Mathematics Department - Spring 2004 Newsletter

 Message from the Department Chair Lewis and D'Atri lectures Wolfson Dedication Ceremony Photographs Undergraduate Program News Faculty Prizes and Honors Graduate Program News Faculty Promotions Pizza Seminar News New Faculty for Fall 2004 Alumni News Retirements Contributions to the Department Obituary

## Kenneth Graham Wolfson (1924-2000)

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### FACULTY PROMOTIONS

#### Stephen Miller was promoted to the rank of Associate Professor with tenure.

We congratulate our colleagues for their outstanding achievements that led to these promotions.

### Hill Assistant Professor

Dorin Dutkay will join the Department as a Hill Assistant Professor, after obtaining his Ph.D. at the University of Iowa. His interests are in functional and harmonic analysis of wavelets and frames and operator algebras.

### Hill Assistant Professor

Rados Radoicic will join the Department as a Hill Assistant Professor, after obtaining his Ph.D. at MIT. His interests are in discrete mathematics, more specifically, combinatorial geometry, random graphs, and Ramsey theory.

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### LEWIS AND D'ATRI MEMORIAL LECTURES

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#### Developments in the Undergraduate Curriculum.

This is the first year of a new option within the mathematics major, the honors track, described more fully in the 2003 issue of this newsletter. The honors track has been designed to provide qualified students with an experience of mathematics that is richer, more rigorous, and more personal than is provided by the standard major.  The option is supervised by an Honors Committee chaired by Professor Michael Saks.   We believe that this program is off to a strong start.

• In the future we will normally accept students into the honors track by the end of their sophomore year, or at the latest after the first semester of their junior year.   In this start-up year, however, we accepted two outstanding members of the class of 2004: Gregory Muller and Minh-Tri L. Vo.   There are currently also seven members of the class of 2005 and two members of the class of 2004 in the track, and more students will be accepted in the early summer.
• An important component of the honors track is the requirement that students participate in at least two special honors seminars during their undergraduate years.  One seminar at the freshman/sophomore level and two at the junior-senior level were offered this year:
• The Freshman-Sophomore Honors Seminar has been offered for several years by Professors János Komlós and Enriqueta Carrington.  Its purpose is to identify promising students early in their Rutgers careers and to introduce them to the world of mathematics that lies beyond elementary calculus. It aims to be informal, lively, and challenging. Students are expected to participate actively by contributing to discussions, making presentations in the seminar, and collaborating with other students in preparing talks.
• The Junior-Senior Honors Seminar, run by Professors Roe Goodman and Siddhartha Sahi and centered around the topic of Fourier Analysis on Finite Groups and its Applications, was offered in the spring.   Every fortnight, a pair of students was chosen to prepare and present the material for the next 2 weeks; the remaining students were divided into study groups of three or four to discuss the material and prepare themselves for the presentations they would hear.  The format was successful and we expect that this seminar will be offered regularly; Professor Jerry Tunnell and a colleague will organize the seminar for Spring 2005.
• The Undergraduate Mathematics Problem Seminar, run by Professors Steven Ferry and Michael Saks, was offered in the fall.   It is aimed at undergraduate students who enjoy solving mathematical problems in a variety of areas, and want to strengthen their creative mathematical skills and their skills at doing mathematical proofs. One of the main goals of this seminar is to help interested students prepare for the William Lowell Putnam Undergraduate Mathematics Competition, a national competition held every December.  The seminar will be offered again in Fall 2004.

This spring Professors Lara Alcock and Amy Cohen again taught a one-credit seminar intended for students interested in teaching mathematics at the secondary school level.  The seminar explored the relation of Math 351, Introduction to Abstract Algebra, to the secondary school curriculum (last spring's course discussed similar relations for Advanced Calculus (Math 311).   This is one of the projects of the Rutgers Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers (CoMET) discussed in last year's newsletter.

In Fall 2003 Professor Michael Beals taught a new course for prospective elementary school teachers.  The course was offered as a special section of Math 103, Topics in Mathematics for the Liberal Arts, and thus satisfied college general education requirements in mathematics.  The goal was to provide the fundamental understanding of arithmetic, geometry, and probability that teachers need to meet diverse classroom challenges with confidence and flexibility.  This course was an initiative of the Rutgers Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers (CoMET), a group which has grown out of interaction between the Mathematics Department and the Graduate School of Education; CoMET is discussed more fully in the departmental newsletter for 2002.

