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On April 2, 2008 Professor Tom Braden gave a talk in the Topology et. al. seminar at Wesleyan University entitled Toric and Hypertoric Varieties: Topology and Combinatorics.
On April 5, 2008 Professor Eduardo Cattani gave a talk on Rational Hypergeometric Functions in Two Variables at the Special Session on D-Modules of the AMS Sectional Meeting in Bloomington, Indiana. He also attended the Workshop on Hodge Theory at the Banff International Research Station (BIRS) in Banff, Canada during the period April 6–11. A co-organizer of this workshop was Greg Pearlstein, who received his Ph.D. in our department in 1999 under the direction of Professor Aroldo Kaplan.
Professor Paul Gunnells attended the workshop Computing Arithmetic Spectra, held March 10–14, 2008 at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, California.
During March and early April 2008, Professor Rob Kusner visited TU-Berlin and TU-Darmstadt in Germany, ETH in Zurich, Switzerland, and University of Milan in Italy. He pitched a season-opening double-header (and now has a 2.718281828... ERA) in the Augsburg-Darmstadt-Frankfurt-Heidelberg-Mannheim Geometric Analysis Oberseminar on April 11 on the topic of Holomorphic Differentials and Surface Theory. The first game was against an old combinatorial geometric problem of triangulating tori; using sextic differentials and Abel’s Theorem, one can give a quick proof that there are no such triangulations with exactly one 5-fold and one 7-fold vertex. The second opponent was the classification of complex projective structures (which, via the Schwarzian, amount to the space of quadratic differentials with polynomial growth) on C and applications of this to the moduli space of constant mean curvature surfaces; in fact, a consequence of this approach is a slick holomorphic proof of Stasheff’s theorem about the associahedron being a cell. Earlier that week in Milan, Rob pitched a special morning game against Knotted Ropes and Bands, and he faced the same rival again in the joint Bryn Mawr-Haverford Colloquium on April 28. Ball four!
Professor Michael Lavine gave a talk on April 2, 2008 at the University of Connecticut and a talk on April 10 at Boston University. Both talks were entitled The Multiset Sampler, a New MCMC Algorithm.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk at the International Conference on Representation Theory of Algebras and Related Topics, which took place at Woods Hole during the period April 25–27, 2008. The title of his talk was Cluster-Tilted Algebras and Slices.
Professor John Staudenmayer has been invited to become an associate editor of Biometrics, a applied statistics journal that is the premier publication of the International Biometrics Society.
During April 2008 Professor Jenia Tevelev gave a talk entitled Hypergraph Curves, Divisors, and Morphisms at the Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry Seminar at the University of California Berkeley and a talk entitled Tropical Compactifications at the Toric Varieties Seminar at the University of California Berkeley and at the Geometry-Algebra-Singularities-Combinatorics Seminar at Northeastern University.
On April 26–27, 2008 Emeritus Professor Floyd Williams was one of six speakers in the Workshop on Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, and their Representations, held at the University of California at Santa Cruz. His one-hour talk was entitled Zeta Integrals on Higher Rank Symmetric Spaces. Among the other speakers was Zhongzhu Lin, who received his Ph.D. in our department in 1989 under the direction of Professor Jim Humphreys. Now a professor at Kansas State University, Zhongzhu Lin gave a talk entitled Frobenius Twisted Conjugacy Classes In Full Matrix Rings.
On March 16, 2008 Professor Tom Braden gave a talk at the AMS meeting at New York University in a special session on algebraic combinatorial geometry. The talk was entitled Hypertoric Varieties and Gale Duality.
Professor Emeritus Ed Connors was appointed to a 3-year term on the Karl Menger Prize Committee. The committee will serve as the American Mathematical Society's special awards judges at this year’s Intel International Science and Engineering Fair being held in Atlanta during the period May 11–16, 2008.
A new book by Professor Emeritus Jim Humphreys will be published by the American Mathematical Society later this year in their series Graduate Studies in Mathematics. The title is Representations of Semisimple Lie Algebras in the BGG Category O; the upper case script letter O comes from the Russian word osnovnoj meaning basic or principal. BGG abbreviates the names of Joseph Bernstein, Israel Gelfand, and Sergei Gelfand.
Professors Rob Kusner and Franz Pedit and their former Ph.D. students Martin Kilian, Wayne Rossman, and Nick Schmitt, participated in a week-long meeting at Kloster Schöntal in Germany's Odenwald during the first week of March 2008. Kilian, now a professor in Cork, Ireland, reported on his recent breakthrough on the Lawson conjecture, asserting that the Clifford torus is the only embedded minimal surface of genus 1 in the three-sphere. Rossman and Schmitt, now professors in Kobe, Japan, and Tübingen, Germany, respectively, helped the attendees celebrate the 48th birthday of their former advisor at the meeting. As is well known, 48 is the order of the symmetry group for the cube, and so, in order to honor the occasion, Rob was given a small but perfect cubic crystal of sodium chloride.
On January 31, 2008 Visiting Assistant Professor Roman Fedorov gave a talk at the Boston University Geometry Seminar. The title was Langland’s Transform and Painlevé Equations.
During the week of February 18–25, 2008, Professor Rob Kusner visited the University of Georgia in Athens, where he collaborated and lectured on constant mean curvature surfaces.
