysis of Large Dynamical Systems. The grant will support the study of dynamical systems with many strongly-interacting degrees of freedom, focusing on some model systems coming from biology and physics. It will also support the development of efficient computer algorithms for the analysis of these systems. For more information on Dr. Lin's research the following URL. For more info: http://math.arizona.edu/~klin.

2009-05-11: Native American Student Affairs Honors Two Math Students.

Native American Student Affairs (NASA) has selected two math students as recipients of their 2008/2009 annual awards. Angela Yazzie, an undergraduate math major, has been selected as the recipient of the Outstanding Undergraduate Award, and Belin Tsinnajinnie, a mathematics graduate student, is the recipient of the Outstanding Graduate Academic Award. Both students will be honored during the NASA Convocation on Friday, May 15, 2009 from 5:00-7:00pm at the UA Mall, East of Old Main. The event is open to the public.

For more information please go to http://nasa.web.arizona.edu/. Please plan to attend this event and offer your congratulations to both Angela and Belin.

2009-05-11: Piegorsch named Environmetrics Editor.

Professor of Mathematics and Statistics GIDP Chair Walter W. Piegorsch has been named an Editor of the journal Environmetrics, the oldest scientific journal presenting peer-reviewed research on development and application of quantitative methods in the environmental sciences. The journal is the official organ of The International Environmetrics Society (TIES) and is published by John Wiley & Sons. Professor Piegorsch began his term in January of 2009. His own research interest in benchmark dose markers for environmental hazard analyses, quantitative risk assessment & geo-spatially referenced disaster informatics, and the historical development of statistical thought as prompted by problems in the biological and environmental sciences dovetails with his new editorial duties for the journal.

2009-04-22: Undergrad receives National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship.

We are very pleased to announce that Amanda Schaeffer has been awarded a National Physical Science Consortium Fellowship. This fellowship will provide up to six years of support while she pursues her PhD. Amanda is finishing her BS in Mathematics at the U of A and will be joining our Mathematics graduate program in the Fall.

Please join us in congratulating Amanda for this prestigious award.

2009-04-17: Arshed Al-Obeidi, UA Honors College student majoring in mathematics, named a Goldwater Scholar. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/25098.

2009-04-13: Yijun Shao is Recipient of Daniel Bartlett Memorial Fellowship.

We are pleased to announce that Yijun Shao has been selected to receive the Daniel Bartlett Memorial Fellowship for summer 2009. Several very strong candidates were nominated and selecting just one was not easy. Yijun's outstanding research in a difficult area of geometry makes him a very deserving recipient of this award.

Yijun entered the PhD program in Mathematics in August 2004, passed his qualifying exams in August 2005, and his comprehensive exam in Spring 2007. He is working on his dissertation research with Prof. Yi Hu. His joint work with his advisor on the moduli space of algebraic maps from the projective line to a projective space has already been submitted for publication. He is now working on vastly generalizing this work to moduli spaces of maps to all homogeneous spaces, in particular to the Grassmannians.

In addition to teaching a variety of courses, Yijun has also served as a super-TA for Introduction to Proofs, Principles of Analysis, and Lie Groups and Lie Algebras.

Yijun entered the graduate program one year after Daniel Bartlett. He took several courses with Daniel and remembers him as being "really smart" and able to absorb new material very quickly.

This summer, Yijun will concentrate on his dissertation research. He expects to finish his PhD next year. Please join me in congratulating him on his accomplishments to date and wishing him the best for the future.

2009-04-10: Mathematical Contest in Modeling.

We are very happy to announce that both Mathematics Department teams participating in this year’s COMAP Mathematical Contest in Modeling received “meritorious” for their solutions!

The team made up of Ivan Grubisic, Dustin Keys and Alex Blount selected problem A. Their paper was entitled Comparative Analysis of Traffic Control Systems for Roundabouts, Including Enzyme Catalyst Reaction Based Scheme.

The team made up of Livia Zarnescu, Emily Hartley and Ben Wilson chose problem B and the name of their paper was Modeling the Energy Consequences of the Current Telecommunications Transition.

COMAP (The Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications) whose mission is to improve mathematics education for students of all ages, conducts the Mathematical Contest in Modeling each year. This contest challenges teams of three students to clarify, analyze, and propose solutions to open-ended problems. Each team receives their problem at 8:00 pm EST on a Thursday and is required to turn in their solution in the form of a research paper on the following Monday at 8:00 pm EST. The contest attracts students and faculty advisors from over 500 institutions around the world.

Of the 1695 teams, nine teams received an “outstanding” and only 18% received “meritorious,” the second highest ranking.

Please join us in congratulating these undergraduates for their success!