This year the Department initiated a program called "Mathematical Careers and Ideas", organized by Professor Enriqueta Carrington. Four evening programs were presented; the first three were panel discussions on careers in financial mathematics, in graduate school and research, and in teaching in high schools and junior colleges. The fourth was a mathematics talk by Professor Simon Thomas, entitled "Killing the Hydra". Pizza and soft drinks were served.

For several years the department has been offering a summer REU (Research Experiences for Undergraduates) program, in which undergraduates from Rutgers and other schools spend eight weeks working on a mathematical research problem with a Rutgers faculty member. Students reside on campus and are given a stipend for living expenses. The program is run in cooperation with DIMACS, the Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science. In the summer of 2003 seven Rutgers undergraduates participated, and eight faculty members and two graduate students from the mathematics department served as mentors. For the coming summer the corresponding numbers are nine Rutgers undergraduates and five faculty members.

The theory of wavelets is an active area of current research in mathematics, applied mathematics, and engineering.  Next spring the Department will offer, on an experimental basis, a course in linear algebra and its application to wavelets.  The course will be developed and taught by Professor Roe Goodman, and will be offered under an existing number: Math 357, Topics in Applied Algebra.   After covering some background topics in linear algebra (beyond those covered in the prerequisite course, Introduction to Linear Algebra) Professor Goodman will discuss a variety of topics including the fast Fourier transform, discrete wavelet transforms, filter banks, wavelet packets, and image compression.

Graduating seniors in Mathematics and in the Biomathematics Interdisciplinary Major will be attending distinguished graduate schools next year.  Here is a partial list.   From Mathematics, Stephen Jaslar and Minh Tri L. Vo will be at Yale, Michal Grabchak and Gregory Muller at Cornell, Inessa Epstein at UCLA, and Hazim Nada at the University of Cambridge (studying physics).   From Biomathematics, Jana Gevertz will be at Princeton and Laura Sontag at MIT.

#### The Weill scholarships, designated for full-time students majoring in mathematics and based on academic merit, were awarded to Jonathan Chipko, Inessa Epstein, Lawrence Goldman, Joseph Hedberg, Steven Jaslar, Hazim Nada, Minh Tri L. Vo, and Jennifer Zoltanski. Six of the recipients, together with Maurice Weill and Chair, Richard Falk, are shown in the photo at the left, taken at the lunch on May 5 to honor Mr. and Mrs. Weill.

The Henry G. Sanders 1925 Memorial Scholarships in Mathematics were awarded to Gregory Lagakos and Aleksey Ratushnyy.

Prizes:

• Stephen Curran was awarded the Bogart Prize for his outstanding overall achievement as a mathematics major.
• Gregory Muller was awarded the Bradley Memorial Prize for best overall performance on the prize exam.
• Siwei Zhu was awarded the Lawrence Corwin Prize in Mathematics.
• Gary Wenger was awarded the Lawrence Corwin Memorial Math Prize as the University College graduating senior mathematics major with the most A's in 300/400 level math courses.
• Siddhi Parikh was awarded the Richard Morris Award as the Douglass College senior majoring in mathematics with the highest average grade in mathematics courses.
• Melissa Lieberman was awarded the Pi Mu Epsilon Prize by the Douglass Chapter of Pi Mu Epsilon, as a member of the junior class of Douglass College with superior achievement in mathematics.
• Matthew Meola was awarded the David Martin Weiss Award for notable achievement in mathematics by a first-year student.
• Mayssam Nehme was awarded the Katharine Hazard Prize in Mathematics as a first year student at Douglass College who has done exceptional work in mathematics.
• Honorable mentions were awarded to Gene Kim and Kristin Liang.

• Highest honors: Inessa Epstein, Steven Jaslar, Gregory Muller, Minh-Tri Vo
• High honors: Michael Grabchak, Matthew Kohut
• Honors: Jonathan Chipko, Rahul Malhotra
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#### New PhDs

This year was a banner year for Ph.D.'s!   Fifteen Rutgers students will earn their Ph.D. in Mathematics in 2004, the largest graduating class since 1996. Six of our new graduates are US citizens and three are women. They are (with advisors and their Fall 2004 Employment parenthesized):
• Pieter Blue (A. Soffer, U. Toronto, Canada)
• Jeff Burdges (G. Cherlin, Univ. Würzburg, Germany)
• Eva Curry (R. Gundy, Dalhousie U., Canada)
• Stephen Hartke (F. Roberts, U. Illinois)
• Klay Kruczek (J. Beck, Univ. of Western Oregon)
• Aobing Li (Yanyan Li, Institute for Advanced Study and Univ. Wisconsin)
• Xiaoqing Li (H. Iwaniec, Columbia University)
• Xiaoyong Li (L. Shepp, industry)
• Carlo Mazza (C. Weibel, Univ. Paris, France)
• Kai Medville (M. Vogelius, industry)
• Alfredo Rios (R. Gundy, Lehigh Univ.)
• Waldeck Schutzer (S. Sahi, U. Federal de Sao Carlos, Brazil)
• Eric Sundberg (J. Beck, Whittier College)
• Matt Young (H. Iwaniec, American Institute of Math.)
• Lin Zhang (J. Lepowsky, industry)