Professor William Meeks is on sabbatical during the spring semester of 2008. As part of his sabbatical he is traveling overseas to give talks and to do joint research projects. At the beginning of the year he spent one month in Spain at the University of Granada to do joint research with Professors Ferrer and Martin and with Professors Perez and Ros. While there he solved one well known conjecture together with Perez and Ros called the Stable Limit Leaf Conjecture. In less than a month, Professor Meeks wrote up the paper, submitted it to the Journal of Differential Geometry for review, and the journal accepted it for publication. While there, he also gave a talk in the geometry seminar. He plans to return to Granada in March for about one month and then again at the end of May for about a month. During his May visit to Europe he will attend a geometry conference in Rome. Professor Meeks also reports on the following invitations.
In March he will be going to McGill University in Montreal in order to lecture on his recent paper, Dynamics Theorem for CMC Surfaces, which is based on joint research with Giuseppe Tinaglia.
At the beginning of May, he plans to attend and give a plenary talk at the Triannual Journal of Geometry Conference at Harvard University. He will then leave for a two-week visit to Korea, where he will give a series of eight research talks to geometers.
At the end of August, he will give a plenary talk at a conference on geometry and physics at Harvard University as part of the 60th birthday celebration in honor of his friend, Professor S.T. Yau of Harvard University.
Finally, in November he will be giving two plenary lectures on his research at the annual Current Developments in Mathematics Conference at MIT-Harvard. His invitation is considered to be a special honor. The speakers invited to this conference will speak on the most interesting recent developments in mathematics.
On February 15, 2008 Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk at the Colloquium on Modules and Related Topics at the Université du Québec à Montréal. The title of his talk was Sur la Structure Combinatoire des Algébres Amassées.
A paper entitled Density Estimation in the Presence of Heteroskedastic Measurement Error by Professors John Staudenmayer, John Buonaccorsi, and David Ruppert of Cornell University is to appear in the Journal of the American Statistical Association.
Professor John Buonaccorsi was a guest researcher at the Section for Biostatistics at the University of Oslo Medical School for much of January 2008, with support provided by the Norwegian Research Council. He continued his ongoing collaboration with colleagues on statistical methods for handling measurement error and misclassification in epidemiologic studies. He also presented a talk on Measurement Error in Time Series with Applications to Population Dynamics through the Centre for Research-based Statistical Innovation at the University of Oslo.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis has published his first book, which appeared in Springer-Verlag’s Atomic, Optical, and Plasma Series. Co-edited by Panos’s close collaborators Dimitri Frantzeskakis and Ricardo Carretero-González, the book is entitled Emergent Nonlinear Phenomena in Bose-Einstein Condensates. The book features a series of theoretical and experimental review-style chapters by experts on different nonlinear phenomena arising in the field of Bose-Einstein Condensates, which is a major thrust of Panos’s work. The preface was written by Professor Wolfgang Ketterle of MIT, who won the Nobel Prize.
During January 2008 Professor Rob Kusner lectured on Nondegeneracy of Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces at the University of Pennsylvania, where he is spending his sabbatical this spring. Rob’s collaborator and former NSF postdoctoral fellow at UMass, Jason Cantarella (also on sabbatical at Penn now), also spoke about their joint work Minimizing the Length of Curves with Curvature Bounded Above.
We are happy to welcome Professor Michael Lavine to our department. His official starting date is January 27, 2008.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a colloquium talk at Kansas State University on December 3, 2007. The title of his talk was Quiver Representations: Basic Facts and Some Recent Developments.
During December 2007 Professor Jenia Tevelev gave talks at the Algebra, Geometry, and Physics Seminar at SUNY Stony Brook and at the Tropical Geometry Workshop in Oberwolfach, Germany. The talks were entitled Tropical Compactifications of Subvarieties of Tori. Jenia was also appointed an editor of the journal Transformation Groups.
On November 26, 2007, Professor Tom Braden gave a talk entitled Category O for Hyperplane Arrangements in the Geometry, Algebra, Singularities, and Combinatorics Seminar at Northeastern University.
During November, Visiting Assistant Professor Roman Fedorov gave a talk entitled "Deformations of Algebro-Geometric Solutions of Kadomtsev–Petviashvili Equations and Frobenius Manifolds at the joint Math-Physics Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania.
During the period November 18–20, 2007, Professor Hans Johnston attended the Division of Fluid Dynamics meeting of the 60th annual American Physical Society meeting in Salt Lake City. At the meeting he participated in the following three activities: he gave a talk entitled A Spectral Collocation Method for 2D Incompressible Fluids in Vorticity Formulation; along with Charles Doering, he contributed a video to the Video Gallery of Fluid Motion entitled Rayleigh-Benard Convection with Imposed Heat Flux; he chaired a session entitled Computational Fluid Dynamics. His talk was presented at this session.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a busy fall. During October, Panos gave the Mathematics Colloquium at the University of Vermont on October 4, and then in the third week of October, he was one of the invited speakers at the workshop on Hamiltonian Lattice Dynamical Systems, which took place in Leiden, Netherlands. Panos was also invited to be a Visiting Fellow at the Research Excellence Centre on Optical Communications and Quantum Atom Optics at the Australian National University in Canberra, Australia, where he spent two weeks and presented an invited seminar. Finally, Panos was recently awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship and will be spending his sabbatical from March to July 2008 at the University of Heidelberg in Germany.
