Spring 2003 Newsletter
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MESSAGE FROM THE DEPARTMENT CHAIR (Richard S. Falk)
Although budget cuts had an impact on the Department, there were still substantial accomplishments by our faculty and students. In its most recent ratings, US News and World Report ranked the Rutgers Mathematics Department 16th overall and 6th among state universities. Several noteworthy events took place in the Department this year. A Conference in honor of Jean Taylor was held January 30-31, 2003. Joel Lebowitz hosted the 88th and 89th Statistical Mechanics Conferences. In early May, A. Soffer and J. Etnyre (U. Penn) organized a conference at Rutgers on Frontiers of PDEs and Dynamical Systems. Also, in early May, the Department held a lunch to honor Adrienne and Maurice Weill for their generous support of undergraduate scholarships and graduate fellowships. There were nine undergraduate scholarship winners (listed below in the section Undergraduate Program News) and eleven graduate student award recipients (listed below in the section Graduate Program News ). Most of the students were able to participate in the event and demonstrated the very high quality undergraduate and graduate students the Department is attracting. As in past years, the Department hosted a large number of seminars and colloquia and many distinguished visitors. This spring, at the suggestion of Simon Gindikin, the Department began a faculty colloquium series, in which Department faculty give colloquium style talks suitable for colleagues and graduate students who are not experts in the field of the speaker. These talks provide an excellent opportunity to find out what our colleagues are doing and to learn about developments in other fields of mathematics. Simon Thomas was the first speaker in this series, followed by Eduardo Sontag.
The Department undertook several major initiatives. The first was to develop a plan for hiring priorities in the short (1-3 year) and medium (3-5 year) term. We took into account enrollment trends in undergraduate and graduate courses and the subject areas in which doctoral students are choosing to work. Also considered were the impact of hiring on funding opportunities, collaborations with other departments, and the diversity and age distribution of the faculty. There was extensive discussion of the Department's desires to insure excellent teaching on all levels, to work with other units of the University in both research and service, and, most important, to maintain and increase the scholarly excellence of our faculty. The second initiative, led by Mike Saks, has begun to examine the undergraduate mathematics major, looking for ways to improve it, and hopefully to attract new strong mathematics students. Finally, led by Jerry Tunnell, the Department is in the process of examining its first year graduate courses to ensure that they are providing the proper foundation and breadth of knowledge crucial for beginning graduate students.
This year, we were able to enhance the support of our computer operation, hiring Austin Murphy as the Technical Support Specialist and Eric Luhrs as the Helpdesk Manager. We were also able to provide additional staff for our business office with the hiring of a new Adminstrative Assistant III, Isabelle Amarhanow. Because of their outstanding work and increased job responsibilities, Lynn Braun, Diane Apadula, and Jacqueline Drayton were upgraded to Administrative Assistant I, Administrative Assistant II, and Accounting Administrator, respectively. Carla Ortiz received a promotion and moved from her position in the undergraduate office to the Graduate Secretary position in the newly combined Graduate/Undergraduate Office.
Gene Speer began his term as Undergraduate Vice-Chair, taking over from Dan Ocone and Chuck Weibel began a three-year term as Graduate Director, taking over from Steve Greenfield. These are demanding positions and the Department expresses its thanks to Dan and Steve for their terrific work and is again fortunate to have two excellent faculty in these key positions.
BioMaPS, the new interdisciplinary Ph.D. granting graduate program at the interface between the Biological, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences, began its first year of operation. The Department of Mathematics is one of several departments involved in this program and also in the new BioMaPS Institute. The Department's efforts in this initiative are being led by Professors Eduardo Sontag and Fred Roberts , who serve as members of the BioMaPS Steering Committee.
A broad spectrum of information about the Department, both
current and from past years, is available on the Mathematics Department web
site. In particular, honors awarded to faculty in previous years
may be found on the
faculty honors page and honors received by undergraduate and
graduate students may be found on the
Mathematics Department Undergraduate Awards and Prizes page
and the
Mathematics Department Graduate Awards and Prizes page,
respectively.
In addition to the above, YanYan
Li and Xiaochun Rong gave
invited talks at the International Congress of Mathematicians held in Beiing,
China in August, 2002.
The next
Lewis lectures will be given by Jean-Michel Coron of the
Département de Mathématiques d'Orsay. These talks will be given during
the week of October 6 -- October 10, 2003. The title and exact dates
will be announced.