#### Incoming students

Replacing these departing students next Fall will be a bumper crop of 17 incoming graduate students. Six of these are US citizens, and five of these are women; thus the number of US citizens will remain at 37 (53%), and the number of women in our program will increase to 17 (24%). Much of the credit for this recruiting goes to the current graduate students, who gave prospective students the idea that life as a mathematics graduate student was pretty good at Rutgers. (Of course, it helps to have a world-class faculty...)

The number of applications for admission and support was again over 300 this year. There were slightly fewer foreign applicants, probably reflecting increased difficulties in obtaining student visas. There were slightly more US applicants this year, reflecting the continued economic slump in technical employment.

The generous gift of Maurice M. Weill and Adrienne R. Weill has allowed the graduate program to admit stronger and stronger students each year. The Weill Endowment has been used to supplement the support level for first-year students, making us more competitive with comparable programs elsewhere. With this support, the current first-year students will be in residence during much of this summer, studying and preparing for their written exams.

#### Financial Support

Our sources of funding determine how many graduate students we can support in our program. Next fall, there will be 54 continuing full-time graduate students, and 16 incoming students, so the overall number of full-time students will be 70 again next year. Of these, 46 will be supported as teaching assistants. Fortunately, our program's ability to attract outside funding means that we will have "no student left behind" in terms of support. In addition to grant funding (12 academic semesters worth), and eight Graduate Fellowships, we have several new funding sources this coming year:
• Aaron Lauve will be a Bevier Dissertation Fellow. Each year, Rutgers University awards 12 of these fellowships to its top graduate students (4 each in Humanities, Science and Social Science).
• Two of our graduate students, Rich Mikula and Michael Weingart, will be supported by Graduate Fellowships in the Science and Mathematics Educational Partnerships program, which will place them in nearby middle schools one day per week. This program has been a success, not only for the region's school systems, and as a way to support graduate students, but also as a great experience for our graduate students.
• Derek Hansen will be a MetroMath Fellow. This is a new interdisciplinary program for students with a commitment to K-12 mathematics education in urban environments. This program is being directed by our Professors Goldin and Rosenstein, among others.
• Alexander Zarechnak will be a Fellow at the Rutgers Center for Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture (CCACC). This Center studies problems of contemporary culture, looking at the relation between research, teaching and curriculum.
• Incoming student Philip Matchett will be an NSF Graduate Research Fellow. This fellowship is awarded by the National Science Foundation to only 900 students each year, out of all students in the mathematical, physical, biological, engineering, and behavioral and social sciences.
• Incoming student Pablo Atasoy (Spain) will be supported by a Fulbright Scholarship.
• Incoming student Luc Nguyen will be funded by the Vietnam Education Foundation.

#### In other news ...

This year Klay Kruczek was a Graduate Fellow in the Science and Mathematics Educational Partnerships program, and taught in both the Salk Middle School in Old Bridge and the Wilson Middle School in Edison one day a week. This was his second year as a Fellow in this program. Klay received his Ph.D. this May and credits this experience with helping him in his successful job search.

One of our graduate students, Matt Young, was awarded a Bevier dissertation fellowship for 2003-4. He graduated this May, and has received a Clay Lift-Off Award from the Clay Mathematics Institute this summer. Only 18 of the 1,000 graduating with math doctorates each year receive this award, designed to help them begin their research career. He also won an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship.

Last fall, we began a new program called Introduction to Mathematics at Rutgers (IMR). It is a mini-conference for entering graduate students, held the weekend before Fall classes begin. One purpose is to review some background material expected in standard courses (and maybe what Rutgers students work on); another is to let the incoming students socialize with each other and get to meet the continuing students and faculty. Anecdotes suggest that it was a great success last fall.

TA Teaching Excellence Awards were won by Derek Hansen, Sasa Radomirovic, and Michael Weingart. These awards are based upon written evaluations by faculty, and course evaluations by students, over several semesters.

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