2009-04-08: Joe Watkins is named College of Science Galileo Circle Fellow. For more info: http://lqp.arizona.edu/node/1278.

2009-03-29: 2008 William Lowell Putnam Competition Results.

The Department of Mathematics would like to congratulate the University of Arizona team—Sean Howe, Kyle Marshall, and Derrick Sund—on the team's 31st ranking among over 1600 competing teams in the William Lowell Putnam Competition. Individually, Derrick Sund placed in the top 200 and Sean Howe placed in the top 500, both for the second year in a row.

The Putnam competition is constructed to test originality as well as technical competence. Contestants are expected to be familiar with the formal theories embodied in undergraduate mathematics. It is also expected that questions involving elementary concepts from group theory, set theory, graph theory, lattice theory, number theory, and cardinal arithmetic will not be entirely foreign to the contestants. In addition, questions may be included that cut across the bounds of various disciplines, and questions may be included that do not fit into any of the usual categories.

The examination is held on the first Saturday of December and consists of two periods of exactly three hours each with a two-hour break between the two sessions, under the official supervision of a faculty member, in our case, David Savitt.

2009-03-15: Math Circle Student Wins MathCounts Competition.

Tucsonan Joshua Sloane, 13, and three of his peers from the Phoenix area have earned the right to be called champions.

Sonoran Science Academy was recognized as the top team in the competition, which brought together more than 30 middle schools from across the state.

Kadir Bahar, Sonoran Science Academy's coach, will accompany the four winners to the national competition, which will be held May 7-10 at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando.

For more info: http://www.azstarnet.com/metro/284438.php.

2009-01-31: Mathematicians Show How Beetles can Share a Niche. For more info: http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/39715/title/Mathematicians_show_how_beetles_can_share_a_niche.

2008-12-23: Bill Velez elected to American Association for the Advancement of Science..William Y. Vélez, a distinguished professor of mathematics, was elected as an AAAS fellow for distinguished contributions in mentoring mathematics students and for leadership as president of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science. For more info: http://uanews.org/node/23114.

2008-03-24: The results of the 2007 William Lowell Putnam Competition have arrived..The results of the 2007 William Lowell Putnam Competition have arrived. I am happy to report that the University of Arizona team (Brendan Pawlowski, Derrick Sund, and Sam Xu) placed 34th among competing institutions. Individually, Derrick Sund placed in the top 200, and Sean Howe and Sam Xu placed in the top 500. Congratulations to them, and to all the participants!

2005-12-06: New milestone for undergraduate program.Greg Farneth is the first student to be the 450th math major. In honor of the occasion, alumna Dr. Abbie Warrick presented Greg with a book about the history of mathematics (see photo below). This is especially fitting in light of Dr. Warrick’s long history with the University of Arizona Mathematics Department, having received three degrees with us (and one in electrical engineering). Her undergraduate degree in Engineering Mathematics was received in 1989. She received MS degrees in Applied Mathematics and Electrical Engineering in 1991 and 1993, respectively, and a PhD in Applied Mathematics in 1996. She has been employed by the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) as an electrical engineer since completing the PhD in 1996. She returns frequently to the University of Arizona to recruit UA students for permanent and internship positions at LLNL. Greg Farneth is a new transfer student to the University of Arizona this semester, majoring in Mathematics and Molecular and Cellular Biology. He is considering combining these interests for a career in epidemiology.

2005-12-04: 66th Putnam Competition Participants.On Saturday, December 4, eleven UofA undergraduates spent a grueling six hours matching wits with the question committee of the 66th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Our thanks to Haokun (Sam) Xu, Gregory Prill, Nikhil Patil, Petr Moravsky, Benjamin McGahee, Adam Labay, Ted Glaza, Jeffrey Gilbert, Taylor Dupuy, Luke Diaz, and Ivan Barrientos for representing the department. The problems they pondered are viewable at http://cr.yp.to/putnam/putnam2005.pdf. Unofficial solutions are there, also, but it's no fair peeking.

2005-10-11: William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition.The 65th annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition will take place on December 4, 2004. If you have any unusually inventive students, please mention the competition to them. They may sign up at Room 619 of the Math Building until Wednesday, October 13.

2004-12-13: Congratulations to Alejandra Alvarado, Ali Amjad, Cristi Guevara, and Selin Kalaycioglu, all of whom passed their Master's Final Oral Exam.

2004-12-13: 65th Putnam Competition Participants.On the rainy Saturday of December 4, ten stalwart undergraduates matched wits with the problem committee of the 65th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. We thank Sam Rawlins, Genevieve Patterson, Taylor Dupuy, Christopher McMurdie, Andrew Lebovitz, James Hatch, Ted Glaza, Jeffrey Gilbert, Andrew Crites, and Samuel Alexander for representing our department. A copy of the Putnam Competition Problems is available for your delectation.