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-- The Mathematics Department is instituting a new option within the major,
called the honors track. The primary goal of the honors track will
be to provide qualified students with an experience of mathematics that is
richer, more rigorous, and more personal than is provided by the standard
major. We expect that many honors track students will go on to graduate
school, and the program will provide a firm foundation for this. Approval
by the faculty committee overseeing the option will be required for
participation; we expect the approval process to be quite selective, so
that only a small fraction of math majors will be in this option at any
time.
Each student in the honors option will be assigned a faculty advisor and,
together with the advisor, will formulate a proposed course plan, subject
to the approval of the mathematics honors committee. This course of study
will normally include (among others) the honors classes in calculus already
offered by the Department, our year-long rigorous courses Mathematical
Analysis (411-412) and Abstract Algebra (451-452), and two semesters of
one-credit honors seminar, at least one at the junior/senior level.
-- Professors Janos Komlos and Enriqueta Carrington offered the Freshman
Seminar, described in the previous issue of
this newsletter, in both Fall 2002 and Spring 2003. This seminar has
been incorporated into the honors track discussed above, and indeed one of
its purposes is to identify promising first year students who are
candidates for the honors track.
-- This spring Professor Komlos offered a special honors section of Math
300, Introduction to Mathematical Reasoning. The goal was to prepare
strong students, primarily sophomores, to take one or both of the the
rigorous advanced courses Mathematical Analysis (411-412) and Abstract
Algebra (451-452) in their junior year. We hope that some of the students
who took this section will join the new honors track discussed above.
-- For several years the Math Department has offered, on an experimental
basis and under a special topics number, a class in the mathematics of
cryptography. Most recently the course has been taught by Professor
Charles Weibel. The course has been quite successful, and has now been
given its own number and title: Math 348, Cryptography. We expect to offer
this course each spring. Topics covered will include the Data Encryption
Standard (DES), the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), Public Key/Private
Key Cryptography, and Digital Signatures, as well as various topics from
Number Theory needed to understand these applications.
-- This spring Professors Lara Alcock and Amy Cohen taught a one-credit
seminar, intended for students interested in teaching mathematics at the
secondary school level and designed to highlight the most important
connections between Advanced Calculus (Math 311) and the mathematics of
junior high school and high school curricula. This is one of the projects
of the Rutgers Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers (CoMET)
discussed in last year's newsletter. Professors Alcock and Cohen will
offer a similar seminar in Fall 2003, exploring the relation of Math 351,
Introduction to Abstract Algebra, to the secondary school curriculum.
During the summer of 2002, three Rutgers undergraduates (Michael Lesnick,
Rahul Malhotra, and John McClain) participated along with three undergraduates
from other universities in the Department's VIGRE Research Experience for
Undergraduates. Most projects had a faculty and/or post-doc mentor
along with a graduate student co-mentor. The projects areas were:
Undergraduate Prizes
We are pleased to announce this years winners of undergraduate prizes and
scholarships.
The Weill scholarship winners, most shown below with Maurice Weill, his son,
James Weill, and Chair, Richard Falk, are Jonathan Chipko, Carmen Costin,
Inessa Epstein, Steven Jaslar, Rahul Malhotra, John F. McClain III, Craig
Phillips, Jared Smollik, and Minh Tri Vo.
Mathematics and Mathematics Education
The Departmental
newsletter for 2002 discussed the increased interaction of the Department
with the Graduate School of Education, and in particular various projects of
the Rutgers Committee on the Mathematical Education of Teachers (CoMET). One
of these was the seminar for prospective high school teachers discussed above.
A second, the proposed revision of the GSE course "Modern High School
Mathematics," has been completed, and the revised course was taught for the
first time in the fall of 2002. A third project was the creation of a course
for prospective elementary school teachers which would satisfy college general
education requirements and also provide the fundamental understanding of
arithmetic, geometry, and probability that teachers need to meet diverse
classroom challenges with confidence and flexibility. This course has been
designed and will be given for the first time in the fall of 2003, by
Professor Michael Beals.
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Next fall, there will be 57 continuing full-time graduate students.
Thus the overall number of full-time students will increase slightly,
from 65 to 73. Have you heard the jokes about where we will find
our new office space?
The number of applications for admission and support was again over
300 this year. This probably reflects the continued economic slump
in technical employment. Draconian budget cuts, also an effect of the
economy, continue to put a limit on how many students we can support.
Fortunately, our program's ability to attract grant support means that
(hopefully) we will have "no student left behind" in terms of support.
