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On May 24, 2008 Professor Erin Conlon gave an invited talk at the International Indian Statistical Association Conference held in Storrs, Connecticut during the period May 22–25, 2008. The talk was entitled Bayesian Meta-Analysis Models for Microarray Studies.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a busy spring during his sabbatical visit to the University of Heidelberg. In the first week of April, Panos co-organized and gave a talk at the Conference on Nonlinear Phenomena in Quantum Degenerate Gases that took place in Toledo, Spain. Panos also gave a pair of invited lectures in the workshop on Mathematical Topics in Electromagnetic Fields and Wave Propagation, organized at the University of Karlsruhe by Prof. G. Schneider and held on April 7–8, 2008. Finally, during the period May 6–13 Panos spent a dense week in the UK, where he gave four invited lectures at Imperial College, University of Oxford, University of Reading, and University of Nottingham. His paper, Three Is a Crowd: Solitary Waves in Photorefractive Media with Three Potential Wells, has been named one of three winners of the 2008 SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize. Co-authored with Todd Kapitula and Zhigang Chen, the paper appeared in the SIAM Journal on Applied Dynamical Systems in 2006.
Professor Michael Lavine delivered a talk entitled Subjective Likelihood For An Assessment of Climate Change in the Ocean at the International Conference on Interdisciplinary Mathematical & Statistical Techniques held in Memphis TN on May 16, 2008.
Professor Arunas Rudvalis has been named a General Education Fellow. This year-long program based in the Center for Teaching is intended to focus on General Education courses. As part of his fellowship, Arunas will be working on the Gen Ed course, Math 100. More information about the General Education Fellows program is available at http://www.umass.edu/loop/talkingpoints/articles/74960.php.
On May 15, 2008 Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was presented a Certificate of Appreciation by Dr. John R. Mullin, Dean of the Graduate School. The certificate states the following: In recognition of your outstanding record of teaching, advising, and mentoring of students at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The certificate was awarded in recognition of the facts that his two students, Jennie D’Ambroise and Shabnam Beheshti, were named winners of the Distinguished Teaching Award in 2007 and 2008, respectively, and that Floyd was nominated for that award in 2004. He was also invited to be one of ten banquet speakers to pay tribute to Professor Bertram Kostant of MIT at a conference given in honor of his 80th birthday. Entitled Lie Theory and Geometry: The Mathematical Legacy of Bertram Kostant, the conference was held at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada during the period May 19–24, 2008. The conference was sponsored by the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences and was co-sponsored by the Clay Mathematical Institute and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Twenty three international speakers gave talks.
On May 1, 2008 Professor Robin Young spoke at a KAM Theory Seminar at Boston University. In his talk, entitled Shock-Free Periodic Solutions for the Euler Equations, Robin spoke about progress on this important topic with his long-time collaborator, Blake Temple. He also attended a conference on Free Boundary Problems in Stockholm, Sweden during the period June 9–13, where he spoke on the same topic. Young has been invited to participate in the IMA summer program on Nonlinear Conservation Laws and Applications, which will take place during the period July 13–31, 2009.
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 Zongzhu 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, Zongzhu 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.
Professor Tom Braden attended the International Conference on Toric Topology, held at Osaka City University in Osaka, Japan during the period May 29 ñ June 3.†On May 29 he gave an invited talk at the conference entitled Equivariant Intersection Cohomology of Toric Varieties and Applications.
Professor Erin Conlon gave an invited talk on May 15, 2006 at the International Workshop on Applied Probability at the University of Connecticut. The title of the talk was Identifying DNA Motifs Using Gene Expression and Sequence Information.
Professors Richard S. Ellis and Bruce Turkington received a National Science Foundation grant from the program addressing cross-cutting topics in analysis, modeling, and computation of stochastic systems in the Division of Mathematical Sciences. The grant is entitled Equilibrium and Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics Applied to Reduced Descriptions of Complex Systems, and the amount of the grant is $320,000.
This year Professor Luc Rey-Bellet joined the editorial board of International Journal of Applied Mathematical Analysis and Applications. He was also an invited speaker in March 2006 at the International Conference on Applications of Mathematics in Santiago de Chile and in April at the AMS sectional meeting in Miami. In addition, Lucís National Science Foundation grant from the probability section of the Division of Mathematical Sciences was renewed for the period 2006ñ2009. The grant is entitled Mathematical and Computational Problems in Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics, and the amount is $102,000.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk at the Workshop on Cluster Algebras and Cluster-Tilted Algebras at the University of Bielefeld, Germany, May 25ñ27, 2006. The title of his talk was From Tilted Algebras to Cluster-Tilted Algebras.
Visiting Assistant Professor Alexandros Sopasakis received a National Science Foundation grant from the program addressing cross-cutting topics in analysis, modeling, and computation of stochastic systems in the Division of Mathematical Sciences. The grant is entitled Stochastic Modeling and Simulation for Traffic Flow, and the amount of the grant is $92,923.
Professor Robin Young spoke at the conference General Relativity and Shock Wave Theory on the topic Interactions of Strong Shocks. Held at Stanford University during the period April 29ñMay 1, 2006, the conference was in honor of Joel Smoller on his 70th birthday. While in California, Robin also visited the University of California Davis to continue his ongoing research with Blake Temple.
Professor Wei-Min Chen was recently awarded a three-year research grant of $105,540 from the National Science Foundation.
Professor Paul Gunnells authored the cover story in the May 2006 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society. Entitled Cells in Coxeter Groups, the article highlights a series of beautiful graphics, which Paul created.
During the period April 5ñ8, 2006 Professor Emeritus Jim Humphreys visited the University of South Alabama in Mobile, where he gave a colloquium lecture as well as a seminar talk. Several UMass Ph.D. students now teach there, including Jimís former student Cornelius Pillen.
Professor Emeritus Aroldo Kaplan, currently a Researcher for Argentinaís Science Agency, has joined the Mathematics Division of the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy as Senior Associate.
In the March 2006 News Briefs the following item appeared concerning some research carried out by Professor Markos Katsoulakis and collaborators.
Professor Katsoulakis had an article accepted for publication in the top journal Nature Materials. Entitled Mechanistic Principles of Nanoparticle Evolution to Zeolite Crystals, the article was written in collaboration with chemical and materials scientists from the University of Minnesota and the industry.
In April the National Science Foundation recognized the importance of this research by featuring it on the main NSF web page in an article entitled Crystal Sieves, Born Anew: Hard Data Resolves Decades-old Mystery of How Certain Zeolites Form. The research was supported by a number of NSF grants and by the NSF National Nanotechnology Infrastructure Network.
Professor William Meeks was recently been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the fall semester of 2006. Professor Meeks was one of 187 out of approximately 3,000 applicants to receive this yearís prestigious award from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.
Professor Gregory Pearlstein, formerly at the Institute for Advanced Study and currently a visiting professor at Duke University, has accepted a tenure-track position at Michigan State University. Gregory was the last student at UMass whose Ph.D. dissertation Professor Emeritus Aroldo Kaplan directed.
A number of current and former UMass people participated in the Spring Northeastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society held April 22ñ23, 2006 at the University of New Hampshire in Durham. Several special sessions were organized by faculty members at UMass, including a special session on algebraic groups organized by Professors Eric Sommers and George McNinch. At that session, the following faculty members gave talks:
Professor Tom Braden, Semi-infinite Moment Graphs
Professor Emeritus Jim Humphreys,Tilting Modules for Semisimple Groups in Characteristic p
Professor Ivan Mirkovic, A t-Structure on Coherent Sheaves on Cotangent Bundle of a Flag Variety
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler, Cluster-tilted Algebras
In addition, Professor Paul Gunnells and Farshid Hajir organized a special session on arithmetic geometry and modular forms, and Professors Weimin Chen, Mike Sullivan, and Hao Wu organized a special session on symplectic and contact geometry. A detailed program listing is available online.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was one of eleven invited plenary speakers at the Fifth International Conference on Mathematical Methods in Physics, held during the period April 24-28, 2006 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The title of his one-hour lecture was Remarks on the BTZ Instanton with Conical Singularity.
On March 20, 2006, Professor Tom Braden gave a talk entitled Hypertoric Varieties and Gale Duality of Hyperplane Arrangements at the Combinatorics Seminar at University of California Berkeley. On March 30 he gave a talk entitled Rigidity of Polytopes and Toric Varieties at a colloquium at the University of Connecticut.
The 78-page paper of Professor Weimin Chen entitled Smooth S-cobordisms of Elliptic 3-Manifolds has been accepted by the Journal of Differential Geometry (2006). In addition, his 46-page paper entitled On a Notion of Maps between Orbifolds, I. Function Spaces has been accepted for publication in Communications in Contemporary Mathematics.
Professor Erin Conlon gave a talk for the training program Statistical Analysis of Genetic and Gene Expression Data in Pavia, Italy on March 22, 2006. The title of the talk was Integrating DNA Motif Discovery and Genome-Wide Expression Analysis.
Professor Rob Kusner delivered the Brandeis-Harvard-MIT-Northeastern Joint Mathematics Colloquium on Thursday, March 23, 2006. Although not quite as well-attended as the annual rally on Amherstís Town Common, this joint event drew a couple of dozen enthusiastic Brandeis locals who were enthralled by a triunduloidal hookah demonstration and by other recent advances in the Moduli Space Theory for Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces.