2004-10-25: Undergraduate Committee Meeting Minutes.The minutes are posted at http://intranet.math.arizona.edu/~ugc/minutes/.

2004-08-30: Ph.D. Qualifying Exam.The following students have completed their exam: Daniel Bartlett, Milos Ivkovic, and Predrag Punosevac. Congratulations!

2004-05-10: Congratulations.Congratulations to Dr. Chris Rasmussen who passed his Final Oral Dissertation Defense. Congratulations to Sacha Swenson and Alan Von Herrmann, both of whom passed their Master's Final Oral Exam.

2004-04-26: Chuck Newman, who was a member of this department for several years, was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. Our congratulations are extended to him for this well-deserved recognition of his accomplishments.

2004-04-19: Congratulations to Dr. Michael Kuecken and Dr. Virgil Pierce, both of whom passed their Final Oral Dissertation Defense.

2004-04-12: Congratulations to Deborah Hughes Hallet, the recipient of this year's award from the Mathematical Association of America for Distinguished University Teaching of Mathematics. Join us all in congratulating Deb on this well-deserved distinction.

2004-04-12: Congratulations to Dr. Jeffry Selden and Dr. Aaron Wootton, both of whom passed their Final Oral Dissertation Defense. Congratulations to Panagiota Konstantinou and John Arlo Caine, both of whom passed their Oral Comprehensive Exam.

2004-04-12: Larry Wright presented an invited paper at the International Workshop for Applied Probability on March 22. The title was "Equilibrium Bidding Strategies in First Price Sealed Price Auctions", and was joint work with Richard Thompson.

2004-03-29: Putnam Competition Results.In December's Putnam Mathematical Competition, the U of A team did quite well, placing 42nd out of 401 schools fielding teams --- just missing the top ten percent! Two of our competitors, Andrew Crites and Mel Koppens, earned the honor of being listed in the "Top Participants" --- roughly the top fifteen percent!

2004-01-12: 64th Putnam Competition Participants.On Saturday, December 6, two undergraduates, Mel Koppens and Eric Welch, spent a sunny day indoors matching wits with the question committee of the 64th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. We thank them for representing our department, and thank Klaus Lux and John Leonard for invigilating the competition. Should you wish to challenge your wits, the twelve competition problems are available: Putnam Competition Problems.

2003-10-13: Putnam Competition.The 64th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition will take place on Saturday, December 6. If you have any outstanding undergraduate students, who rank high on mathematical ingenuity, please mention the Competition to them. More information and a sign-up sheet are available at Math 619. They must sign up by Tuesday, October 14, 2003.

2003-09-08: Dr. V. Zakharov has been awarded the 2003 Dirac Medal and Prize together with Prof. R. H. Kraichnan. The Dirac Medal and Prize was instituted by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics in 1985 and is awarded yearly on P.A.M. Dirac's birthday, August 8 for contribution to the field of theoretical physics. Zakharov and Kraichnan were awarded for their distinct contributions to the theory of turbulence.

2003-09-01: The following students have completed the Ph.D. qualifying exam: Lisa Berger, Assane Lo, Cameron McLeman, Rob Pawloski. Congratulations!

2003-05-03: Congratulations to Mohammed Maagoul who passed his Master's Final Oral Defense. Congratulations to Robert Pawloski who passed his Oral Comprehensive Exam.

2003-03-31: 63rd Putnam Competition Results.The results of the Sixty Third Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition have arrived, and they are most gratifying. The University of Arizona team placed 29th out of 376 schools fielding teams in the top eight percent! Three of our students Ed Carter, Josh Green and Jens Sukkestadscored high enough to make the prestigious "Top Participants" List, roughly the top 15% of the contestants. We thank the nineteen undergraduates who took six hours on a Saturday, at a critical period of the semester, to participate in the competition: Jason Young, Allen Whitt, Alice Trimble, Jens Arne Sukkestad, Kenneth Porter, Amanda Morrow, Anita Lee, Gergely Kota, Becket Hui, Andrew Hill, James Hatch, Joshua Green, Sujoy Ganguly, Amy Nicole Dashiell, Edward Carter, Breanne Bushu, David Brown, Mathazin Aung, and Benjamin Armbruster.

2003-03-24: The Department of Mathematics Graduate Committee would like to announce that Michael Kuecken, Program in Applied Mathematics, has been chosen as Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant for Fall 2002. The award will include a monetary prize of $300.