The generous gift of Maurice M. Weill and Adrienne R. Weill has allowed the
graduate program to admit stronger students. This was done by supplementing
the support level for first-year students, making us more competitive with
comparable programs elsewhere. Students in the program beyond the first year
can usually get summer support from teaching or research, but first-year
students generally do not have this opportunity. With support from the Weill
Endowment, these students will be in residence during much of the summer,
studying and preparing for their written exams. The Weill support recipients,
most pictured below with Maurice Weill, his daughter Wendy Weill Friedrich,
and the Chair, Richard Falk, are: ShiTing Bao, Ben Bunting, Paul Ellis, Sarah
Genoway, Qinian Jin, Sikimeti Mau, Thomas Robinson, David Smith, Chris
Stucchioi, Thotsaporn Thanatipanonda, and Sujith Vijay.
One of our graduate students, Matt Young, was awarded a Bevier dissertation
fellowship. Each year, Rutgers University awards 12 of these fellowships
to its top graduate students (4 each in Humanities, Science and Social
Science).
We were fortunate to be able to hire a new Graduate Secretary,
Carla Ortiz (ortizc@math.rutgers.edu) this May. She has been working
in the Undergraduate Office for the last four years, so some of you may
remember her in that capacity. Ms. Ortiz replaces Ms. Janet Mindur,
who had been acting GS for 12 months, and who did an exceptional job.
Thanks, Janet!
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The Pizza Seminar is a seminar for graduate students and interrupting
faculty members. The coordinator coerces graduate students to become
members of a coalition of individuals able and willing to give informal
talks to their peers. The talks are a fantastic opportunity for graduate
students to perfect their skill in orally communicating mathematics.
In the 2002--2003 academic year, the Pizza Seminar started in the summer
and ran until the end of classes in May. During this time, we watched the
text on the pizza boxes go from "We Will Never Forget" to "Pizza From
Your Favorite Pizza Shop" and then to "Support Our Troops." Everyone is
eagerly waiting to know which presidential candidate will be endorsed by
Gerlanda's (our supplier) in 2004. Some boring statistics follow and a
list of the talks is below. In the summer, ten talks occurred. Average
attendance was twenty-one. In the fall, thirteen talks took place and the
average attendance was twenty-six; three faculty members also spoke about
their research. In the spring, there were also thirteen talks and the
average attendance was twenty-nine; no faculty were invited to speak
because the department instituted a new Faculty Research Colloquium. Also
in the spring, the first-ever jointly continuous talk was given.
The following is a list of the seminar speakers for the
academic year 2002-2003.
If possible, responses should be sent by email to: alumni@math.rutgers.edu
One particular high priority fund-raising project for the Department is the
renovation of the seventh-floor lounge in the Hill Center and naming it the
Wolfson Lounge, in honor of Ken Wolfson, former Chair of the Department and
Dean of the Graduate School. An article about Ken Wolfson that appeared
recently in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences Newsletter can be found
here.
If you wish to join our effort to honor Ken, you can do so by sending
a donation to the Kenneth Wolfson Memorial Fund (Account #7-34568), a special
fund that has been set up for this purpose. In particular, if you were
planning to contribute to the Rutgers University Capital Campaign, you may
request that the funds go specifically to the Kenneth Wolfson Memorial Fund.
The estimated cost of the lounge renovation is approximately $108,000.
As part of the Higher Education Capital Improvement Fund, the Faculty of
Arts and Sciences has already allocated about $62,000. Last year, we raised
approximately $9000. Thus, to complete
the project, we need to raise about $37,000.
Ken was instrumental in building the Mathematics Department to the stature it
has today. Renovating the lounge in the manner described in the FAS Newsletter
article will greatly benefit the Mathematics Department and be a wonderful way
to honor Ken for his accomplishments and dedication to the Department.
I hope you will be able to help us achieve this goal.
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PRIZES AND HONORS TO OUR FACULTY
HAIM BREZIS
ELECTED FOREIGN ASSOCIATE OF NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Dr. Haim Brezis was one of 18 foreign associates from 11 countries elected to
the National Academy of Sciences in recognition of his distinguished and
continuing achievements in original research. Dr. Brezis is a Professor at
Université Pierre et Marie Curie and has been a Distinguished Visiting
Professor at Rutgers since 1988. He holds honorary doctorates at 7 universities
and is a member of the French Academy of Sciences (and of 6 other Academies).