On November 19, 2007, Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk entitled Cluster-tilted Algebras in the Geometry, Algebra, Singularities, and Combinatorics seminar at Northeastern University.
On November 7, 2007 Professor Jenia Tevelev gave a talk entitled Tropical Compactifications of Subvarieties of Tori in the Algebraic Geometry Seminar at the University of Michigan. On November 16 he gave a talk entitled "Elimination Theory for Tropical Varieties" in the Mathematics Colloquium at Cleveland State University.
On October 7, 2007 Professor Tom Braden gave a talk in a special session on toric varieties at the fall meeting of the American Mathematical Society, which was held at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. The talk was entitled A Ring Structure on Intersection Cohomology of Hypertoric Varieties.
Professor Erin Conlon gave a talk at the Third Annual Geobacter meeting, which was held in Amherst, Massachusetts on October 22, 2007. The title of her talk was Geobacter Sulfurreducens Transcription Factor Binding Site Discovery.
Professor Brian Emond presented a paper at the E-Learn 2007 World Conference on E-Learning in Corporate, Government, Healthcare and Higher Education, which was held in Quebec City, Quebec, Canada during the period Qctober 15–19. The paper was entitled Using an Online-Supported Text Homework System in Undergraduate Precalculus Classes: A Pilot Study. The paper reports on the preliminary results of student performance in the new precalculus curriculum and the on-line student support system that instructors are using at UMass Amherst. He also received a second grant from the Center for Teaching for the training of precalculus instructors on the use of the system.
Professor Paul Gunnells spoke about Weyl group multiple Dirichlet series at both the Explicit Methods in Number Theory meeting in Oberwolfach, Germany (July 15–21, 2007) and the Maine/Quebec Conference on Number Theory and Related Topics at the University of Maine (September 29–30, 2007). He also participated in the Workshop on L-functions and Modular Forms, which took place at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, CA, from July 30 to August 3, 2007. Professor Gunnells was a co-organizer of the five-day workshop on Low-dimensional Topology and Number Theory, which took place at the Banff International Research Station in Banff, Alberta during the period October 21–26.
The Aspen Center for Physics (http://www.aspenphys.org/) has invited Professor Rob Kusner and his UMass Physics colleague Chris Santangelo to lead a workshop on the Geometry of Condensed Matter (http://people.umass.edu/csantang/geometry.html) during June and July
2008.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk at the International Conference on Representations of Algebras and Related Topics, which was held at Northeastern University during the period October 5–7, 2007. His talk was entitled A Cluster Expansion Formula. He also gave a talk at the International Meeting on Representation Theory of Algebras, which took place in Sherbrooke, Canada during the period October 12–14. The title of his talk was "Cluster-tilted Algebras.
During the second week of October Professor Eric Sommers co-organized a workshop at INDAM in Rome, Italy with Professor Paolo Papi of the University of Rome (La Sapienza). The title of the workshop was B-stable Ideals and Nilpotent Orbits. Among the twenty talks, graduate student Molly Fenn presented her thesis work in a talk entitled Equivalence Classes of B-stable Ideals, and Professor Sommers gave a talk entitled Minimal Points in Cells.
On October 10, 2007 Professor John Staudenmayer gave a talk in the Department of Biostatistics at Johns Hopkins University. The title of the talk was Density Estimation in the Presence of Heteroscedastic Measurement Error.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was one of six invited speakers at the Workshop on Lie Groups, Lie Algebras, and Their Representations, which was held at the University of California Berkeley during the period October 27–28, 2007. The workshop was organized by Professor Joseph Wolf. Professor Williams’s talk was entitled Harmonic Analysis on a Hyperbolic Cylinder.
Professor John Buonaccorsi was an invited presenter/participant at the National Institute on Aging Workshop on Statistical Methods for Longitudinal Data on Aging held in Bethesda, MD on June 13–14, 2007. John gave a talk at the workshop entitled Measurement Error in Longitudinal Studies.
Professor Rob Kusner lectured on Nondegeneracy for CMC Surfaces at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study conference on Geometric Analysis (September 7–11, 2007) and at the conference celebrating the 60th birthdays of Professor Bill Meeks and former UMass Professor David Hoffman in Buzios, Brasil (August 20–25, 2007). Between these two conferences, Rob was a member of IMPA in Rio de Janiero, where he and collaborator Karsten Grosse-Brauckmann wrote a new paper on conjugate Plateau construction of minimal surfaces in the Heisenberg group Nil(3) and CMC surfaces in H^2 x R, two of the eight Thurston geometries on 3-manifolds.
Professor Andrea Nahmod is giving a minicourse at the NSF-sponsored 10th New Mexico Analysis Seminar held in Albuquerque on October 11–12, 2007. The title of her minicourse is Bilinear Operators in Analysis and PDEs. Full details are available at the URL http://www.math.unm.edu/conferences/10thAnalysis/.
On June 19, 2007 Professor Tom Braden gave a talk entitled Hyperplane Arrangements and Hypertoric Varieties at a workshop on combinatorics and topology held at the Institute for Advanced Studies, Hebrew University in Jerusalem. He was also awarded a two-year NSA grant totaling $61,120 for a project entitled Equivariant Topology of Singular Varieties.