Visiting Assistant Professor Evgeny Materov gave a talk entitled Toric Duality for Quotient Rings in the Algebra-Geometry-Combinatorics Seminar at San Francisco State University on March 24, 2005.
Professor Andrea Nahmod gave an invited address entitled Bilinear Operators in Analysis and PDEís at the 1015th Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Miami, Florida, April 1ñ2, 2006.
Professor Eric Sommers traveled to the University of Sydney in Australia during spring break, where he visited with Professor Gus Lehrer and Dr. Anthony Henderson. While there, he gave a lecture entitled Equivalence Classes of B-Stable Ideals. He also delivered a colloquium on the same topic at Tufts University in early February.
Professor Nate Whitaker has received the Universityís Distinguished Community Education Award. Nateís award is in recognition of his work in establishing the AIMS program, an enrichment program for African American students in the Amherst schools that enhances their classroom performance and improves their self-confidence.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis reports on the following activities.
He gave two talks at a workshop on Stochastic and Statistical Parameterization of Unresolved Features in the Atmosphere and Upper Ocean held during the period February 27 ñ March 3, 2006 at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) at Boulder, CO. Furthermore, two Ph.D. students in our department, Sasanka Are and Visweswaran Nageswaran, also participated in the workshop. More information on the workshopís agenda and the slides of the speakersí talks are available at http://www.image.ucar.edu/Workshops/TOY2006_III/.
During the last week of January, 2006 Professor Katsoulakis and Visiting Assistant Professor Alexandros Sopasakis gave three talks in a short course on Multiscale Modeling and Simulations held at the Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Delaware. Their talks and other teaching material can be found at http://www.ums.udel.edu/multiscale/.
Professor Katsoulakis had an article accepted for publication in the top journal Nature Materials. Entitled Mechanistic Principles of Nanoparticle Evolution to Zeolite Crystals, the article was written in collaboration with chemical and materials scientists from the University of Minnesota and the industry.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler spent the period January 14ñ19, 2006 at the University of Sherbrooke, where he continued his joint research with I. Assem and T. Bruestle and gave a talk at the local algebra seminar. He was also an invited speaker at the IVth Colloquium on Module Theory and Related Topics at the UniversitÈ du QuÈbec ‡ MontrÈal on January 20, 2006. The title of his talk was Algebres inclinÈes amassÈes (cluster-tilted algebras).
On January 27, 2006 Professor Tom Braden gave a colloquium entitled Convex Polytopes and Intersection Cohomology at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universit‰t in Freiburg, Germany. On February 1 he gave a talk in a meeting on Convexity and Algebraic Geometry at the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany. The title of his talk was "Intersection Cohomology of Hypertoric Varieties and Gale Duality.
Professor Franz Pedit visited the University of Melbourne during the period January 12ñ25, 2006 in order to continue his collaboration with Emma Carrberry. During the period January 26ñ29 he attended the international conference on Geometry, Integrable Systems and Visualization at Osaka University in Osaka, Japan and gave an invited lecture. On February 1 he gave a seminar presentation at Tsukuna University.
The book Probabilistic Metric Spaces by Professor Emeritus Bert Schweizer and A. Sklar, first published in 1983, has just been reissued by Dover Publications. The reissue contains supplementary comments and additions to the bibliography which, together, serve to bring the subject up-to-date. A book entitled Associative Functions: t-norms, Copulas by C. Alsina, M. J. Frank, and Bert Schweizer has been accepted for publication by World Scientific Press and will appear later this year.
In 1985 Professor Richard S. Ellis published with Springer-Verlag a book entitled Entropy, Large Deviations, and Statistical Mechanics. Appearing in the Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften series, the book went out of print about six years ago. Recently Springer-Verlag reprinted the book in the series Classics in Mathematics. The following explanation of the series appears on the back cover of the reprinted book.
Springer-Verlag began publishing books in higher mathematics in 1920, when the series Grundlehren der mathematischen Wissenschaften, initially conceived as a series of advanced textbooks, was founded by Richard Courant. A few years later a new series Ergebnisse der Mathematik und ihrer Grenzgebiete, survey reports of recent mathematical research, was added.
Of over 400 books published in these series, many have become recognized classics and remain standard references for their subject. Springer is reissuing a selected few of these highly successful books in a new, inexpensive softcover edition to make them easily accessible to younger generations of students and researchers.
A new book by Professor Emeritus Jim Humphreys has just been published by Cambridge University Press. The book is entitled Modular Representations of Finite Groups of Lie Type (London Mathematical Society Lecture Note Series, 326).
Professor William Meeks published a paper entitled The Uniqueness of the Helicoid and the Asymptotic Geometry of Properly Embedded Minimal Surfaces of Finite Topology in Annals of Mathematics, volume 161, pages 727ñ758. It is a joint paper with Harold Rosenberg. His paper entitled The Topological Classification of Minimal Surfaces in R3 and co-authored by Charles Frohman, has recently accepted for publication in Annals of Mathematics. In addition, his paper entitled Minimal Surfaces with the Area Growth of Two Plane; the Case of Infinite Symmetry and co-authored with Michael Wolf has recently been accepted for publication in Journal of the American Mathematical Society.
Professor Ivan Mirkovic reports on the following activities during his sabbatical leave in the spring semester of 2005.
He visited University of Chicago (February 15ñMay 1), Hebrew University of Jerusalem (May 10ñJune 10), and UniversitÈ de Cergy-Pontoise in Paris (June 10ñJuly 10).
He gave invited talks at University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (seminar talk); the Geometric Representation Theory Conference in Tucson, Arizona; the JournÈes Solstice d'ÈtÈ workshop at Paris VII; Hebrew University of Jerusalem (seminar talk); and the AMS Summer Institute in Algebraic Geometry in Seattle, Washington.
He gave a three-hour mini-course at the Geometric Langlands Correspondence Conference at Hebrew University of Jerusalem and attended a conference at the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany (by invitation).
During this period two of his papers were accepted for publication in Annals of Mathematics. They are Localization of Modules for a Semisimple Lie Algebra in Prime Characteristic, co-authored by Roman Bezrukavnikov and Dmitriy Rumynin, and Geometric Langlands Duality and Representations of Algebraic Groups over Commutative Rings, co-authored by Kari Vilonen.
In addition, his paper entitled Modules Over the Small Quantum Group and Semi-Infinite Flag Manifold, co-authored by S. Arkhipov, R. Bezrukavnikov, A. Braverman, and D. Gaitsgory, was accepted for publication in Transformation Groups in a volume in honor of Vladimir Drinfeld.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ivan Soprunov gave a thirty-minute talk in the Commutative Algebra session at the Union College Mathematics Conference on December 3, 2005. The talk was entitled Global Residues in the Torus.
The paper General Design Bayesian Generalized Linear Mixed Models by Professors Yihua Zhao (FDA), John Staudenmayer (UMass Amherst), Brent Coull (Harvard University), and Matt Wand (University of New South Wales) has been accepted for publication in Statistical Science.
Professor Erin Conlon is a member of a group of co-PIs on a grant from the U.S. Department of Energy entitled Genome-Based Models to Optimize In Situ Bioremediation of Uranium and Harvesting Electrical Energy from Waste Organic Matter. The PI is Derek Lovley. The total award is $21.8 million over the period 2005ñ2010. Additional information can be found at http://www.geobacter.org. Erin also gave a seminar at the Center for Imaging Science at Johns Hopkins University on November 15, 2005. The title of the talk was Integrating DNA Motif Discovery and Genome-Wide Expression Analysis.
On November 11, 2005 Professor Rob Kusner lectured in the Applied Mathematics Seminar at the University of Pennsylvania. The title of his talk was The Moduli Spaces of Soap Bubbles. Rob recently became chair of the Amherst Select Board.
Professor Eric Sommers is co-organizing a conference in honor of his advisor, George Lusztig, to be held at MIT during the period May 30 ñ June 3, 2006. Information is available at http://www-math.mit.edu/conferences/lusztig60.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams reports on the following activities.
He was an invited speaker for at one of several international conferences held this year celebrating 100 years of Einsteinís theory of relativity (1905ñ2005). This one was held at Alexandru Ioan Cuza University in Iasi, Romania during the period October 27ñ29, 2005 and was hosted by the Department of Solid State and Theoretical Physics. The title of his talk was Conical Defect Zeta Function for the BTZ Black Hole.
He was an invited speaker at the annual International Conference on Zeta Functions held in Okinawa, Japan during the period October 30 ñ November 3, 2005. He gave a 60 minute talk entitled Zeta Function Deformation and Black Hole Entropy. The conference was held at the Laguna Garden Hotel, where he also give a piano recital.
On November 7 he gave an invited 60-minute lecture in the Algebra and Representation Theory Seminar at Kyushu University in Fukuoka ,Japan. The title of his talk was Zeta Integrals on Higher Rank Symmetric Spaces. While he was there, he also gave a piano recital in the home of Professor Masato and Chieko Wakajama.
Floydís travel has resulted in joint projects with Professors Marina and Ciprian Dariescu, who are physicists in Romania, and with Professor Nobushige Kurokawa, who is one of the leading number theorists in Japan.
Professors Weimin Chen and Mike Sullivan and Visiting Assistant Professor Hao Wu are organizing a special session on Symplectic and Contact Topology to be held in April 2006 at the Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Durham, NH.
Professor Murray Eisenberg presented the paper Embedding Mathematica in an Online Web-Based Learning System at the Wolfram Technology Conference 2005, held in Champaign, Illinois during the period October 13ñ15. The paper was co-authored with Stephen Battisti of the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology in the UMass Computer Science Department.