2003-03-03: 17th Annual Recruitment Workshop for Prospective Graduate Students (March 8-11).Together with the Program in Applied Mathematics, the Department of Mathematics is hosting its annual undergraduate recruitment workshop for prospective graduate students, "Current Ideas in the Mathematical Sciences." Participants will be arriving Saturday, March 8th to begin their stay, with workshop activities planned through Tuesday, March 11th. Please join the Graduate Committees in extending a warm welcome to these visiting students!

2003-02-24: On Thursday, February 27, 2003, Dr. Donald E, Myers, Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, has been invited to give a talk at the Department of Mathematics, University of Nevada-Las Vegas. The title is "Is a Stochastic Formulation for Radial Basis Functions Useful?"

2003-01-20: Remember Pearl Harbor.December 7, 2002, will be well-remembered by some 19 U of A undergraduates, not as a day of infamy, but rather as the day they matched wits with the Question Committee of the 63rd Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. We thank: Jason Young, Allen Whitt, Alice Trimble, Jens Arne Sukkestad, Kenneth Porter, Amanda Morrow, Anita Lee, Gergely Kota, Becket Hui, Andrew Hill, James Hatch, Joshua Green, Sujoy Ganguly, Amy Nicole Dashiell, Edward Carter, Breanne Bushu, David Brown, Mathazin Aung, and Benjamin Armbruster for their generosity in spending six hours in a critical period of the semester to uphold the honor of our department. Just how high that honor was held we will know toward the end of March, when results are communicated. In the meantime, you're welcome to whet your wits on the attached problems (no peeking at various solutions posted on the web).

2002-11-22: Math major Andy Gulbis elected Homecoming King..For the second year in a row, a math major has been elected Homecoming King. Congratulations to Andy Gulbis, Mathematics senior, who is also pursuing majors in Molecular and Cellular Biology and Biochemistry.

2002-10-11: Congratulations to Nellie Rios and Brooke Zang, who are the recipients of the UA Star Award for this quarter..

Congratulations to Nellie Rios and Brooke Zang, who are the recipients of the UA Star Award for this quarter. Nominations by members of the department were submitted to the Staff Recognition Committee of CoSSAC and the committee selected Nellie and Brooke. If anyone would like to submit a nomination for other Math Department staff and A/P, the main office has forms or they are on line at http://www.cs.arizona.edu/cossac and click on UA Star Program. It's a nice way to show your appreciation for staff and A/P personnel. Again, congratulations Nellie and Brooke.

2002-09-20: Former UA math major Dr. Todd D. Murphy, California Institute of Technology, will speak at a seminar on Monday, September 23, 2002..Former UA math major Dr. Todd D. Murphy, California Institute of Technology, a candidate for a faculty position in the AME Department, will speak at a seminar on Monday, September 23, 2002 at 4:00PM in AME Lecture Hall S212. Title: Accelerated Control of Multiple Model Systems. Todd was a math major here at the University, graduating in 1997. He would be pleased to see any former classmates and instructors at his talk.

2002-09-13: Invited Guest: Professor Donald E. Myers, Emeritus, during the week of 26 August, was an invited guest at the Centro de Investigacions en Matematicas (CIMAT), Guanajuato, Mexico.

Invited Guest: Professor Donald E. Myers, Emeritus, during the week of 26 August, was an invited guest at the Centro de Investigacions en Matematicas (CIMAT), Guanajuato, Mexico http://www.cimat.mx/info_general/english.html. He gave two lectures: On 27 August, one lecture "Space-Time Structure Functions: Model, Fitting and Parameter Estimation. On 28 August, another lecture, "Kriging, Radial Basis Functions and Space-Time". He also served on a PhD Final oral exam committee while there (defense of dissertation).

2002-05-02: UGC Awards Announcements. Recognizing various achievements and awards, including the Mathematics Department Senior of the Year award..

UGC Awards Announcements:

• Mathematics Department Senior of the Year: Ivo Seitenzahl
• Semifinalists: Stephen Beathard, Jeremie Korta, Britt Zitterkopf, Ivo Seitenzahl
• Ivo Seitenzahl has a triple major in math, physics, and astrononmy, and he is also Senior of the Year in Physics.
• Jeremie Korta was Senior of the Year in Physics last semester and is the winner of Outstanding Research award in Physics this semester.
• Shanna Shaked and Johanna Schmidtke, other strong candidates that we considered, are Senior of the Year in Astronomy and Biochemistry, respectively.
• Oustanding Research Project: Catherine Ott. Catherine is one of the finalists for the College of Science Outstanding Research Award.

The UGC would like to express its appreciation to everyone who assisted us in evaluating candidates for these awards. The accomplishments of our candidates this year were truly awesome, and evidence that our program is headed in a positive direction.

The UGC: Bayly, Laetsch, Lozano, Lu, Madden, Mikel, Pickrell, Smith, Yoshinobu.