Professor John Buonaccorsi gave an invited talk entitled Measurement Error/Errors-in-variables in Longitudinal Models at a special National Institute on Aging Workshop on Statistical Methods for Longitudinal Data on Aging. The workshop was held in Bethesda, MD during the period June 13--14, 2007.
Professor Richard S. Ellis was a member of the International Advisory Committee for the workshop on Dynamics and Thermodynamics of Systems with Long Range Interactions: Theory and Experiments, held in Assisi, Italy during the period July 4--8, 2007. He gave a talk at the workshop entitled Ginzburg-Landau Polynomials and the Asymptotic Behavior of the Magnetization in the Neighborhood of a Tricritical Point.
Professor Paul Gunnells participated in the workshop Arithmetic Harmonic Analysis on Character and Quiver Varieties, which took place during the period June 4--8, 2007 at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, California.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis gave a number of lectures during the past few months. In April 2007 he gave an invited talk at the 5th IMACS Meeting in Athens, GA. At the beginning of May, he visited the University of Kansas and gave a mathematics colloquium there. Panos then participated and presented an invited lecture in the first UMass-Heidelberg Workshop on Modeling and Computation in Physics, Mathematics and Biology, which took place at UMass Amherst during the period May 21–23. He then traveled to Snowbird, UT, where he gave another invited lecture at the SIAM Dynamical Systems Conference at the end of May. Finally, in June, he presented one of the six invited lectures at the Workshop on Analysis and its Applications, organized by the Mathematics Department of the University of Athens, Greece; Professor Markos Katsoulakis was also an invited speaker at the workshop. All of these talks focused on Panos’ recent joint work with experimental and theoretical colleagues on the dynamics of Bose-Einstein condensates, optical solitary waves in photorefractive crystals, and acoustic waves in strongly nonlinear phononic crystals.
In June 2007 Professor Markos Katsoulakis co-organized the workshop Mathematical and Computational Methods for Accelerated Molecular, Stochastic and Hybrid Simulation, which was held at the Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH) in Crete Greece. The website and poster of the conference are available at the URL http://www.tem.uoc.gr/~workshop07/. Markos was also awarded a grant totaling $336,172 from the Division of Mathematical Sciences at the National Science Foundation for a project entitled Multiscale Methods for Many-Particle Stochastic Systems: Coarse-Graining and Microscopic Reconstruction. Among other activities the grant will support graduate students working on their PhDs during the period 2007--2010.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler was awarded an NSF grant totaling $87,048 for the period 2007–2010 (DMS-0700358). He spent the period June 27--July 14, 2007 at the University of Sherbrooke, where he continued his joint research with I. Assem and T. Bruestle and gave two talks at the local algebra seminar. The titles of his talks were Formules de Developpement dans les Algebres Amassees and Algebres Amassees et Surfaces Triangulees. Ralf also attended the International Conference on Representations of Algebras (ICRA XII), which took place at the Nicolaus Copernicus University in Torun, Poland during the period August 15--24, 2007. At the conference he gave a talk entitled Geometric Realizations of Cluster Categories.
During July 2007 Professor John Staudenmayer became an Associate Editor of the Journal of the American Statistical Association, Theory and Methods Section.
Professor Jenia Tevelev received a grant from the National Science Foundation for his project entitled Geometry of Compact Moduli Spaces (DMS-0701191). He gave a talk entitled Modular and Tropical Compactifications during his stay at IHES in June and July 2007 and a second talk entitled Mori-theoretic and Tropical Aspects of Terada, Naruki, and Sekiguchi Cross-ratio Varieties during the conference Analysis and Geometry on Complex Varieties, which took place in Krasnoyarsk, Russia during the period August 15--20, 2007. Jenia’s paper entitled Compactifications of Subvarieties of Tori was published in the American Journal of Mathematics, 129, no. 4 (2007).
On June 25, 2007 Visiting Assistant Professor Yorghos Tripodis gave a talk at the International Symposium on Forecasting held in New York City. The title of the talk was Forecasting in Linear Autoregressive Models with Heteroscedastic Measurement Error. On July 30 he gave a talk entitled Forecasting Contemporaneous Aggregated Time Series at the Joint Statistical Meeting held in Salt Lake City.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams has been invited by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley to organize a two-week graduate workshop in number theory and physics during the period June 16--27, 2008. Entitled A Window into Zeta and Modular Physics, the workshop will host up to forty students, including Floyd’s two Ph.D. students, Shabnam Beheshti and Jennie D’Ambroise. The lectures by Floyd and four other professors will cover the following topics: spectral and non-spectral zeta functions, heat kernel asymptotics, Bose-Einstein condensation, black holes and gravity in extra dimensions, and modular invariance in conformal field theory.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis is organizing a workshop entitled Mathematical and Computational Methods for Accelerated Molecular, Stochastic and Hybrid Simulation at the Foundation for Research and Technology–Hellas in Heraklion, Greece. It will take place during the period June 25–27, 2007. Details of the workshop are available at http://www.tem.uoc.gr/~workshop07/.
During the last week of May, Professor Rob Kusner lectured on the topic Lengths of Knotted Bands and Raceways at the Banff International Research Station conference on the Mathematics of Knotting and Linking in Polymer Physics and Molecular Biology. Part of this topic involves recent joint work with his former REU student Evan Innis, who plans to head to Oxford next year.