Professor Farshid Hajir was an invited lecturer at the 10th meeting of the conference Arithmetic, Geometry, and Coding Theory, which took place at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques, Luminy, France during the period September 26ñ30, 2005. His lecture was entitled Finitely Ramified Iterated Extensions.
On October 3, 2005, Professor Rob Kusner gave a talk entitled Nondegeneracy of Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces at Tianís geometry seminar at MIT. He gave a similar talk at the University of Connecticut on October 25 and a talk entitled Nondegeneracy and Moduli Space Theory of Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society held at Bard College on October 8ñ9. The latter talk was given in a special session hosted by former UMass/GANG colleague David Hoffman.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ralf Schiffler gave a talk at the International Conference on Representations of Algebras and Related Topics held at Northeastern University in Boston on October 7ñ8. The title of his talk was Cluster Categories and Duplicated Algebras. He also gave an invited talk at the Brandeis-Harvard-MIT-Northeastern Joint Mathematics Colloquium held at Brandeis University in Boston on October 27. The title of this talk was Quiver Representations: Basic Facts and some recent Developments.
Professor Eric Sommers gave a twenty-minute talk in the session on Algebraic and Geometric Combinatorics at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society held at Bard College on October 9, 2005. The talk was entitled A partial order on equivalence classes of B-stable ideals. In April, he will organize a special session of the AMS meeting at UNH with George McNinch of TuftsUniversity.
Visiting Assistant Professor Ivan Soprunov gave a twenty-minute talk in the session on Algebraic and Geometric Combinatorics at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society held at Bard College on October 9, 2005. The talk was entitled Global residues for sparse polynomial systems.
Professor Paul Gunnells and Professor Farshid Hajir are organizing a special session on Arithmetic Geometry and Modular Forms to be held in April 2006 at the Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Durham, NH.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis is a co-PI on a recently awarded grant from the Multiscale Mathematics Program at the Department of Energy for the period 2005ñ2008 ($1,120,747). The grant is entitled Multiscale Modeling of Spatially Distributed Biological Systems. The other co-PIs are D. G. Vlachos, Department of Chemical Engineering at the University of Delaware, J. Edwards of the Cancer Research and Treatment Center and Departments of Chemical and Nuclear Engineering at the University of New Mexico, and J. Faeder of the Theoretical Biology and Biophysics Group at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a busy and productive summer. He spent two weeks at the beginning of the summer in two conferences, the SIAM Dynamical Systems Conference in Snowbird, UT and the conference on Nonlinear Waves, Integrable Systems and Applications at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs. At these conferences he delivered invited talks on his recent work on discrete solitons and applications. Between the two conferences, he spent a week visiting the Center for Nonlinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. During the period June 26ñJuly 9, Professor Kevrekidis and Professor Nate Whitaker participated as research program members in the summer school for Mathematical Biology at the Park City Math Institute in Utah. During the period July 25ñ27 Professor Kevrekidis also visited the Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Summer School in Woods Hole. Finally, he spent a week as a guest of the engineering mathematics group of the University of Bristol and delivered a talk at the conference on Successes and Failures of Continuous Models for Discrete Systems, held at the University of Bristol during the period September 5ñ8.
During June 2005 Professor Rob Kusner visited Palo Alto, lecturing at AIM on Quadratic Area Growth of Middle Ends of Minimal Surfaces and at Stanford University on Nondegeneracy of Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces. During the summer Rob was also a principal speaker at the Gordon Research Conference on Polymers and Liquid Crystals, where he talked about the mathematics of Packing Rope in a Box.
Professor Franz Pedit was a co-organizer of the 10-day workshop on Integrable Systems and Quantum Field Theory held in Peyresq, France, in June 2005. He also gave a plenary lecture entitled Surface Geometry and Algebraically Completely Integrable Systems at the Methods of Integrable Systems, Geometry, Applied Mathematics Workshop on Geometry and Integrability, held in Harnack Haus, Berlin, Germany during June 2005. Finally, during August 2005 he gave a lecture series at Beijing University in China entitled Quaternionic Holomorphic Geometry: an Overview and Darboux Transforms and Spectral Curves of 2-Tori as well as a lecture at Chengdu University in China entitled Surface Geometry and Integrable Systems.
Professor Weimin Chen gave a talk at a Workshop on Topology held in Banff, Canada during the period August 27ñSeptember 1, 2005. The title of his talk was Pseudoholomorphic Curves and Finite Group Actions in Dimension 4.
Professor Erin Conlon gave an invited talk at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Minneapolis, Minnesota on August 7, 2005. The title of her talk was Identifying Chromosome Clusters and Over-represented Functions of Differentially Expressed Genes In Complementary cDNA Microarray Experiments.
Professor Richard S. Ellis gave an invited talk at the Florence Meeting on Long-Range Interactions and Ensemble Inequivalence held at the University of Florence in Florence, Italy on June 28 and June 29, 2005. The title of his talk was Global Optimization, the Gaussian Ensemble, and Universal Ensemble Equivalence.
Professor Emeritus David Foulis gave an invited plenary lecture, Rickart Comparability Groups and Quantum Logics, at a Workshop on Quantum Information, Computing, and Logic held at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. At the end of the 7-day workshop and conference, Professor Foulis also participated as a member of a panel to summarize the events of the meeting.
During the past summer Professor Paul Gunnells participated in three workshops. The first was Variations on Mahlerís Measure held in Luminy, France during the period 30 May 30ñJune 3, 2005. The next was Multiple Dirichlet Series held in Bretton Woods, NH during the period July 11ñ14 July,2005. The third was Explicit Methods in Number Theory held in Oberwolfach, Germany during the period July 17ñ23, 2005.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was an invited speaker at the 16th Latin-America Colloquium on Algebra held in Colonia, Uruguay during the period August 1ñ9. The title of his lecture was Conical Defect Zeta Function for the BTZ Black Hole. Other speakers at the Uruguay meeting were the former department members Aroldo Kaplan, Frank Sottile, and Sarah Witherspoon. Professor Williams also spent the period July 25ñ30 as a visitor at the Universidad Nacional de Cordoba in Cordoba, Argentina, where he continued to do research on an ongoing project with Professor Roberto Miatello on problems in non-commutative harmonic analysis on higher rank semisimple Lie groups.
Professor John Buonaccorsi gave an invited talk at the meeting of the Nordic Region of the Biometrics Society held in Oslo, Norway during the period June 2ñ4, 2005. The title of his talk, which was based on joint work with Professor John Staudenmayer, was Measurement Error in Time Series.
Professor Paul Gunnells attended the CIRM workshop, Variations on Mahler Measure, held in Luminy, France from May 29 to June 4, 2005.
On June 3, 2005 Professor Rob Kusner gave a talk at Stanford University entitled Nondegeneracy and Moduli Space Theory for CMC Surfaces. During the following week he participated in the American Institute of Mathematics workshop on moduli spaces of minimal surfaces in Palo Alto, CA.
Professor Franz Pedit gave an invited 45-minute plenary talk at the conference Methods of Integrable Systems, Geometry and Applied Mathematics held in Berlin during the period June 3ñ6, 2005. The title of his talk was Conformal Maps of a 2-Torus to the 4-Sphere. Professor Pedit also co-organized the annual conference on Integrable Systems and Quantum Field Theory held in Peyresq, France during the period June 7ñ17. He gave a lecture at this conference.
In May 2005 Professors Jonathan Mattingly and Luc Rey-Bellet organized a mini-symposium on Extended Stochastic Dynamical Systems during the SIAM Conference on Applications of Dynamical Systems at Snowbird.
On April 13, 2005 Professor Tom Braden gave a talk at the Boston University geometry seminar entitled Koszul Duality for Perverse Sheaves on Dual Toric Varieties. He also participated in a special session on Algebraic Geometry and Combinatorics at the AMS conference held April 16ñ17 at the University of California in Santa Barbara. The title of his talk was Stanleyís Convolution and Koszul Duality for Dual Affine Toric Varieties.
On April 18, 2005 Professor John Buonaccorsi presented a seminar talk entitled Measurement Error in Time Series in the Department of Statistics at Colorado State University. His talk was based on joint work with Professor John Staudenmayer.
Professor Eduardo Cattani has been awarded a Fulbright Scholar grant to do research and lecture at the University of Buenos Aires, Argentina during the 2005ñ2006 academic year. The Fulbright Program, Americaís flagship international educational exchange activity, is sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Educational and Cultural Affairs. Over its 58 years of existence, thousands of U.S. faculty and professionals have studied, taught or done research abroad, and thousands of their counterparts from other countries have engaged in similar activities in the U.S. Recipients of Fulbright Scholar awards are selected on the basis of academic or professional achievement and because they demonstrated extraordinary leadership potential in their fields. Further details on Professor Cattaniís award are available under Latest News on the departmental webpage.
Visiting Assistant Professor Michael Bush attended the Arizona Winter School in Albuquerque during the period March 12ñ16, 2005. This yearís topic was Fundamental Groups in Arithmetic. On April 5, he gave a talk in the algebra seminar at the University of Connecticut entitled Galois Groups of p-Class Towers.
Professor Erin Conlon gave a talk on March 28, 2005 in the Department of Mathematics at Smith College and a talk on March 30 at the UConn-UMass Joint Statistics Colloquium at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. The title of both talks was Integrating Regulatory Motif Discovery and Genome-Wide Expression Analysis.