STEPHEN GREENFIELD
RECEIVES MAA-NJ SECTION DISTINGUISHED TEACHING AWARD
Dr. Stephen Greenfield was the 2003 recipient of the MAA-NJ Section
Distinguished Teaching Award. He was cited as "an inspired classroom teacher
whose accomplishments go well beyond the classroom. He has served as mentor
to many students by rehearsing job talks, advising students on job
applications, helping graduate students teaching their own course for the
first time, and discussing students' lives and mathematical careers. His
activities also include course innovation leading to sustained change,
successful applications for funding of educational activities, outreach to
other programs, and educational administration. He has been meticulous about
documenting his instructional activities on the web and his pages are
considered regularly and extensively by people at Rutgers and elsewhere. All
these activities have been of enormous help to the Rutgers Mathematics
Department and have been greatly appreciated by his students."
NATASHA KOMAROVA RECEIVES PRIZE FOR PROMISE
Dr. Natasha Komarova, who will be joining the Mathematics Department in Fall,
2003, received the
Prize for Promise. The Prize for Promise is an award given to young women
demonstrating exceptional ability, leadership, and vision in their respective
endeavors. Natasha was selected for her "extraordinary potential and
contribution to her field, her expertise in other science disciplines, and her
collaboration with colleagues on numerous continents. Only 30 years old,
Komarova already is considered a leader in the field of mathematical biology,
currently focusing her study on the modeling of cancer and virus dynamics. She
will receive $90,000 of the overall award."
STEPHEN MILLER SELECTED AS ALFRED P. SLOAN FELLOW
Dr. Stephen D. Miller was one of 117 outstanding young scientists and
economists (only 20 in mathematics) selected to receive Sloan Research
Fellowships. Sloan Research Fellows are selected from "among hundreds of
highly qualified scientists in the early stages of their careers on the basis
of exceptional promise to contribute to the advancement of knowledge."
EDUARDO SONTAG
AWARDED HENRIK W. BODE LECTURE PRIZE
Professor Eduardo Sontag was awarded the Henrik W. Bode Lecture Prize: To a
distinguished contributor to control systems science or engineering. The
recipient gives a plenary lecture at the Conference on Decision and Control in
the year of the award.
JEAN TAYLOR
ELECTED TRUSTEE OF AMS and GIVES AWM NOETHER LECTURE
Dr. Jean E. Taylor was elected to a five-year term as a Trustee of the
American Mathematical Society. She also gave the Association of Women in
Mathematics' Emmy Noether Lecture: Five little crystals and how they grew.
FRANÇOIS TRÈVES ELECTED FOREIGN MEMBER OF
BRAZILIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Dr. François Trèves was one of only six scientists in all fields elected
as a new Foreign Member of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.
WOLMER VASCONCELOS ELECTED MEMBER OF
BRAZILIAN ACADEMY OF SCIENCES
Dr. Wolmer Vasconcelos was one of twenty new members and the only one
from the Mathematical Sciences elected a Member of the Brazilian Academy of
Sciences.
Past Faculty Honors
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FACULTY PROMOTIONS
Simon Thomas was promoted to the rank of Professor
II.
We congratulate our colleague for his outstanding achievements that led
to this promotion.
NEW FACULTY FOR FALL 2003
Assistant Professor
Natasha Komarova will join the Department as a tenure-track Assistant
Professor, coming to Rutgers from the Institute for Advanced Study, where she
has been a member of the Program in Theoretical Biology. She received her
Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1998 and has interests in mathematical
biology, mathematical modeling of learning and evolution of language,
nonlinear waves, and integrable systems.
Assistant Professor
Drew Sills will join the Department as a Hill Assistant Professor,
coming to Rutgers from Penn State University, where he has been a
Visiting Assistant Professor for the past year, after obtaining his
Ph.D. from the University of Kentucky in 2002. His research interests
include q-series identities, partitions, and symbolic computation.
NSF post-doc
Geoffrey Buhl will join the Department as a National Science Foundation
post-doctoral fellow. He will receive his Ph.D. from the University of
California at Santa Cruz in June, 2003 and his research interests include
vertex operator algebras, conformal field theory, and infinite-dimensional
Lie algebras.
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JEAN TAYLOR
RETIRES
Jean Taylor was a Rutgers faculty member for twenty-nine years, coming to
Rutgers as an Assistant Professor in 1972, following a year as an Instructor
at MIT. She received her BA from Mount Holyoke College in 1966, an MS (in
Physical Chemistry) from Berkeley in 1968, an MS (in Mathemtics) from the
University of Warick, England in 1971 and her Ph.D. from Princeton in 1973.