2002-03-29: Putnam results. Our team placed 75th out of 336 schools. Our students Edward Carter and Joshua Green received "Top Competitors" ranking..The returns of the December 1st William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition are in. The U of A team placed 75th out of 336 schools which fielded teams. Two U of A students, Edward Carter and Joshua Green, scored high enough to be listed in the prestigious "Top Competitors" ranking roughly the top 15% of the 2,954 students participating. We thank again those 15 undergraduates who took part in the competition: Allen Whitt, Kevin Wampler, Alice Trimble, Max Shkarayev, Amanda Paull, Peter Lewis, Adam Kiel, Andrew Hill, Joshua Green, Chi-Lwan Chan, Ed Carter, Santiago Canez, David Brown, Nathaniel Blair-Stahl, and Benjamin Armbruster.

2002-03-21: Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant Award goes to Emily Lane..The Graduate Committee would like to announce that Emily Lane, Applied Mathematics student, has been chosen as Outstanding Graduate Teaching Assistant for Fall 2001. The Award will include a monetary prize of $300. Emily will also be nominated by the Mathematics Department for the College of Science Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for academic year 2001-2002.

2001-08-24: Donald Myers to present paper at the meeting of the International Association of Mathematical Geologists in Cancun, Mexico..

Donald Myers, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, will present a paper at the meeting of the International Association of Mathematical Geologists in Cancun, Mexico. The conference will be held 9-12 September 2001. The title of his presentation is Space-Time Modeling and the Linear Coregionalization Model, this joint work with S. De Iaco and D. Posa, Universita di Leece, Italy.

2001-04-16: Spring Fling Booth.Kudos to Bruce Bayly, Chris Mikel, Maria Robinson, Marek Rychlik, Joe Watkins, and Stan Yoshinobu for engaging the public in hands-on math activities last Saturday at the Spring Fling in the Wild About Sciences Math "Booth".

2001-04-06: Putnam Competition Results.The U of A team placed an impressive 59 out of 322 schools competing in the MAA's Putnam Competition, held last December. Two students, Joshua Green and Mark Lyon, earned places on the prestigious "List of Top 497 Entrants", and one more, Jason Young, missed that honor by a single point. Our thanks to the thirteen students who devoted a day to representing the Math Department: Annie Ahnert, Ed Carter, Joshua Green, Andrew Hill, Justin Gaberdiel, Mark Lyon, Justin Miller, Lee Miller, Althea Moorhead, Max Shkarayev, Steven Steinke, Allen Whitt, and Jason Young.

2001-02-26: Fifteenth Annual Recruiting Workshop.March 3-6. Together with the Program in Applied Mathematics, the Department of Mathematics is hosting its annual workshop for prospective graduate students, "Current Ideas in the Mathematical Sciences." Participants will be arriving Saturday, March 3rd to begin their stay, with the workshop activities planned through Tuesday, March 6th. Please join the Graduate Committees in extending a warm welcome to these visiting students!

2000-11-03: 2000 ICTCM Award awarded to Richard Thompson's Business Mathematics project.Richard Thompson's Business Mathematics project has been selected to receive the 2000 ICTCM Award for Excellence and Innovation with the Use of Technology in Collegiate Mathematics. The award will be presented on November 17 at the 13th annual International Conference on Technology in Collegiate Mathematics, held in Atlanta, Georgia.

2000-08-20: Donald Myers to give invited lecture at the Fourth International Conference on Environmetrics and Chemometrics..

Donald E. Myers, Emeritus Professor of Mathematics, will be giving an invited lecture at The Fourth International Conference on Environmetrics and Chemometrics, 18-20 September 2000. The Conference will be held in Las Vegas, NV. The conference is sponsored by the Environmental Protection Agency, Texas A & M University and the University of Nevada LV.

1999-11-04: VIGRE fellowships.Hearty congratulations to Jeffrey Edmunds, Thomas Hoffman, Dmitry Kondrashov, Andre Lehovich, Guadalupe Lozano, David Marshall, Susan Marshall, Tyler McMillen, Christopher Rasmussen, Jeffrey Selden, and Jeanine Smallwood, all of whom will be supported by VIGRE fellowships in the Spring semester.

1999-08-27: Qualifying Exam Results.Hearty Congratulations to those students having passed the qualifying examinations: Thomas Hoffman, Virgil Pierce, Christopher Rasmussen, Jeffrey Selden, and Aaron Wooton. Bravo! Keep up the good work!