Professor Farshid Hajir reports on the following activities.
He is a co-PI, along with three other UMass Amherst faculty members, of a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation.
On March 3, 2005, Professor Hajir gave a talk on his joint work with Professors Christian Maire (UniversitÈ de Toulouse) and Wayne Aitken (CSU San Marcos) on Finitely Ramified Iterated Monodromy Representations in the Quebec-Vermont Number Theory Seminar at McGill University in Montreal.
On March 24, 2005, Professor Hajir's UMass Amherst Undergraduate Colloquium entitled Determinants and Discriminants: adñbc, b^2ñ4ac and All That brought together high school students, pre-service and in-service middle-school and high-school teachers, undergraduate mathematics majors, graduate students, and Mathematics Education faculty for wonderful food and conversation before and after the talk.
On April 7, 2005, Professor Hajir gave a talk at a colloquium at UCSD entitled Iteration of Polynomials and Tree Representations of the Absolute Galois Group.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis reports on the following activities.
Along with five co-authors, he published in the 25 March 2005 issue of Physical Review Letters a paper entitled Necklacelike Solitons in Optically Induced Photonic Lattices. During the week April 6ñ13, 2005 this paper was posted on the Technology Research News website, which highlighted it in an article entitled System forms light necklace.
He delivered invited lectures on the paper mentioned above and on related activities at the conference in Almagro, Spain on Solitons in Bose-Einstein Condensates (February 2005) and at the 5th IMACS Conference on Nonlinear Waves in Athens, GA (April 2005).
At the 5th IMACS Conference on Nonlinear Waves in Athens, GA (April 2005), Professor Kevrekidis, together with Professors Boris Malomed and Ricardo Carretero, organized a mini-symposium on Nonlinear Waves in Bose-Einstein Condensates.
Professor Kevrekidis gave an invited talk on Discrete Solitary Waves in Optics and Bose-Einstein Condensates: Some Old Aspects, Some Recent Findings and Some Future Perspectives at the Applied, Industrial and Financial Mathematics Seminar of McMaster University in Canada (March 2005).
Professor Rob Kusner has been elected to the Amherst Select Board. He was one of the leaders of the campaign to keep town meeting in Amherst, an initiative which prevailed.
On March 25, 2005, Visiting Assistant Professor Matvei Libine, Professor Ivan Mirkovic, and So Okada, a graduate student in our department, gave talks at the Geometric Representation Theory Conference in Tucson, AZ.
Professor Franz Pedit give an invited talk entitled Geometry of Surfaces and Integrable Systems at the Lubbock Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, April 8ñ10, 2005.
Professor Robin Young reports on the following activities.
On January 7, 2005, he gave a double talk at the special session on Nonlinear PDE and Applications at the AMS/SIAM/MAA Joint Meetings in Atlanta, GA on his recent work. His talk was is Hentitled Existence of Solutions for Isentropic Gas Dynamics for Large BV Data.
He spoke on the same subject at PDE seminars at Iowa State University on March 7 and at North Carolina State University on March 30.
He has been invited to contribute to a special volume of Methods and Applications of Analysis in honor of Joel Smoller's 65th birthday.
He has also been invited to give four lectures at the Workshop on Scientific Computation, Numerical Analysis and Applications at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, India, July 4ñ15 and to give an invited talk at the International Conference on Partial Differential Equations and their Applications, July 18ñ21, also in Bangalore.
Three papers by Professor Richard S. Ellis and co-workers have recently been accepted for publication. The first paper was co-written with Peter Otto, who received his Ph.D. from our department in 2004. The second and third papers were co-written with Marius Costeniuc, who will receive his Ph.D. from our department in 2005. The three papers are the following.
1. Analysis of Phase Transitions in the Mean-Field Blume-Emery-Griffiths Model by Richard S. Ellis, Peter Otto, and Hugo Touchette. Accepted for publication in Annals of Applied Probability (2005).
2. Complete Analysis of Phase Transitions and Ensemble Equivalence for the Curie-Weiss-Potts Model by Marius Costeniuc, Richard S. Ellis, and Hugo Touchette. Accepted for publication in Journal of Mathematical Physics (2005).
3. The Generalized Canonical Ensemble and Its Universal Equivalence with the Microcanonical Ensemble by Marius Costeniuc, Richard S. Ellis, Hugo Touchette, and Bruce Turkington. Accepted for publication in Journal of Statistical Physics (2005).
Three undergraduate mathematics majors, Heather Harrington, Marc Maier, and Santha Naidoo presented a poster in January at the 2005 Joint Mathematics Meeting. Heather Harrington is a junior applied math major, Marc Maier is a double-degree senior in mathematics and computer science, Santha Naidoo is a junior math major with a pre-medicine concentration. Their poster, entitled Mathematical Modeling of Tumor-Induced Angiogenesis in the Cornea, was based on a Research Experience for Undergraduates during the summer of 2004 and on honors research that Professors Panos Kevrekidis and Nathaniel Whitaker supervised. The undergraduate team was recognized and rewarded for presenting one of the best posters, an honor reserved for 30 of the 123 posters that were presented.
Professor Rob Kusner gave a talk on February 1, 2005 at the University of Connecticut. The talk was entitled Conformal Structures and Necksizes of CMC Surfaces.
Professor Eric Sommers visited the University of Oregon during the week of February 28, 2005. During that time, he gave a colloquium talk entitled The Generalized Catalan Numbers and an algebra seminar talk entitled Functions on Covers of Nilpotent Orbits.
Professor George Avrunin has been appointed to a 3-year term on the editorial board of the ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology.
On January 27, 2005 Professor Tom Braden gave a talk at the Institute for Advanced Studies in Princeton in the seminar Algebraic Groups and Convexity. His talk was entitled Equivariant Cohomology of Quot Schemes.
On January 19, 2005 Professor Hans Johnston gave a talk entitled Numerical Schemes for the Navier-Stokes Equations Based on Explicit Treatment of the Pressure in the CAMP/Nonlinear PDE seminar at the Univeristy of Chicago.
During January 2005 Professor Eric Sommers gave a talk in the special session Representations of Lie Algebras held at the national meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Atlanta. He also gave one of six introductory talks at a workshop entitled Braid Groups, Clusters, and Free Probability held at the American Institute of Mathematics in Palo Alto, CA. During November 2004 Eric gave a talk in the Geometry Seminar at Boston University.
Professor Emeritus Floyd Williams was one of 25 invited plenary speakers at the International Conference on Relativity held at Amravati University in Maharashtra State in India during the period January 11ñ14, 2005. His lecture was entitled Remarks on Einstein Field Equations and Non-Abelian Gauge Fields in Higher Dimensions. This conference was held to commemorate the 100th year of Einsteinís discovery (1905-2005) and is the first of many planned celebrations to be held worldwide during this centennial year.
Professor Murray Eisenberg has been elected Vice Chair for Programs of WEB SIGMAA, the Mathematical Association of Americaís Special Interest Group on Mathematics Instruction Using the Web.
Professor Franz Pedit gave a plenary talk entitled Surface Geometry and Algebraic-Geometric Completely Integrable Systems at a DFG-sponsored weeklong conference Advances in Surface Geometry, held January 24ñ30, 2005 in Kloster Benediktbeuern, Bavaria, Germany. DFG is the German analogue of the National Science Foundation.
Professor Paul Gunnells attended the workshop Explicit methods in Number Theory held at Banff International Research Station, Banff, Alberta, Canada, during the period November 13ñ18, 2004.
Professor Rob Kusner lectured in Cliff Taubesí geometry and topology seminar at Harvard University in November.
Professor Floyd Williams reports on the following activities.
At a conference on Zeta Functions and Limit Laws held November 1ñ4, 2004 in Okinawa, Japan at the Okinawa Convention Center, he gave a talk entitled Patterson-Selberg Zeta Function for the BTZ Black Hole. While he was in Japan, he gave a mini piano recital at the home of Prof. Masato Wakayama in Fukuoka. The program consisted of jazz and ballads.
He gave the same talk at a special session on spectral geometry held October 16ñ17, 2004 in Albuquerque, New Mexico at the 1000th meeting of the American Mathematical Society. Other department speakers at that meeting were Professor Arpad Benyi and Professor Andrea Nahmod.
On November 18, 2004, he gave a colloquium lecture at Washington University in St Louis, Missouri. The title of the lecture was Solitons, Harmonic Maps, and Gravity.
He has been invited to present a paper for the centenary celebration of Einsteinís discovery of relativity (1905ñ2005), to be held January 11ñ14, 2005 at Amraviti University in Amraviti, India. The paper is entitled Remarks on Einstein Field Equations and Non-Abelian Gauge Fields in Higher Dimensions.
He was nominated for a Distinguished Teacher Award for 2004ñ2005.
Professor Robin Young reports on the following activities.
He gave an invited talk at the International Conference on Hyperbolic Equations, HYP2004, held September 13ñ16, 2004 in Osaka, Japan. The talk was entitled Isentropic Gas Dynamics with Arbitrary BV Data.
He spoke on the same topic in the UMass Applied Analysis seminar on October 5, 2004 and in the Penn State PDE seminar on October 8.
He attended and spoke at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society held November 6ñ7, 2004 in Pittsburgh, PA and spoke at the SIAM conference on partial differential equations held December 6ñ8 in Houston, TX.
He gave the TWIGS seminar What Is a Shock Wave? at UMass on October 13, 2004 and a graduate seminar on blowup of solutions of hyperbolic PDEs at Penn State on October 8.