Jean received many honors, including election as a Fellow of the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences (1999), a Fellow of the American Association for
the Advancement of Science, the Rutgers Presidential Public Service Award
(1999), and an Honorary Doctorate from Mount Holyoke College (2001). Jean
also had a distinguished record of service to the mathematics profession,
which included serving as President of the Association for Women in
Mathematics (1999-01) membership on the Executive Committee of the Conference
Board of the Mathematical Sciences (2000-02), and Vice-President of the
American Mathematical Society (1994-97). While undertaking all these
activities, Jean had a highly productive research career, with over 100
publications in mathematics and materials science. Jean retired as
of June 30, 2002 and a
conference in her
honor was held in the Department on January 30, 31, 2003.
MYLES TIERNEY RETIRES
Myles Tierney was a Rutgers faculty member for
thirty-four years, coming to Rutgers as an Associate Professor in 1968
following positions at Rice University (1965-6) and at the
ETH-Forshungsinstitut fur Mathematics, Zurich (1966-68). He received his
B.A. from Brown University in 1959 and his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1965. Myles
began his career as an algebraic topologist, moved toward category theory and
was responsible (together with F.W. Lawrence) for the introduction of an new
field within category theory: elementary topoi. He had six Ph.D. students:
Ira Wolf (1971), Carol Ann Keller (1983), Norman Adams (1984), Terence
Lindgren (1984), Todd Trimble (1994), and Luca Mauri (1998). Myles retired as
of January 1, 2003 and was honored by the Department at a retirement party on
December 10, 2002.
LEWIS AND D'ATRI MEMORIAL LECTURES
The D'Atri
lectures, given by Richard Hamilton of
Columbia University on April 3-4, 2003, were entitled "On the Ricci Flow."
NEWS FROM THE
UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM
(Eugene R. Speer,
Undergraduate Vice-Chair)
Developments in the Undergraduate Curriculum.
Honorable mentions were awarded to Stephen Curran, Philip Engel, and
Christopher Ross.
NEWS FROM THE GRADUATE PROGRAM
(Chuck Weibel,
Graduate Director)
New PhDs
Eight Rutgers students will earn their Ph.D. in Mathematics this year.
They are (with advisors and their fall 2003 Employment parenthesized):
Incoming students
Replacing these departing students next fall will be a bumper crop
of 16 incoming graduate students. Eleven of these are US citizens, and
five of these are women; the number of US women in our program will
more than double. 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...)
In other news ...
This year Klay Kruczek was
a Graduate Fellow in the Science and Mathematics Educational Partnerships
program, and taught in the Crossroads Middle School in South Brunswick one day
a week.
PIZZA SEMINAR NEWS
(Jason Tedor,
Curator)
ALUMNI NEWS
The Mathematics Department is very interested in hearing from
its alumni/alumnae from either the undergraduate or graduate program, about
where they are and what they are doing. One aim is to set up a
Department website that would facilitate contacts among former graduates and
serve as a source of contacts for our current graduates. We would be
especially interested to know if you are employed in a company that hires
mathematics graduates at any level, since we are seeking summer internship
opportunities for our students and also occasionally look for individuals
willing to come to campus to speak about job opportunities in industry for
mathematics majors. Please let us know if you would be willing to
participate in such activities.
Name:
Current Address:
Job Title and Company:
Home Phone:
Business Phone:
Email address:
Web page url:
News item: If you do not have access to email, please FAX the
information to 732-445-5530 (attention: Alumni Committee) or
mail the information to:
Alumni Committee
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Department of Mathematics - Hill Center
Rutgers, The State University Of New Jersey
110 Frelinghuysen Rd
Piscataway, NJ 08854-8019
CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE MATHEMATICS DEPARTMENT
The Mathematics Department would like to thank its alumni and friends for
their past generous support of the Department. Gifts to the Department
enhance our ability to compete for the most outstanding undergraduates and
graduate students, to bring outstanding mathematics faculty as visitors to the
Department, and to support seminars and colloquia. If you would like to help
us by making a contribution, you can do so directly on the web at the URL
https://secure.entango.com/donate/GSuEdXhgRpV by clicking on
"Or choose an academic department:" and selecting Mathematics. If you would
like to discuss various possibilities for a gift to the Department, please
call the Department Chair, Richard Falk, at 732-445-2393.
Maintained by
falk@math.rutgers.edu
and last modified 5/27/2003.