1999-04-26: Orna Amir and Susan Marshall receive Scholar Awards from the P.E.O. Sisterhood..Congratulations to Orna Amir and Susan Marshall for receiving Scholar Awards from the P.E.O. Sisterhood. These highly competitive grants are awarded on merit, recognizing their academic achievements. Out of 600 applicants nationwide, 50 women received grants, 8 of whom are in Arizona. To be eligible a woman must be a citizen of the United States or Canada and be a full time graduate student within two years of completing their academic program with at least one full year remaining. For more information about this program or projects funded by this organization, please contact Nancy Greenlee (Prof. Marty Greenlee's wife) at 749-4373.

1999-04-11: Deborah Hughes Hallet to be on radio program.On Saturday, April 17, Deborah Hughes Hallett, Department of Mathematics, University of Arizona, will be the guest on Math Medley, a radio talk show from Phoenix at 11:00 AM on KFNX. Hosted by Dr. Pat Kenschaft, the topic of the show will be "Learning Mathematics: Opportunity or Obstacle?".

1999-04-02: Congratulations to William Y. Velez.William Y Velez has been elected by the Board of Governors of the Mathematical Association of America to serve as a member of that board as Governor-at-Large for Minority Interests from the end of the January 1999 meeting until the conclusion of the January meeting in 2002.

1999-01-15: Putnam results.On Saturday, December 5, seven undergraduates ushered in the festive season by spending six hours puzzling over the 12 problems posed on the MAA's 59th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Our thanks to Todd Thompson, Steve Steinke, Max Shkarayev, Patrick Shipman, Mark Lyon, Carolyn Lanser, and David Coughlin for upholding the honor of the UofA. Thanks also to Robert Beals and John Leonard for invigilating the exam. A copy of the twelve puzzlers (one for each Day of Christmas, with no partridges) is appended to sharpen your wits.

1998-09-04: Qualifying Exam Results.Hearty Congratulations to Yuko Fukatsu, Guadalupe Lozano, and Steve Phillips for having passed the PhD Qualifying Examinations.

1998-03-27: Putnam Competition Results.In the 58th Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, held last December, the UofA can be proud to have placed two students in the prestigious "Top Participants" list (essentially the top 25%). They were Steven Steinke and Antonina Kolokolova. A third UofA student, Sofiya Vasina, missed that honor by a single point. Our thanks to the twelve undergraduates who devoted a Saturday to representing the Department. They are Sofiya Vasina, Michael Todd Thompson, Steve Steinke, Patrick Shipman, David Morales, Moses Milazzo, Robert Macomber, Carolyn Lanser, Cheryl Lacotta, Antonina Kolokolova, Weldon Gilcrease, and Brian David.

1998-03-06: Congratulations to William Y Velez for winning an Alumni Association Centennial Achievement Award.

1998-01-16: Dr. William Yslas Velez elected as delegate to AAAS..Congratulations to Dr. William Yslas Velez who was elected to a three year term as Council Delegate of the electorate of the Section on Mathematics of the AAAS.

1998-01-16: Putnam Competition Results.On Saturday, December 6, 1997, 11 determined undergraduates participated in the MAA-sponsored 58th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. [One more competed in Budapest, but I'm not sure of the date there.] Our thanks to Sofiya Vasina, Michael Todd Thompson, Steve Steinke, Patrick Shipman, David Morales, Moses Milazzo, Robert Macomber, Carolyn Lanser, Cheryl Lacotta, Antonina Kolokolova, and Brian David for representing the department (and to Weldon Gilcrease, in far-off Hungary). We also thank Richard Thompson and John Leonard for invigilating the exam.

1997-10-24: Deborah Hughes Hallett receives Louise Hay Award.Congratulations to Deborah Hughes Hallett for receiving the 8th Annual Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education, given by the Association for Women in Mathematics.

1997-09-19: Presidential Award goes to Dr. William Velez.CONGRATULATIONS to Dr. William Velez for being selected one of the recipients of the Presidential Awards for Excellence in Science, Mathematics, and Engineering Mentoring Program from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, its National Science and Technology Council and the National Science Foundation. We will receive, as part of the award, a $10,000 grant for the purpose of improving our mentoring activities. He will be honored in Washington, DC on Friday, September 12 at the "Mentoring for the Twenty-First Century Workforce: A Symposium", at a White House Awards Ceremony, and a farewell breakfast. There were 19 awardees.

1997-05-01: Lyn Reid receives $50 for decoding message..

The Message has been Decoded! David Lovelock and Bill Velez received the following message from Lyn Reid. She was the first to break our message and we have gladly paid her the $50. It is clear that David Lovelock composed the message!

Date: Thu, 01 May 1997 23:15:58 -0700 
To: velez@math.arizona.edu 
From: Lyn R Reid 

I brought the Enigma program home to give it a shot tonight. In under an hour of playing with the program, I decoded the message. 