A joint paper with former math major Walter Szeliga, now a graduate student in geology at Central Washington University, has been accepted for publication in the Archives for Rational Mechanics and Analysis, a top journal in the field. This paper grew out of an NSF-funded REU project entitled Blowup with Small BV Data in Hyperbolic Conservation Laws.
Professor Tom Braden spoke at the conference Geometry, Combinatorics and Algebraic Groups, which took place October 7ñ9 at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton on the occasion of the sixtieth birthday of Robert MacPherson. Tomís talk was entitled Equivariant Localization and Intersection Cohomology. He also spoke in the special session on Modern Schubert calculus at the AMS Fall Central-section meeting held in Evanston, IL October 23ñ24. His talk was entitled Equivariant Cohomology of Quot Schemes.
An article by Professors John Buonaccorsi and John Staudenmayer entitled Measurement Error in Linear Autoregressive Models was accepted for publication by the Journal of the American Statistical Association in the Theory and Methods Section.
On October 18 Professor Erin Conlon gave a talk in the Department of Microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also gave a talk on October 22 in the Department of Biostatistics, Section on Statistical Genetics, at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. The topics of both talks were Bayesian methods for the analysis of microarray data, and integrating sequence and expression information for the identification of sequence motifs.
During the month of November Professor Markos Katsoulakis will visit the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He will participate in the 2004-2005 IMA Thematic Year on Mathematics of Materials and Macromolecules: Multiple Scales, Disorder, and Singularities.
Dover Publications plans to reissue the book Probabilistic Metric Spaces by Professor Emeritus Berthold Schweizer and Professor Abe Sklar. The reissue will contain several addenda, including additions to the bibliography, comments concerning the current status of various open problems listed in the book, remarks concerning further developments of the subject during the last 20+ years, and an errata list. The reissue is scheduled to appear in the latter half of 2005.
On October 27 Professor Eric Sommers gave a talk in a joint meeting of the Combinatorics and Lie Groups Seminars at MIT. The title of the talk was Exponents for Ideals in the Poset of Positive Roots.
Professor Bruce Turkington organized a minisymposium on Coherent Structures for the Oceans and Atmosphere at the SIAM Conference on Nonlinear Waves and Coherent Structures, which took place in Orlando, FL during the period October 2ñ5. Bruce gave a talk at the minisymposium entitled "Coherent Structures in Geophysical Fluid Dynamics: Deterministic and Statistical Models. Professors Panos Kevrekidis and Nate Whitaker also attended the meeting. Panos organized a session on Nonlinear Waves and Pattern Formation in Biological Systems together with Mason Porter of Georgia Tech. University. In this session, Nate gave an invited talk entitled Modeling Tumor Angiogenesis with Inhibitors. Panos also gave an invited talk in the session organized by J. Yang, T. Lakoba, and Z. Chen on Nonlinear Wave Phenomena in Photonic Lattices. The title of his talk was Discrete Solitons Revisited: Teaching an Old Dog Some New Tricks.
Professor Paul Gunnells received a grant from the National Science Foundation for the period 2004ñ2007. The title of his proposal was Number Theory, Algebraic Geometry, and Representation Theory. On September 10, 2004, Paul gave a colloquium talk at the University of Arizona entitled Configuration Varieties and the Space of Tetrahedra.
In July 2004, Professor Farshid Hajir was an invited visitor at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland. In August, he participated in the celebration of the 65th birthday of his advisor Harold Stark at a conference hosted by the Digital Technology Center at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In September, Farshid gave a lecture in the algebra seminar at Boston University on his joint work with Wayne Aitken and Christian Maire. The title of his talk was Iterated Monodromy Groups Attached to Dynamical Systems on the Projective Line.
Professor Ivan Mirkovic reports on the following activities.
During the past year he visited Universita di Roma La Sapienza for two weeks and gave a seminar talk entitled Localization of Modular Representation Theories as well as a 10-hour mini-course.
He gave a talk at the representation theory seminar at University of Zagreb in Zagreb, Croatia entitled Modular Representation Theories; a talk at the International Conference on Quantum Groups in Haifa, Israel entitled Localization for Quantum Groups at Roots of Unity; and a talk entitled Critical Quantization at the 2004 AMS-SIAM-IMS Joint Summer Research Conference on Representations of Algebraic Groups, Quantum Groups, and Lie Algebras held in Snowbird, Utah.
He attended a Geometric Langlands Program Conference at University of Chicago; a Croatian mathematical congress in Split, Croatia; and a conference on the geometry and topology of string theory at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL.
Along with Lori Clarke (CMPSCI), Lee Osterweil (CMPSCI), and Elizabeth Henneman (Nursing), Professor George Avrunin has been awarded a 4-year ITR grant from NSF, which is being funded at the level $1,448,242. This is a collaborative grant with Philip Henneman, Chair of the Department of Emergency Medicine both at Tufts University Medical School and at Baystate Medical Center. The project will apply, to medical processes, techniques developed to represent and analyze computer systems, with the goal of reducing medical errors and cost. George was also the General Chair of the ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, held in Boston in July, 2004. In addition to its three days of sessions, two one-day workshops were held in association with the symposium, and there were several joint activities with the co-located 16th International Conference on Computer-Aided Verification.
In June 2004, Professor Tom Braden spoke at the SIAM conference on discrete mathematics in Nashville, TN. The title of his talk was Cohomology of Intersections of Opposite Bruhat Cells. He also participated in this summerís Park City Math Institute, where Professor R. MacPherson gave graduate lectures on equivariant localization techniques and mentioned some of his joint work with Tom. At the institute, Tom helped run a discussion section associated with the lectures and demonstrated computer algebra code to calculate with these techniques.
Professor Erin Conlon gave a talk at the Functional Genomics 2004 Reunion Conference at IPAM at UCLA on June 3, 2004. She also gave a talk at the Statistics in Functional Genomics Workshop in Ascona, Switzerland on June 30. The topic of both talks was motif-finding using DNA sequence and expression information.
At MathFest 2004, the national meeting of the Mathematical Association of America in August, Professor Murray Eisenberg delivered a 20-minute paper entitled The OWL System with webMathematica in Applied Calculus. The paper, selected for the session Uses of the WWW that Enrich and Promote Learning, was co-authored with David M. Hart of the Center for Computer-Based Instructional Technology at UMass and Alan R. Peterfreund and Kenneth A. Rath of Peterfreund Associates. The talk discussed adaptation of the OWL on-line, web-based learning system to the introductory calculus course for management and the life and social sciences, and it evaluated the results of its use there.
Professor Richard S. Ellis gave a talk on June 23, 2004 in Berlin at the Berlin Stochastics Colloquium, a joint colloquium with the Technishe Universit‰t, Humboldt University, and the Weierstrass Institute. The title of his talk was Generalized Canonical Ensembles, Universal Ensemble Equivalence, and Global Optimization.
On the occasion of his 65th birthday, Professor Emeritus Jim Humphreys was honored at the Joint Summer Research Conference on Representations of Algebraic Groups, Quantum Groups, and Lie Algebras for his contributions to the fields of Lie algebras, algebraic groups, and representation theory. At the conference, which took place at the Snowbird Ski Resort in Utah during the period July 11ñ16, 2004, Jim gave a talk entitled Representations of Reduced Enveloping Algebras and Cells in the Affine Weyl Group, Professor Eric Sommers chaired an afternoon session, and Professor Ivan Mirkovic gave a featured talk entitled Beilinson-Bernstein Localization for Quantum Groups at Roots of Unity. During the lively dinner in Jimís honor, speeches were made by a number of people including Professor Mirkovic and Jimís former UMass doctoral students, Cornelius Pillen and Zongzhu Lin. Zongzhu was a principal organizer of the conference.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis was awarded an NSF grant that is being funded at the level $314,000 by the Applied Mathematics, Statistics, Computational, and MSPA/Material Programs of DMS. The title of his project is Multiscale Stochastic Modeling, Analysis and Computation.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis had a busy spring and summer, visiting the University of Chicago in February, Georgia Tech and University of Kansas in March, and Boston University in April. As part of these visits, he lectured on his recent work on Bose-Einstein condensates and a dynamic renormalization approach to self-similar problems. Panos was also invited to spend two weeks during the summer at the Los Alamos National Laboratory. He combined this visit with a visit to San Francisco State University and the AIMS June meeting in Pomona, CA, where he delivered an invited talk in the session on dynamical systems; this session was organized by Yuri Latushkin and Carmen Chicone.
During the academic year 2003ñ2004, Professor Rob Kusner was a member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley and a Visiting Research Professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He also had month-long invitations to the Federal University of Ceara in Fortaleza, Brazil in February, to the University of Utah in Salt Lake City in March, to the Technical University in Darmstadt, Germany in May, and to the Center for Theoretical Physics in Aspen, Colorado in June, where he delivered a series of lectures and collaborated with colleagues. Perhaps the highlight of Robís year was a major breakthrough concerning the nondegeneracy, in the sense of Morse theory, of constant mean curvature surfaces. Done in collaboration with Nick Korevaar and Jesse Ratzkin of the University of Utah, this work has led to a series of papers, the first of which was submitted to Inventiones Mathematicae during the summer. Eli Cooper, Robís new Ph.D. student, spent the year as a graduate student at UC Berkeley. Eli is working on a dissertation about the geometry of a constant-mean-curvature-surface moduli space as a Lagrangian submanifold.
