Math News: Summer 2021
Mathematics Department Newsletter June 2021
Dear Friends of UGA Mathematics,
I hope you are having a good summer! We had a most unusual spring semester, which started during the height of the pandemic, and ended with an outdoor graduation ceremony this May: about twenty of our graduating students were able to attend, along with many of their family, friends, faculty and staff. We are eagerly anticipating more normal times in the fall. In the meantime, it’s a great pleasure to look back on all of the accomplishments and activities of our department.
This spring, UGA celebrated the 60th anniversary of desegregation. One of the first three Black students to enroll at UGA as freshmen was Kerry Rushin Miller (BS ’66), a mathematics major. Ms. Miller went into telecommunications and retired after 29 years from Southern Bell. You can read more at this link.
I’m proud that our department served as Ms. Miller’s academic home at UGA. I’m also happy to report that Dean Dorsey has committed matching funds for a scholarship to honor Ms. Miller’s accomplishments. If you are interested in supporting this fund, please click here. We hope to host a visit by Ms. Miller this fall.
Our faculty’s outstanding work was recognized with the following awards this spring:
- As mentioned in January’s newsletter, Toyin Alli received the Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award from the Franklin College for her superb teaching and contributions to mentoring, professional development, and improvements in our gateway courses such as MATH 1113.
- Allison Arnold received our departmental Outstanding Instructor Award, which recognized her fine teaching and especially her notable contributions over the past year helping our instructional corps get up to speed during the pandemic. Many of us benefitted from her guidance and help as we entered a world of remote learning.
- David Gay was awarded a Creative Research Medal from the University of Georgia for his breakthrough development of “trisections of 4-manifolds,” a novel way of representing and studying the topology and geometry of 4-dimensional spaces. In letters supporting Dr. Gay’s nomination, internationally recognized leaders in this field praised Dr. Gay's work in this area as “ground-breaking” and “likely one of the biggest advances in the topology of 3 and 4-manifolds in the last 20-30 years."
- Neil Lyall received the McCay Award in recognition of his combined achievements in research, teaching, and service. Dr. Lyall’s research and collaborations with other members of our department have played a key role in the strength of the areas of harmonic analysis and arithmetic combinatorics. He is an exceptional teacher and past winner of the Sandy Beaver Excellence in Teaching Award. Moreover, his generous service, including and going beyond his role as Graduate Coordinator, has had a large positive impact on our department.
In addition, this spring was a banner time for faculty promotions: eight were approved, to the following ranks:
- Associate Professor with Tenure: Weiwei Hu, Giorgis Petridis, Laura Rider, Weiwei Wu
- Senior Academic Professional: Kel Black
- Senior Lecturer: Toyin Alli, Jennifer Royal, Trent Schirmer
These awards and promotions are a testament to the great work done by our faculty. Please join me in congratulating them all!
Our faculty members are not resting on their laurels -- they continue to demonstrate their commitment to excellent instruction. Three of our faculty members – Joseph Hoisington, Peter Lambert-Cole, and Sofya Zaytseva – were selected to participate in UGA’s Teaching Academy Fellows program. This program provides early career faculty “an opportunity to reflect on their teaching and build their instructional toolkits at an early point in their careers; it also helps them build bridges across campus, mentor their peers, be mentored by senior faculty, and network with award-winning educators at UGA.”
Our department continues to provide innovative educational opportunities for our students:
- Akram Alishahi and Melissa Zhang are running an REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) on knots (imagine a tangled piece of rope with the two ends glued together). Knots can be used to describe many different kinds of phenomena in our natural world, such as the folding of proteins or genetic material. Despite perhaps a hundred or more years of study, there are still seemingly simple questions about knots that we still do not know the answers to. Dr. Alishahi and Dr. Zhang gave a math club talk on this fascinating subject in the spring. This summer, they are exploring a few of these problems in the hopes of generating new ideas for how to solve them.
- David Gay and four undergraduates (Branton Dearmoun, Lenny Shalman, Evan Short and Hayes Way) this spring kickstarted the Geometry Research, Outreach and Visualization Initiative (GROVI, pronounced "Groovy"). The goal is to produce a sophisticated computer animated video of interest to everyone from the artistic public with an appreciation for geometric forms to researchers in differential topology. The two figures shown are snapshots of some of the preliminary work. At the graduate student level, Dr. Gay’s Ph.D. students Sarah Blackwell and Terrin Warren are participating in the Park City Mathematics Institute's 2021 summer program on Mathematical Illustration.