On the settings for day 117, I noticed that the first six characters read "ZULZUL". Remembering the additional trick you said the Germans used, I decided to change my rotor settings to Z, U, L. After doing that, I decoded the message "David is handsome, intelligent, and modest. Bill is not." (The spacing and punctuation I added, obviously). 

For reference, the settings for day 117 were: 

Rotors V, I, IV 
Init settings R, E, D 
Plugboard C-G, H-I, M-O 

Lyn Reid

1997-04-25: Congratulations to Dr. Cheryl Delorme, who passed her Doctoral Defense last week!.

1997-04-21: Carole Anderson receives 1997 CoS Staff Recognition Award..Congratulations! Carole Anderson won the 1997 College of Science Staff Recognition Award for the Mathematics Department, and will be honored at a luncheon May 1st for all College of Science Classified Staff. Congratulations also to nominees Jerrie Bieberstein, Robert Lanza, Laurie Lefebvre, Jennifer Roll, Sandy Sutton, Bernadette Thomas, Faye Villalobos, and Brooke Zang. The department received over 30 nomination forms, and more staff were nominated this year than in any other year. Thank you to all who took the time to recognize what great staff we have here in the Mathematics Department!

1997-04-14: Putname results: UA Team ranked 51st, three UA students top participants..Putnam Results: The returns from last December's William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition are in, and they are very heartening. The U of A team was ranked 51st out of 294 institutions which had teams competing. Three U of A students, Sofiya Vasina, Kirill Shokhirev, and Lyn Reid, were listed in the prestigious list of "Top Participants", approximately the top 20% of those competing. Our thanks to the fourteen undergraduates who spent a grueling six hours defending the department's honor: Shao-Chu Yu, Sofiya Vasina, Kirill Shokhirev, Elena Shoshitaishvili, Keith Schon, Lyn Reid, Robert Macomber, Cheryl Lacotta, Antonina Kolokolova, Pavlos Konstadinidis, Christine Keller, Noah Goodman, Gary Gongwer, and Brian David.

1997-04-07: Donna Krawczyk receives UA Foundation Leicester and Kathryn Sherrill Creative Teaching Award..Congratulations to Donna Krawczyk , recipient of the University of Arizona Foundation Leicester and Kathryn Sherrill Creative Teaching Award. Donna will be honored on April 29 at the Annual Recognition dinner.

1997-04-07: Cindy Kaus receives 2-year assistant professorship..Congratulations to Cindy Kaus who received a 2 year assistant professorship at the University of Minnesota. The position is renewable for a second 2 year term.

1997-04-07: Matt Davies awarded Fulbright Fellowship to study in Bombay, India..Our Congratulations to Graduating Senior Matt Davies, who has been awarded a Fulbright Fellowship to study and do research at the Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay, India.

1997-03-03: Cheryl Delorme offered post-doctoral fellowship at MSRI..Belated Congratulations to Cheryl Delorme, who has been offered a one-year post-doctoral fellowship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California.

1997-02-03: Bill McCallum receives UA FoS Innovation in Teaching Award..Belated Congratulations!: At the Faculty of Science Commencement Breakfast (December 19, 1996) BILL MCCALLUM received the FoS Innovation in Teaching Award!!

1997-01-17: Putnam Competition Results.On Saturday, December 7, twelve of our undergraduates devoted most of the day to pondering the twelve brain-teasers that constituted the Fifty-seventh Annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. We thank the following stalwarts for representing the Department: Shao-Chu Yu, Sofiya Vasina, Kirill Shokhirev, Elena Shoshitaishvili, Lyn Reid, Robert Macomber, Cheryl Lacotta, Antonina Kolokolova, Pavlos Konstadinidis, Christine Keller, Gary Gongwer, and Brian David. Gender-sensitive observers will note that seven of these twelve represent the fairer sex - a first, I believe. However, Keith Schon and Noah Goodman were slated to take the exam in Budapest, and if indeed that came to pass, we can boast an amazing fourteen competitors, amongst whom the sexes were precisely balanced. Our thanks, also, to Robert Beals and John Leonard for invigilating the exam.

1996-11-18: William Velez receives UA CoS Outstanding Advisor Award.Congratulations to William Velez! At a meeting of College of Science Undergraduate Advisors on Monday, November 18, William Velez was presented, in absentia, with an award in recognition of being named the Outstanding Advisor for the College of Science, by Randy Richardson, Associate Dean of the College of Science. The award is in the form of a paperweight with the inscription, "Imagination: A mind once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions."

1996-11-18: Math majors Tood David Murphey and Andrew Scott Klein elected to Phi Beta Kappa..Congratulations to Todd David Murphey and Andrew Scott Klein: undergraduate Math majors who have been invited to accept election to Phi Beta Kappa. If faculty who are members of Phi Beta Kappa are interested in the revitalization efforts of the campus Chapter, please contact the newly elected President Helen Henderson (Anthropology 621-4818).