Professor Matvei Libine participated in the American Institute of Mathematics workshop on Moment Maps and Surjectivity in Various Geometries, held in the AIM Research Conference Center in Palo Alto, CA during the period August 9ñ13, 2004. The workshop was organized by T. Holm, E. Lerman, and S. Tolman.
Professor Franz Pedit recently completed a three-month visit at TU-Berlin in Germany, where he was supported by a $10,000 Alexander von Humboldt Senior Research Grant. While in Germany, he gave a three-hour lecture series on Conformal Tori in the 4-Sphere at the annual workshop on "Integrable Systems and Quantum Field Theory in Peyresque, France. He also gave two colloquia on the same topic at the University of Cologne and at the University of Freiburg in Germany.
Professor Tom Weston was awarded a joint NSF grant with Robert Pollack of Boston University for 2004ñ2006. The title of their project, which is being funded at the level $93,715, is p-adic Variation of Supersingular Iwasawa Invariants. Tom also gave a talk entitled Iwasawa Invariants of Galois Deformations at the special session on arithmetic geometry at the meeting of the Canadian Number Theory Association in Toronto.
In July 2004 the department had a large contingent at the Park City Mathematics Institute in Utah. Focusing on geometric combinatorics, this three-week program had different subprograms for undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and high school teachers. Professor Nate Whitaker was involved in recruitment for the program. Heather Harrington, a rising junior, was in the undergraduate program. Professors Tom Braden, Amit Khetan, Eric Sommers, Evgenia Soprunova, and Ivan Soprounov participated in the faculty program, as did former Professors Frank Sottile and Sarah Witherspoon. In the graduate program, Patrick Boland, Chris McDaniel, Marianna Pereira, and Jim Ruffo represented the department. Professors Sommers, Soprunova, and Soprounov gave research talks, and Professor Braden led a session on a software program that he developed.
At the biennial meeting in July 2004 of the International Quantum Structures Association (IQSA) in Denver, CO, Dr. Alex Wilce was awarded the IQSA prize for his mathematical research, his service to the IQSA, and his work as coeditor of the book Operational Quantum Logic, published by Kluwer in 2000. Dr. Wilce received his Ph.D. in our department in 1998. After receiving the prize, Dr. Wilce gave a plenary lecture entitled Symmetry and Topology in Quantum Logic.
Professor Floyd Williams had a busy summer and reports on the following activities.
He was an invited speaker at the Sixth Alexander Friedmann International Seminar on Gravitation and Cosmology, which was held in CargËse, France during the period June 28ñJuly 3, 2004. The title of his 30-minute lecture was An Alternate Formulation of Einstein-Friedmann Equations with Scalar Field and Perfect Fluid Matter Source.
As part of a week-long visit to the Department of Mathematics, he gave two one-hour, invited lectures at the City University in Cordoba, Argentina. The two lectures, given on August 4 and 5, were entitled Patterson-Selberg Zeta Function for a Hyperbolic Cylinder-Application to the BTZ black hole and Solitons and 2-Dimensional Gravity.
He served as a member of the Scientific Committee for the Fourth International Winter Conference on Mathematical Methods in Physics held at the Physics Institute CBPF (Centro Brasileiro de Pesquisas Fisicas) in Rio de Janerio, Brazil during the period August 9ñ13. As one of the plenary speakers, he gave a one-hour lecture entitled Further Thoughts on First Generation Solitons and Jackiw-Teitelboim Gravity.
He gave mini piano-recitals at the Institut díEtudes Scientifiques de CargËse in CargËse, France on July 1 and at a private home in Cordoba, Argentina on August 7. The programs consisted of American hymns, modern jazz, and original compositions, one of which was a variation on a theme of S. Rachmaninoff.
The paper of Professor Robin Young entitled Solutions to Isentropic Gas Dynamics with Arbitrarily Large BV Data contains a major result that he presented at James Glimmís 70th birthday conference held in Stony Brook, New York during the period August 3ñ5. Robin will also present the result at HYP2004 held in Osaka, Japan during the period September 13ñ16 and at several AMS and SIAM conferences during the next few months.
Professor Jin Feng gave an invited, 40-minute talk on May 15, 2004 in the Fifth Biennial International Conference on Statistics, Probability, and Related Areas, held in Athens, Georgia during the period May 14ñ16.† His talk was entitled Some Gradient Flow Equations, Their Microscopic Stochastic Origins, and Large Deviations.† He was also invited to give a 45-minute talk in the stochastic session of the Fourth World Congress of Nonlinear Analysts, to be held in Orlando, Florida during the period June 30ñJuly 7.
Professor Farshid Hajir attended the seminar on Analogies Between Function Fields and Number Fields, held on Texel Island in the Netherlands in April, 2004.† His lecture was entitled Tame Fundamental Groups of Number Fields.
Professor Rob Kusner gave a Hauptstudiumkolloquium talk on May 12, 2004 in Darmstadt and lectured about New Results on CMC surfaces on May 10 in Berlin and on May 20 in Madrid.
On April 2, 2004 Professor Erin Conlon gave the department seminar in the Department of Biostatistics and Epidemiology at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.† The title of her talk was Integrating DNA Motif Discovery and Genome-Wide Expression Analysis,
Professor Brian Emond gave a talk at the 82nd Annual Meeting of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM), which took place in Philadelphia during the period April 21ñ24, 2004.† NCTMís annual meeting is the largest gathering of mathematics educators in the world.† Brianís talk, entitled How Fish, Scallops, Whales, and Turtles Make Learning and Teaching Mathematics Fun, included a presentation on the use of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) data sites, readings, and other outside sources in the teaching of mathematics for grades 5ñ13.† He also presented curriculum units that he developed from those resources. With 100,000 members and 250 affiliates in the U.S. and Canada, NCTM is the worldís largest organization dedicated to improving mathematics education for all students from pre-K through grade 12.
During the period April 18ñ24, 2004, Professor Matvei Libine attended a workshop on Cohomological Aspects of Hamiltonian Group Actions and Toric Varieties at the Mathematics Research Institute in Oberwolfach, Germany.† He gave a talk there entitled Integrals of Equivariant Forms in the Setting of Non-Compact Group Actions.† The workshop was organized by Victor Guillemin, Volker Puppe, and Michele Vergne.
Nikos Tzirakis has received a Liftoff Fellowship from the Clay Mathematics Institute.† The Liftoff program, which provides a summer stipend and funds for travel expenses, is an extremely competitive program directed toward new Ph.D.ís in mathematics.† Nikos is the second UMass graduate to receive this honor; Anvar Mavlyutov was a 2000 Clay Fellow.† Writing his Ph.D. dissertation under the direction of Professor Andrea Nahmod, Nikos defended his dissertation on April 23, 2004 and will receive his Ph.D. in August 2004.† He will spend the next academic year at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, followed by a two-year postdoctoral position at the University of Toronto.
Professor Floyd Williams has been active in communicating with undergraduates, professors, and deans on issues concerning teaching, learning, careers in science, surviving in graduate school, and related topics.† On April 10, 2004 he spoke at Smith College and participated on a panel with five other professors at an annual event sponsored by the Union of Under-represented Science Students.† His talk, which had no formal title, addressed issues on overcoming obstacles towards our goals.† The main point was to be available for questions from those in attendance.† The three-hour program was followed by dinner with all the students.† On April 17, 2004 Floyd spoke at Florida A & M University in Tallahassee on the occasion of a three-day Alliance Annual Conference, the purpose of which was to provide support for minority students and encouragement for them to pursue graduate study towards a Ph.D. in mathematics.† The title of his talk was Some Thoughts on Teaching, Learning, and Mentoring.† Floyd also hosted the visit to our campus of the noted Russian theoretical physicist, Vladimir Mostepanenko, who was our colloquium speaker on April 15, 2004.† Invited to spend two months at Harvard University, Professor Mostepanenko is a member of the Friedmann Laboratory for Theoretical Physics in St. Petersburg, Russia.
On March 12, 2004 Professor Tom Braden spoke on Toric Koszul Duality in the special session Algebraic Geometry and Topology at the Spring AMS Southeastern Section Meeting in Tallahassee, FL.††
Professor Emeritus Ed Connors reports on the following activities.
Professors Eyal Markman and Marcos Jardim organized a Special Session on Algebraic Geometry, Integrable Systems, and Gauge Theory at an American Mathematical Society meeting in New York, April 12-13.
Professor Frank Sottile gave an invited talk at a workshop on Commutative Algebra and Geometry at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada on April 1 and gave a colloquium lecture at the University of Saskatchewan on April 4. Also participating in the Banff workshop were Professor Eduardo Cattani and Professor David Cox of Amherst College.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis recently attended the 3rd IMACS conference on Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Wave Phenomena: Computation and Theory. He gave an invited talk in the session on Stability and Bifurcation of Solitary Wave Solutions of NLPDEs organized by D. Pelinovsky, D. Kaup and R. Choudhury. In the same conference, he also organized a session with Kim Rasmussen (of the Los Alamos National Laboratory) on "Nonlinear Waves in Bose-Einstein Condensates.
On May 1-2, Professor Franz Pedit gave two talks at Texas Tech, Lubbock: a colloquium and a geometry seminar.
In May Professor Rob Kusner will be lecturing at a workshop on Statistical Mechanics of Polymer Model sponsored by the Pacific Institute at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada. In June and July, he will be a visiting professor in Tours, France, and will participate in a conference on knotted polymers in Switzerland.