- Jennifer Royal was selected to participate in the PIC Math (Preparation for Industrial Careers in Mathematical Sciences) program of the Mathematical Association of America. Dr. Royal will teach a new PIC Math research course next spring. Students will work in small teams to solve problems provided by industry or non-profit partners. These are real-world problems with messy data and multiple analysis options. There is no answer key. Success is learning new skills, while making progress on the problem and bringing value to the partner organization. You can read more about the PIC Math program here.
- We are starting a Math Peer Mentor Program (MP2). Our goals are to develop community among undergraduate math students, and improve their overall experience as math majors. The program is kicking off in the fall – thanks to our advisor Kestrina Shrestha for her enthusiasm in moving this forward. You can read more at this link.
Our alumni continue to make us proud. Our 2019 graduate Lori Watson, who is now at Wake Forest University, received the NSF Math Institutes prize for the best presentation at the Haynes-Granville-Browne Session of Presentations by Recent Doctoral Recipients. This session is held at the Joint Mathematics meetings; it showcases recent graduates in the mathematical sciences. More details are here.
Lori Watson also led a six week course titled “An introduction to modular groups,” at the 2021 Arizona Winter School. Our graduate student Tyler Genao served as course assistant, and provided the following details. The AWS is well-known in the number theory community: it's normally a week-long winter school aimed at graduate students in number theory, providing lectures and problem sessions on an advanced research topic. For 2021 they decided to go virtual and aim it at advanced undergraduate and beginning graduate students. They also actively recruited students from underrepresented minority groups who might not have been necessarily thinking of specializing in number theory. This virtual winter school had more than 200 student participants. With three other course assistants, Tyler wrote problem sets for each of the six lectures, met twice a week with some of the students to discuss exercises and related topics, and monitored an online discussion board for the lectures.
Two of our Ph.D. alumni are now department chairs: Victoria Baramidze leads the Department of Mathematics and Philosophy at Western Illinois University, and Tanya Cofer is the chair at the College of Coastal Georgia.
Our graduate students continue to excel. In February, our Ph.D. students Sarah Blackwell, Zack Garza, Terrin Warren, Peter Woolfitt, and Skylar Zhang won the 2nd place prize in this year's UGA Libraries Capturing Science Contest, for their animated video submission on the mathematics of gerrymandering. The contest involvedconveying a STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics) concept to a broader audience using any medium; submissions were evaluated on creativity, clarity of expression, and appeal to a broad audience. You can read about the contest here, and view their winning entry here.
Undergraduate News and Awards
Our undergraduates continue to thrive. Read more about their accomplishments here.
Undergraduate Research
Our Undergraduate Research Program had a very successful year, under the leadership of our Undergraduate Research Coordinators Lin Mu and Robert Schneider. Read more about the full extent of their work here.
Graduations
Congratulations to our math majors who completed their degrees in Fall 2020 and Spring 2021! Four Ph.D. students are also graduating this spring and summer. See a full list of our graduates here.
Graduate News and Awards
I’m very pleased to report on the outstanding accomplishments and activities of our graduate students. They are pursuing their research both at UGA and elsewhere this summer. Follow this link for a report on their activities and honors.
As I finish this newsletter I’m struck with how much our department members have accomplished during a challenging year. Our department has a great deal to celebrate, and a lot to look forward to in the coming year.
In closing, I would like to ask that you consider supporting the Mathematics Department. We are very grateful to the generous donors who have helped provide funds for awards and support of our students. Our general math fund supports a variety of educational and research activities in the department. You can contribute online at this website. Our Math Club organizes events and speakers for our majors throughout the academic year. You can contribute to the Math Club fund online at this website.
Best wishes,
Bill Graham
Head, Department of Mathematics
P.S. Thanks to all those who sent information for the newsletter, and in particular to Mo Hendon, Neil Lyall, and Robert Schneider for their contributions about our undergraduate and graduate programs.
|
The University of Georgia Foundation is registered to solicit in every state and provides state specific registration information at http://www.ugafoundation.org/charity.