1996-11-04: Graduate Evi Dube to meet grads and undergrads to discuss employment opportunities at Lawrence Livermore Lab..Evi Dube, a mathematics graduate of the University of Arizona, is currently a researcher at Lawrence Livermore Lab. She will be available in Room 401 from 3-4 PM on Monday to talk about employment opportunities at her lab. She is interested in talking with both undergraduate and graduate students. If you would like to talk to Evi, but have a conflict at that time, please contact Kathleen in Room 410 or David Lomen for other times when Evi will be available.

1996-10-28: Don Myers paper selected..Congratulations to Don Myers: the 1995 Prize Paper selected by the Production Ecology Graduate School, Wageningen, The Netherlands as co-authored by Dr. Myers with A. Stein, C. G. Kocks, J. C. Zakoks, H. D. Fringking, and M. A. Ruissen ("A Geostatistical Analysis of the Spatio-Temporal Development of Downy Mildew Epidemics in Cabbage", Phytopathology 84 (1994) 122701239. The selection was made from 16 nominations. The report read "Paper of high scientific quality, application of modern geostatistical techniques in a new area of research. Innovative and interdisciplinary article, partly the result of international cooperation. The journal has a high impact factor of 2.0; the paper has been well written with a clear conclusion; the subject is a core activity of PE: spatial and temporal development of a plant disease. There is a clear link between subprogramme 5 (methodology) and subprogramme 3 (growth reducing factors).

1996-10-26: William Velez receives award at SACNAS Awards Banquet..SACNAS Awards Banquet: on October 26, 1996, at the annual meeting of the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS), held at the Airport Hilton in Los Angeles, CA, Dr. Eugene Levy, Dean of the College of Science at the University of Arizona, presented to Dr. William Yslas Velez, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona and President of SACNAS, the 1996 College of Science Outstanding Advisor Award. The is the second time that Dr. Velez has won this award, the first time being in 1989. Dr. Velez has also been awarded the University of Arizona College of Engineering Outstanding Student Advisor Award in 1990 and the Outstanding Departmental Advisor Award in 1994 by the Mathematics Department at the University of Arizona.

1996-10-21: Matthew Kruse receives honorable mention for excellence in teaching..Matthew T. Kruse, graduate associate in the Mathematics Department, has been selected to receive an honorable mention award from the "Excellence in Teaching" Summer Session faculty award at the University of Arizona. Each Summer Session, instructors are nominated by students and colleagues for their techniques, ability to motivate, and true understanding of the subject matter. Matt was described as highly effective, with excellent skills for illustrating three-dimensional math and clearly projecting his voice while lecturing. Congratulations Matt!

1996-10-07: Don Myers receives department's Outstanding Advisor Award..On the advice of the Math Center, the Undergraduate Committee has awarded the annual departmental OUTSTANDING ADVISOR AWARD to Donald Myers, for his tireless and exemplary service to students following the Probability and Statistics and Economics/Finance options in the mathematics major, most of whom are his advisees. Don was active in setting up and maintaining the UA Student Actuary Club, and, through his association with the Actuary Society of America, he regularly provides students with information about the actuarial profession and study materials for the preliminary actuary exams. He has also developed and maintained contacts with businesses that hire interns and have positions for mathematics department graduates. He encouraged one of his advisees who was writing an honors thesis to enter his research project in the 1995 Student Showcase, where the student won a monetary prize. The award, consisting of a plaque and $1,000 in departmental funds, will be presented to Don at the annual open house for math majors, this Wednesday, October 9, at 4:00 PM. Previous recipients of the award are: John Leonard, David Lomen, and Bill Velez.

1996-09-02: AAUW Educational Foundation awards American Fellow to Shandelle Henson..The AAUW Educational Foundation Board of Directors selected Dr. Shandelle Marie Henson as an American Fellow for the 1996-97 year. The 1996-97 year class of American Fellows included nine one-year postdoctoral scholars, who work in various fields such as philosophy, mathematics, education, and archaeology. Henson received the Sarah Berliner Fellowship, a one-year award for postdoctoral research. The host institution is the Department of Mathematics at the University of Arizona. Henson will be constructing a partial differential equations model of insect population dynamics, studying the solutions and bifurcation behaviors, and designing testable laboratory hypotheses regarding transitions of the populations between various attractors (including strange and chaotic attractors). This work will be a continuous version of the landmark discrete work done by Costantino et al. [Nature, 1995, 375:227-230]. Henson served as the Hanno Rund Visiting Research Assistant Professor of Mathematics at the University of Arizona for the last two years.