Professor William Meeks has been awarded a new NSF grant for the period 2007–2010. The amount of the grant is $153,165. On June 13 he will give a talk at the Geometry Day conference at the University of Marseille, and then the following week he will give a talk at the week-long geometry conference at Luminy. Bill’s two talks are entitled The Classical Theory of Minimal Surfaces and The Classification of Embedded Minimal Planar Domains in R3. During August he will participate in an international geometry conference on Minimal and Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces, which will take place in Buzio, Brazil. The conference honors the 60th birthdays of Bill and of David Hoffman, a former member of our department.
Professor Franz Pedit gave the following lectures in the spring:
A talk in the joint ETH-University of Zurich Geometry Seminar entitled Conformal Maps from a 2-Torus to the 4-Sphere,, April 25, 2007.
A talk at the Oberwolfach meeting Advances in Surface Geometry entitled Tori of spectral Genus Zero, May 4, 2007.
A public lecture in the Tübingen City Museum entitled "What Do Mathematicians Really Do?", May 10, 2007.
During the week of June 19–22, Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams will give a 2-day mini-course on automorphic forms at Northwestern University on the occasion of the 13th Meeting of the Conference of African American Researchers in the Mathematical Sciences. This is his second invitation to speak at the conference. The first was a one-hour address at the Institute of Advanced Studies at Princeton in 1996. The conference at Northwestern University will also involve 12 other speakers.
On April 26, 2007 Professor Tom Braden gave the first of a series of two talks in the seminar Basic Notions in the Department of Mathematics at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The title of the talk was Counting Faces of Polytopes and Geometry of Toric Varieties. On March 18 he gave a talk at a one-day mini-conference on Toric Varieties, Polytope Duality, Mirror Symmetry, and Koszul Duality. The title of the talk was Polytope Duality and Koszul Duality.
On March 28, 2007 Professor Erin Conlon gave an invited seminar talk in the Division of Biostatistics, University of Minnesota, and on April 12 she gave an invited seminar talk in the Department of Biostatistics at Boston University. The titles of both talks were Statistical Methods for Integrating Multiple Sources of Genomic Data. Erin was also recently invited to serve on a panel at the National Science Foundation to review proposals.
Professor Richard S. Ellis recently served on a panel at the National Science Foundation that reviewed proposals.
On April 2, 2007 Visiting Assistant Professor Roman Fedorov gave a talk at the seminar Geometry-Algebra-Singularities-Combinatorics at Northeastern University. The title of his talk was Isomonodromic Deformations and Affine Lie Groups.
Professor Paul Gunnells was a co-organizer of a special session entitled Arithmetic Geometry and Automorphic Forms, held during the weekend of April 14-15, 2007 at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Hoboken, NJ. On the Friday before the meeting he gave a talk in the Collaborative New York Number Theory Seminar at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York City. The title of the talk was Automorphic Forms and the Cohomology of Arithmetic Groups.
On April 26, 2007 Professor Farshid Hajir gave a colloquium entitled Recent Advances in Galois Theory at Emory University.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis reports on the following three items.
His article entitled Intermittency, Metastability and Coarse Graining for Coupled Deterministic Stochastic Lattice Systems has been included in the list of High-Profile Articles of 2006 for Nonlinearity <http://herald.iop.org/non/m7/cid/215282/link/682>. This collection consists of the top-downloaded papers published in 2006.
Markos was one of the invited speakers in the 2007 John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville, held during the period April 28ñ30, 2007. The theme of the series this year was Multi-Scale Modeling and Simulation in Materials Science. Details on the series including the list of speakers are available at http://www.math.utk.edu/Barrett/.
Markos was invited to participate at the Applied Mathematics Research-PI (Principal Investigators) Meeting organized by the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research at the Department of Energy. The meeting will take place at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory during the period May 22ñ24, 2007.
A paper by Visiting Assistant Professor Yorghos Tripodis and Dr. J. Penzer of the London Schol of Economics was published in the April 2007 issue of Journal of Forecasting. The paper is entitled Single-Season Heteroscedasticity in Time Series.
On February 26, 2007 Professor Qian-Yong Chen gave a talk entitled A New Multipoint Flux Approximation for Reservoir Simulation at the 2007 Reservoir Simulation Symposium at Houston, TX.
The paper Symplectic Symmetries of 4-Manifolds by Professor Weimin Chen and Slawomir Kwasik has been published in Topology 46, no. 2 (2007), 103-128.
On February 23, 2007 Visiting Assistant Professor Roman Fedorov gave a talk entitled Frobenius Manifold Structures on the Spaces of Abelian Integrals at the Infinite-Dimensional Algebra Seminar at MIT.
Professor Jenia Tevelev gave a talk entitled Modular, Tropical, and Log Canonical Compactifications at the University of Michigan/Ohio State University Weekend Algebraic Geometry Workshop held March 24ñ25, 2007 in Columbus, Ohio. He also gave a talk entitled Embedding Tropical Stuff in Buildings at the conference Buildings and Combinatorial Representation Theory held March 26ñ30 at AIM in Palo Alto, California.
Professor Weimin Chen gave an invited talk at the workshop Quantum Cohomology of Stacks and String Theory, which was held at the Institut Henri Poincare in Paris during the period February 12ñ16, 2007. The title of his talk was Pseudoholomorphic Curves in the Context of Orbifolds. The workshop was part of the program Trimester on Groupoids and Stacks in Physics and Geometry 2007 at the Institut Henri Poincare.