A book on state lotteries by emeritus Professor Don Catlin is being published this month: The Lottery Book, subtitled The Truth behind the Numbers (Bonus Books).
In early April Professor Tom Braden participated in an Oberwolfach conference on Topological and Geometric Combinatorics.
Professors Rob Kusner, Bill Meeks, and Franz Pedit participated in the Special Session on Applications of Teichmuller Theory to Dynamics and Geometry at the AMS meeting in Bloomington, Indiana, April 4-6. Kusner spoke on Moduli spaces of constant mean curvature surfaces properly embedded in R3 and Meeks on Recent results on classical minimal surface theory, while Pedit's topic was Spectral curves of 2-tori in the 4-sphere.
Professor Paul Gunnells has been invited to speak at a workshop, The many aspects of Mahler's measure, to be held the last week of April at the Banff International Research Station in Alberta, Canada. He will also be attending the Oberwohlfach conferences "Explicit methods in number theory" and "Locally symmetric spaces," in July and September respectively.
On February 24 Professor Farshid Hajir spoke in the Brown University Algebra Seminar on Asymptotically good towers of global fields.
During his current leave at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, Professor Eric Sommers visited the University of Virginia and gave a talk February 21 in their Algebra Seminar, "On the semisimple conjugacy class attached to a nilpotent orbit in a simple Lie algebra.
Professor Luc Rey-Bellet, who joined the Department last fall, gave an invited lecture in February at the Workshop equations cinetiques, hypoellipticite et Laplacien de Witten held in Rennes. His talk was on Lyapunov functions and spectral theory for mechanical systems coupled to heat reservoirs. In March 2002 he will give an invited lecture during the four week program Statistical Mechanics and Probability Theory at CIRM in Luminy, Marseilles. He will speak during the last week of the program in the Workshop Nonequilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Open Systems on The Gallavotti-Cohen Fluctuation Theorem in Open Systems.
In January Professor Rob Kusner delivered a colloquium lecture at the University of Utah on his recent work in geometric knot theory. He will also be lecturing at the Universities of Illinois and Indiana this spring, as well as at the South East Geometry Conference in Charleston, South Carolina, 28-30 March. He has invitations to be a visiting professor this summer at the Universite Francois Rabelais in Tours, France, and to participate in the special geometry year at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley for 2003-04.
A new book by Professor Floyd Williams, Topics in Quantum Mechanics has been published by Birkhauser in their series Progress in Mathematical Physics. He has been invited to speak at the September 2003 Oberwolfach conference on Locally Symmetric Spaces.
In February Professor Paola Sebastiani was guest speaker at the Workshop Graphical Models at the Samsi Institute, Research Triangle Park, NC, where she gave the talk Decoding gene expression control using generalized gamma Networks. She also gave a seminar at the Institute of Statistics and Decision Sciences at Duke University.
The paper Statistical Challenges in Functional Genomics by Paola Sebastiani and coauthors E Gussoni, I Kohane and M Ramoni has been accepted as a discussion paper in Statistical Science. It will appear in the next issue of Statistical Science, dedicated to Bioinformatics.
She was awarded a subcontract from the Children's Hospital to research on statistical methods for outbreak detection. The subcontract is part of a grant sponsored by the Sloan Foundation on bioterrorism detection.
At the end of February, Professor Franz Pedit participated in the SFB288 Geometry and Quantum Physics Retrospective,held at Monastery St. Marienthal, Ostritz, Germany, where he gave a one hour invited talk entitled Spectral Curves of 2-Tori in the 4-Sphere.
Greg Warrington, who has been here for two years as a visiting assistant professor following his Ph.D. at Harvard, has been awarded an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship for the coming years.
Professor Eyal Markman is to give a colloquium lecture on February 27 at Pennsylvania State University.
Professor Farshid Hajir gave a talk in the Boston University Algebra Seminar in November. The title of his talk was Shallow Ramification and the Fontaine-Mazur Conjecture.
The second and final volume of the Karl Menger Selecta, edited by Professor Berthold Schweizer, A. Sklar, and K. Sigmund, has just been published by Springer Verlag. The volume contains a long commentary on Probabilistic Geometry written by Professor Schweizer.
Professor Rob Kusner continues to be a member of the editorial board of the journal Experimental Mathematics. Other members of the board are Marcel Berger (IHES), David Mumford (Fields Medalist, Brown), Peter Sarnak (Princeton) and J.-P. Serre (Fields Medalist, College de France). The journal is now entering its second decade of publication. Professor Kusner will be lecturing at the University of Utah next month.
On Tuesday, December 17, Professor Chris Raphael did a radio interview on his Music Plus One research with a program on the BBC World Service called Go Digital. It is available at http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/1478157.stm. The program, Go Digital, is a weekly technology show hosted by Tracey Logan.
In November, Professor Paola Sebastiani was invited to give a seminar talk entitled Statistical Challenges in the Post-Genome Era in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Boston University and a seminar talk entitled Badge: Bayesian Analysis of Differential Gene Expression at the Cancer Genomics Group, Whitehead Institute.
In November Professor Frank Sottile gave a talk entitled A Gromov-Witten Invariant in the Real World at Michigan State University and a talk entitled Combinatorial Hopf Algebras at the University of Michigan. Along with colleagues at Cornell University, York University, and the University of British Columbia, Professor Sottile won a competition to organize a workshop in August 2004 on Combinatorial Hopf Algebras at the Banff International Research Station. This center, located in the Canadian Rockies, is devoted to research in the mathematical sciences.
During visits in September to Aarhus University and the University of Warwick, Professor Jim Humphreys gave seminar talks on recent work connecting Kazhdan-Lusztig cells for affine Weyl groups with representations of Lie algebras in prime characteristic.
During November, Professor Rob Kusner published a seminal paper On the Minimal Ropelength of Knots and Links in the journal Inventiones Mathematicae. This paper proves the existence and regularity of curves which minimize length with a constraint on thickness, as well as establishing sharp bounds on this quantity for small knots and links. Professor Kusner also spoke on a related rope-packing problem at the October AMS Meeting in Madison, Wisconsin. Although stuffing boxes with knotted rope is a very nice way to visualize this problem, said Kusner, biologists have gotten quite interested in our ropelength results because of their possible application to understanding the global structure of DNA and protein arrangements in living cells.
Professor Franz Pedit spent the summer as senior scientist at the SFB288, Special Research Institute on Geometry and Quantum Physics, at Technical University Berlin. In October Pedit gave an invited talk at the Geometry Meeting in Oberwolfach, Germany, on Spectral Curves of Tori in the 4-Sphere. In November Pedit gave a geometry seminar at MIT on the same topic.
Along with Professor C. Woodward of Rutgers University, Professor Frank Sottile co-organized a
AMS special session on The Modern Schubert Calculus at the Boston AMS regional AMS meeting October 5-6, 2002.
Professor John Tsimikas presented a talk in The International Conference on Current Advances and Trends in Nonparametric Statistics in Crete, Greece, July 15 - July 19. He also chaired a session on bioinformatics at the same conference.
In September, Professor Tom Braden gave a talk in the Topology/Geometry seminar at Binghamton University, entitled Torsion in intersection cohomology of Schubert varieties. In October, he spoke at the American Mathematical Society conference in Boston in a special session co-organized by Professor Frank Sottile. The title of Tomís talk was Polynomials Associated to Bott-Samelson Resolutions and Torsion in Intersection Cohomology.
The Department of Mathematics and Statistics has started a new program to help students with the professional actuary exams. Professor Thurlow Cook is leading this effort.
On August 1, 2002, Professor Jin Feng gave an invited talk on large deviations at The Fourth International Symposium on Probability and its Applications.
In September, Professor Rob Kusner delivered a plenary lecture on Constant Mean Curvature Surfaces at the International Geometry Congress in France honoring Professor Harold Rosenberg on his 60th birthday. Professor Kusner also visited the University of Freiburg in Germany and participated in the week-long Geometrie Tagung at the Mathematische Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach.
Professor Bill Meeks delivered a plenary lecture on The Global Theory of Minimal Surfaces at the International Geometry Congress in France honoring Professor Harold Rosenberg on his 60th birthday.
Professor Ivan Mirkovic gave an invited talk at the Workshop on Algebraic Transformation Groups at the Centre de Recherches MathÈmatiques, University of Montreal in June 2002 (Modules for Lie Algebras in Prime Characteristic and Coherent Sheaves on Springer Fibers) and an invited talk at the Workshop on Representations of Lie Algebras in Honour of Anthony Joseph at the Weizmann Institute of Science, Rehovot, Israel in July 2002 (Localization of Lie Algebra Modules in Prime Characteristic').
An article on the music research of Professor Chris Raphael has been posted on the ABC news website. On Friday, October 4, the article was their lead Science and Technology piece. It can be viewed at the URL
http://abcnews.go.com/sections/scitech/CuttingEdge/cuttingedge021004.html.
On September 21-22, 2002, Professor Frank Sottile gave a series of two lectures on the topology of real algebraic curves at the MSRIñHoward University Workshop on Geometry at Howard University in Washington, D.C.
Professor Emeritus Bert Schweizer delivered a plenary address entitled Probabilistic Measurement at the Ninth International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems, which was held in Annecy, France, July 1ñ5, 2002. He also gave a lecture on Karl Menger and His Work at the University of Paris Dauphine. Professor Schweizer is currently editing a Karl Menger Selecta, which is being published by Springer-Verlag. Volume 1 has appeared, and Volume 2 is in press.