On February 4, 2007 Professor Rob Kusner hosted a conversation with Congressman John Olver on the Sunday-noon WMUA (91.1 FM) public affairs program FOCUS. They discussed transportation issues involving energy, the environment, and foreign policy; Congressman Olver is the new chair of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Transportation. On March 4 Rob hosted Computer Science colleagues Brian Levine and Mark Corner along with the Town of Amherstís IT director Kris Pacunas in a conversation on the Community Wireless Project and its implications for community and economic development in Amherst.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler attended the Workshop on Representation Theory and Related Areas, which took place at the Universidad de la Republica in Montevideo, Uruguay during the period February 26ñ28, 2007. At the workshop he gave a mini-course consisting of three lectures on Cluster Algebras and Cluster Categories.
Professor Jenia Tevelev has been named a 2007 recipient of a Sloan Research Fellowship. This year 118 fellowships were awarded, of which 20 were in mathematics. These extremely competitive awards, presented annually by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to researchers throughout the sciences, are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science.
During the week January 29 ñ February 2, 2007 Professor Tom Braden participated in the workshop Geometric and Topological Combinatorics at the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in Germany. On January 29 he gave a talk entitled Combinatorics of Arrangements and Topology of Hypertoric Varieties.
On January 23, 2007 Professor Farshid Hajir gave a talk in the number theory seminar at the University of Arizona. The title of his talk was Finitely Ramified Galois Groups via Iteration.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis was extremely busy during the winter break. On December 6 and 7, 2007 he visited the University of Crete at Heraklion, and during the period December 13ñ16 he participated in the workshop on Coherent Nonlinear Optics of Artificial Media at the University of Lisbon. He then accepted an invitation to participate in the Dynamical Systems Program at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley during the period January 6ñ27. During that time he also visited San Francisco State University. In each of these venues, Professor Kevrekidis delivered invited lectures about his recent work on solitary waves in spatially and temporally periodic media.
During January 2007 Professor Rob Kusner visited Atlanta, Athens (Georgia), and Salt Lake City for research collaborations. He lectured at both the University of Georgia and Georgia Institute of Technology.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler spent four weeks at the UniversitÈ Claude Bernard in Lyon, France, where he continued a joint research project with his colleagues. He also gave a talk at the local algebra seminar entitled Des ModËles GÈomÈtriques pour les AlgËbres AmassÈes.
On January 26, 2007 Professor Jenia Tevelev gave a talk at the algebraic geometry seminar at Columbia University. The title of his talk was Geometry of Chow Quotients of Grassmannians. During 2006 he published the following papers.
Geometry of Chow Quotients of Grassmannians (with Sean Keel), Duke Math. J. 134, no. 2 (2006), 259-311
Hilbertís 14-th Problem and Cox Rings (with Ana-Maria Castravet), Compositio Math. 142 (2006), 1479-1498
Compactification of the Moduli Space of Hyperplane Arrangements (with Paul Hacking and Sean Keel), J. Alg. Geom. 15 (2006), 657-680.
A paper by Professor Richard S. Ellis and two former Ph.D. students in our department, Marius Costeniuc and Peter Otto, has been accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Physics. The 60-page paper is entitled Multiple Critical Behavior of Probabilistic Limit Theorems in the Neighborhood of a Tricritical Point. After receiving his Ph.D. in 2005, Marius spent a year as a postdoctoral associate at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. He is currently enrolled in the Master of Advanced Studies Program in Finance in Zurich, Switzerland. Peter received his Ph.D. in 2004. After holding temporary positions at Gettysburg University and Union College, he now has a tenure-track position at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon.
Professor Rob Kusner was recently invited to serve on a National Science Foundation panel reviewing proposals in geometric analysis.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler attended the winter meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society in Toronto. He gave a talk at the meeting entitled m-Cluster Categories and m-Replicated Algebras.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ana-Maria Castravet gave a talk on November 7, 2006 in the Harvard-MIT Algebraic Geometry Seminar. The title of her talk was Hilbertís 14th problem and Cox Rings, based on joint work with Jenia Tevelev.
Professor Paul Gunnells gave a talk on November 15, 2006 at the Algebra and Number Theory Seminar at the University of Maryland. The title of his talk was Quadratic Weyl Multiple Dirichlet Series.
Professor Farshid Hajir gave a colloquium on November 3, 2006 at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. The title of his talk was Galois Groups and Dynamics on the Projective Line.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis was informed on November 2, 2006 that his paper Deciding the Nature of the Coarse Equation through Microscopic Simulations: The Baby-Bathwater Scheme was chosen as the next SIGEST selection from Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, a journal published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Cowritten with Ju Li, C.W. Gear, and I. G. Kevrekidis, the paper will appear in issue 49-2 of SIAM Review in June 2007. The purpose of the SIGEST propgram is to make the more than 10,000 readers of SIAM Review aware of exceptional papers published in SIAMís specialized journals. The paper by Panos and his collaborators was chosen by the editors of SIAM Review for the importance of its contributions and topic, its clear writing style, and its broad interest for the SIAM community.
Professor Jenia Tevelev gave a talk on October 31, 2006 at the Commutative Algebra and Algebraic Geometry Seminar at the University of California at Berkeley. The title of his talk was Modular, Log Canonical, And Tropical Compactifications. He gave another talk on November 3 at the Algebraic Geometry Seminar at Stanford University. The title of his second talk was Geometry of Chow Quotients of Grassmannians.
Professor George Avrunin has been named a Distinguished Scientist by the Association for Computing Machinery for having made a significant impact in the fields of computing, computer science and information technology. One of 49 people given this honor, George is the Associate Head of the Department as well as an adjunct professor in the Department of Computer Science. He is currently investigating finite-state verification techniques as applied to high-performance scientific computing and to complex medical processes. In order to view the list of 2006 ACM Distinguished Members and for information on selection criteria, visit http://distinguished.acm.org.
Professor Tom Braden was co-organizer of a special session at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Storrs, CT during the weekend of October 28ñ29, 2006. The title of the special session was "Combinatorial Techniques in Equivariant Topology".
Professor Eduardo Cattani has been appointed to the American Mathematical Societyís Committee on Human Rights of Mathematicians. The appointment, made by AMS President James Arthur, is for a three-year term effective February 1, 2007. The Committee on Human Rights assists the AMS by investigating alleged violations of human rights of foreign mathematicians, whether they may have occurred in the US or abroad, and by recommending appropriate action whenever actions seems warranted.
Eli Cooper spoke on part of his dissertation work at the Storrs AMS special session on Geometric Analysis in October 2006; the special session was co-organized by his advisor, Professor Rob Kusner. Because a scheduled speaker canceled, fellow graduate student, Shabnam Beheshti, gave an impromptu lecture on her dissertation work, which is being directed by Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams. When another speakerís flight was delayed, Rob also came off the bench to pinch-speak about his work with session co-organizer Jesse Ratzkin on Nondegeneracy of CMC Surfaces and Regularity of the CMC Classifying Map, a talk that he expanded upon at the Valley Geometry Seminar six days later.
Professor Richard S. Ellis was the main speaker at the International Seminar on Extreme Events in Complex Dynamics, held during the week October 23ñ27, 2006 at the Max Planck Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. At the seminar Richard delivered an eight-hour lecture series entitled The Theory of Large Deviations and Applications to Statistical Mechanics.
Professor Franz Pedit participated in the biennial Geometrie Tagung at the Mathematisches Forschungsintitut Oberwolfach in October, 2006.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler attended the International Conference on Representations of Algebras and Related Topics held at Northeastern University on October 6ñ7, 2006. He gave a talk at the conference entitled Geometric Realizations of Cluster Categories.
Visiting Assistant Professor Hao Wu gave a talk on October 27, 2006 in the Topology and Geometry Seminar at University of Wisconsin-Madison. His talk was entitled Transversal Knots and Khovanov-Rozansky Cohomology. He also gave a 20-minute condensed version of the same talk in the special session on Floer Methods in Low-dimensional Topology during the Fall 2006 Western Section Meeting of the American Mathematical Society held in Salt Lake City, UT. In June 2006 he gave a talk entitled Legendrian Knots and the Spanning Tree Model of the Khovanov Homology at the Park City Mathematical Institute.
Professor Farshid Hajir and graduate student Mairead Greene attended the Quebec-Maine Number Theory Conference, which took place in Quebec City on September 30 and October 1. Maireadís contributed talk was entitled On the Index of Cyclotomic Units, and Farshid gave a plenary address on Algebraic Properties of Some Hypergeometric Polynomials. John Cullinan, who obtained his Ph.D. at UMass Amherst under the direction of Professor Siman Wong and is now a visiting assistant professor at Bard College, also gave a lecture at the conference. His lecture was entitled Divisibility Properties of the Torsion Subgroup of an Abelian Variety.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis reports on the following activities.
In April 2006 he presented a colloquium jointly sponsored by the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Chemical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute. His talk was entitled Discrete Solitary Waves and Applications.
In July 2006 Panos organized jointly with Mason Porter a mini-symposium entitled Analysis, Computation, and Experiments in Bose-Einstein Condensates at the annual SIAM meeting in Boston, MA.
In September 2006, Panos attended the SIAM meeting on Nonlinear Waves in Seattle, WA along with Professor Nate Whitaker and Visiting Assistant Professors Adri·n EspÌnola-Rocha and Hadi Susanto. At the same meeting, Professor Nate Whitaker and he co-organized a session on Analysis, Modeling, and Simulation of Biological Systems. In addition, Panos gave an invited talk at the mini-symposium organized by J. Yang and T. Lakoba and entitled Advances in Analytical and Numerical Techniques for Nonlinear Waves. The talk was entitled Solitary Waves in the Presence of Spatial or Temporal Periodicity: Some Case Examples.
In September 2006 Panos also attended the conference SoliQuantum: Solitons and Nonlinear Phenomena in Degenerate Quantum Gases, which took place in Cuenca, Spain. He also presented an invited talk entitled Solitons Under Temporal or Spatial Periodicities at that meeting.
Finally, Panosís research work with a CalTech group consisting of Martin Centurion, Mason A. Porter, and Demitri Psaltis has attracted worldwide attention by science and technology news sources. The topic of the research is the first experimental realization of the theoretical concept of nonlinearity management. In particular, their paper published in Physical Review Letters, Volume 97, No. 3: 033903 has been featured in Physical Review Focus <http://focus.aps.org/story/v18/st1>, a CalTech press release <http://pr.caltech.edu/media/Press_Releases/PR12881.html>, and numerous other websites including PhysOrg.com, Science Daily, PhysLink.com, Science News Daily, Whatís Next in Science & Technology, Pasadena Independent, Softpedia, and Technology Horizons. Detailed links can be found at the URL <http://www.its.caltech.edu/~mason/research/#optics>. Two more articles on this topic are about to appear in Photonics Spectra in October 2006 and in CalTech's research quarterly, Engineering and Science.
Professor Rob Kusner recently participated in the biennial Geometrie Tagung at the Mathematisches Forschungsintitut Oberwolfach, using the opportunity to continue a long-standing collaboration with colleagues from Berlin and Darmstadt, Germany.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a sixty-minute talk at the International Meeting on Representation Theory of Algebras, which took place in Sherbrooke, Canada on September 22ñ24. The title of his talk was Geometric Realizations of Cluster Categories. He also participated in a Meeting on Homology and Deformations in Algebra, Geometry and Representations at the CIRM in Luminy, France on September 25ñ29, where he gave a thirty-minute talk entitled Les Categories AmassÈes et les Algebres RepliquÈes.
Professor Erin Conlon organized an invited session entitled Statistical Methods in Genetics and Public Health for the International Chinese Statistical Association 2006 Applied Statistics Symposium, which was held during the period June 14ñ17, 2006 in Storrs, Connecticut.
During June 2006 Professor Murray Eisenberg attended the 8th International Mathematica Symposium in Avignon, France, where he gave a talk entitled Visualizing Complex Functions with the Cardano3 Application. This talk was based upon joint work with David J. M. Park, Jr.
On June 27, 2006 Professor Richard S. Ellis gave a talk in the Seminar in Probability and Stochastic Processes at the TechnionñIsrael Institute of Technology in Haifa, Israel. The title of his talk was Double-Chai (18?2) Limit Theorems for Sums of Dependent Random Variables Occurring in Statistical Mechanics.
Professor Paul Gunnells participated in the workshop Multiple Dirichlet Series that took place during the period July 8ñ16, 2006 at Stanford University. He also gave a short course of four lectures on the cohomology of arithmetic groups at the MSRI Summer Graduate Workshop on Computing with Modular Forms, which took place during the period July 31 ñ August 11 2006 at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California.
Professors Paul Gunnells, Hans Johnston, Markos Katsoulakis, Panos Kevrekidis, and Bruce Turkington were awarded a $84,000 NSF SCREMS grant (Scientific Computing Research Environments for the Mathematical Sciences). The grant will be used to purchase a Beowulf computer cluster to support computationally intensive research in the mathematical sciences. The cluster will initially be used for research in several areas, including the following.
computational investigation of cohomology of arithmetic groups and Kazhdan-Lusztig cells in Coxeter groups;
investigation of heat transfer and turbulent shear flows in viscous incompressible fluids via direct numerical simulations;
development of multiscale computational methods for hydrid deterministic/stochastic systems;
simulation of nonlinear multi-dimensional phenomena in optics and condensed matter physics;
development and testing of novel closure strategies using equilibrium and nonequlibrium statistical mechanics.
These projects will also have a significant impact on the education and training of both students and young researchers in the mathematical sciences at UMass Amherst. As such, the equipment in this grant is part of a continuing effort of the department to build its computational program and to bring the frontier of research in mathematics to all levels of university education.
Along with three co-authors, Professor Panos Kevrekidis published an article in the July 21, 2006 issue of Physical Review Letters, which is the premier journal of the American Physical Society. Entitled Nonlinearity Management in Optics: Experiment, Theory, and Simulation, this article was chosen to be a focus article by the journal. It is featured on the website Physical Review Focus <http://focus.aps.org/story/v18/st1>.
The new design for the International Mathematical Union, unveiled during August 2006 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, is based on the example of Professor Rob Kusner of an optimal configuration of the Borromean rings. This optimal configuration appeared in a paper published in Inventiones Mathematicae several years ago and co-written with Jason Cantarella and John Sullivan; it was elaborated upon in a recent paper that Rob wrote with Jason Cantarella, Joe Fu, John Sullivan, and Nancy Wrinkle. This recent paper will soon appear in the journal Geometry and Topology.
Professor Franz Pedit co-organized the London Mathematical Society Durham Symposium on Methods of Integrable Systems in Geometry, which was held during the period August 11ñ21, 2006. He also gave a lecture at the symposium in honor of T. J. Willmore (1919ñ2005) on the history and developments of the so-called Willmore Conjecture. Professor Willmore was the long time chairman of the Mathematical Institute at the University of Durham.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk at the CBMS Conference on Cluster Algebras at the North Carolina State University, which was held during the period June 13ñ16, 2006 in Raleigh. The title of his talk was Introduction to Cluster Categories. He also spent the period June 25 ñ July 1, 2006 at the University of Sherbrooke, where he continued his joint research with I. Assem and T. Bruestle.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was one of hundreds of speakers at the 11th Marcel Grossmann Meeting on General Relativity held at the Free University in Berlin, Germany during the period July 23ñ29, 2006. Floyd presented a 10-minute abstract entitled A Non-linear Schrˆdinger-type Formulation of FLRW Scalar Field Cosmology.
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