In June, Professor Tom Braden gave a talk in the conference on Computational Lie Theory at the Centre de Recherches Mathematiques at the University of Montreal. The title of his talk was Torus Actions and Singularities of Schubert Varieties. Visiting Assistant Professor Greg Warrington also spoke at the same conference.
In June, Professor Richard S. Ellis was awarded a 3-year, $227,000 National Science Foundation grant entitled Research in Large Deviations and Applications to Statistical Mechanical Models of Turbulence. He also gave two talks at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and two talks at University of Paris VI.
At a convocation held on September 3, 2002, Professor Ellis received the 2001-2002 Outstanding Faculty Award for Research in the College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics. The citation that accompanied the award was the following.
Richard S. Ellis is an acknowledged world leader in the study of large deviations, an important field having numerous applications including the analysis and design of high-speed communication networks. His most recent innovative work on statistical theories of turbulence is an outgrowth of his previous research on statistical mechanics and large deviations.
† † † †Professor Ellis has produced a considerable body of published work, including two major research monographs on probability theory and applications, a well known theorem carrying the name G‰rtner-Ellis Theorem, and many frequently cited papers on probability theory and statistical mechanics. In 1999 he was elected to be a Fellow in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in honor of his outstanding research contributions.
† † † † As important and impressive as Richard's scientific accomplishments are, his intellectual activities extend beyond science. UMass Magazine recently highlighted his numerous contributions to the field of Judaic studies. As the article points out, Ellis performs a remarkable and rare intellectual juggling act, straddling what the British writer C. P. Snow called the ëtwo culturesí of science and the humanities. We are indeed fortunate that Professor Ellis has chosen to spend his highly creative research career here at UMass.
During the summer of 2002, Professor Farshid Hajir was awarded a 3-year National Science Foundation grant from the program in algebra, number theory, and combinatorics. He was invited to give a special session talk at the meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Boston in October 2002. The special session, entitled Number Theory and Arithmetic Geometry, is organized by Professor Siman Wong.
Professor H. K. Hsieh presented a paper entitled A Proof for a Continuity Property of Positive Definite Matrices Used in Linear Models at the ICSA 2002 Applied Statistics Symposium held in Philadelphia on June 6-8, 2002.
Professor Markos Katsoulakis accepted an invitation to join the editorial board of the SIAM Journal in Mathematical Analysis. He was recently awarded a $420,000 grant from the National Science Foundation for the development of mesoscopic Monte Carlo simulation methods. Co-PIís on the grant are David Horntrop, Department of Mathematics, New Jersey Institute of Technology, and Dionisios Vlachos, Department of Chemical Engineering, University of Delaware.
Professor Panos Kevrekidis gave an invited talk in the 15th Conference on Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos and Complexity held in Patras, Greece on August 20, 2002. He was also invited to present a colloquium talk at the Department of Physics, Rutgers University on September 25. His talk is entitled A Dynamic Renormalization Approach to Blowups: the Nonlinear Schrˆdinger Equation Paradigm.
This summer Professor Rob Kusner participated in workshops on geometric analysis and its applications at the Euler Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, England, and the Max Planck Institute for Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany. Professor Kusner delivered several plenary lectures at each institute (3 at Newton, 2 at Max Planck, and 1 at Euler) and also lectured in August at the University of Warwick. Some of the work on which he lectured was recently announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and some is appearing just now in the journal Inventiones Mathematicae.
The music research of Professor Chris Raphael was the subject of a short radio program on Science Update which aired on July 22, 2002. This is a syndicated program sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. His music research is the focus both of a short article in the June 15, 2002 issue of New Scientist Magazine and of an article in the September 17, 2002 online edition of Discover.
A recent statistical technique and algorithm developed by Professor Paola Sebastiani and her collaborators at Harvard Medical School has received a remarkable amount of attention lately. By analyzing the expression level of thousands of genes with microarrays, molecular biologists hope to identify genes that collaborate in cell functions. Machine learning methods such as clustering or self-organizing maps are typically used to discover groups of genes with similar expression levels in repeated experiments. The method developed by Professor Sebastiani and her collaborators is the first principled solution to clustering gene expression data measured in temporal experiments. The method uses a novel, model-based, Bayesian clustering algorithm to identify gene-expression profiles that are likely to be generated by the same process.
The method is implemented in the program Caged, which is available at http://www.genomethods.org/caged, and was published in the paper by M. Ramoni, P. Sebastiani and I. S. Kohane entitled Cluster Analysis of Gene Expression Dynamics, Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. USA 99(14):9121-9126 (2002).
Out of the 93 papers published in this issue, this paper is one of 6 appearing on the cover page,. It has already been reviewed in the Netwatch section of Science, volume 29, July 2002, and in Bio. IT World; additional reviews are to appear in The Scientist and the ISBA Bulletin. The paper was the most frequently read paper on PNAS online across all fields of science during the month of August; the PNAS website is said to receive over 4 million hits a month. Details about the method, the program, and articles in the press are available at http://www.genomethods.org/caged/docs/index.html.
Professor Eric Sommers was recently awarded a 3-year National Science Foundation grant entitled Nilpotent Orbits in Representation Theory.
During July, Professor Frank Sottile participated in the conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics in Melbourne, Australia, was a plenary speaker at the conference on Symbolic Computational Algebra in London, Ontario, and spoke at the workshop on Algebraic Geometry and Geometric Modeling in Vilnius, Lithuania. Professor Sottile was recently awarded a grant from the National Security Agency to organize a series of meetings on Discrete Mathematics in New England. In addition, he had a proposal accepted for a program at the Mathematical Science Research Institute in the spring semester of 2004 on Topological Aspects of Real Algebraic Geometry. He is the chair of the organizing committee.
Professor John Staudenmayer will attend the NSF-sponsored Frontiers in Statistics Conference at Texas A&M in Oct 10-13, 2002. His topic will be Robust Smoothing for Designed Experiments. On July 15, 2002, he gave an invited talk on this topic at the International Conference on Current Advances and Trends in Non-Parametric Statistics in Crete, Greece. The title of his talk was The t-Linear Mixed Model for Smoothing and More. Professor Staudenmayer has also been invited to give a talk at the Yale Biostatistics seminar on November 12, 2002. The title of his talk is Robust Smoothing for Designed Experiments in Toxicology.
Professor Floyd Williams was invited to deliver a Convocational Address to faculty and students of the School of Architecture at Valparaiso University in Valparaiso,Chile. The address, given August 1, 2002, focused on successes and failures of Einstein and the architecture of the early universe. Professor Williamsís new book, entitled Topics in Quantum Mechanics, is scheduled for publication by Birkh‰user this fall.
Professor Jim Humphreys gave an invited plenary lecture at a Fields Institute (Toronto) workshop on Finite Dimensional Algebras, Algebraic Groups and Theory in early August. His topic was "Cells in affine Weyl groups and reduced enveloping algebras".
Professor Emeritus Bert Schweizer delivered a plenary address entitled Probabilistic Measurement at the Ninth International Conference on Information Processing and Management of Uncertainty in Knowledge-Based Systems which was held in Annecy, France, July 1-5, 2002. In addition he gave a talk entitled Karl Manger and his Work at the University of Paris, Dauphine.
George Avrunin and Jim Humphreys, as well as former UMass Ph.D. students Zongzhu Lin and Cornelius Pillen, participated in an AMS-IMS-SIAM Summer Reseach Conference on "Groups, Representations, and Cohomology", held at Mt. Holyoke College June 7-13. One of the conference organizers, Sarah Witherspoon, is a postdoc in our department currently teaching at Amherst College.
On April 11 and 12, the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the University of Vienna sponsored a conference to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Karl Menger. Professor Emeritus Berthold Schweizer, a doctoral student of Menger's, helped to organize the conference and gave one of the principal addresses. Prof. Schweizer is also an editor of a 2-volume collection of selected papers of Karl Menger.
Panos Kevrekidis will have a busy summer. He is invited to the Department of Physics at the University of Lisbon, Portugal, May 25-June 2. He will then spend a month in the Center for NonLinear Studies of the Los Alamos National Laboratory, June 12-July 12. He will also be organizing a workshop there on "Intrinsic Localized Modes, From Paradigm to Reality, From Theory to Practice" from July 8-11, together with Alan Bishop, Kim Rasmussen and Avadh Saxena. He will spend the period of July 15-30 at Brown University (a focused research workshop in nonlinear optics), while in August he will be visiting the University of Athens, Greece and attending the 15th Summer School/Conference on "Nonlinear Dynamics: Chaos and Complexity" in Patras, Greece.
Eduardo Cattani and Frank Sottile, as well as several of our graduate students (Sarah Croog, Ray Curran, Jim Ruffo) participated in the CBMS Lecture Series "Solving Systems of Polynomial Equations" May 17-24 at Texas A&M University.† Along with the main lectures by Bernd Sturmfels (Berkeley), Eduardo and Frank gave invited lectures.
Paul Gunnells has spent time in Europe over the past year: He spoke at the annual Arbeitstagung in Bonn, Germany during June 2001, then in July attended and spoke at the Oberwohlfach meeting, "Explicit methods in number theory," in Oberwohlfach, Germany.† In January 2002 he visited the University of Neuchatel in Switzerland, and gave two talks there.† In February he was an invited speaker at the Workshop on Arithmetic Groups and Automorphic Forms in Vienna, Austria.
Richard S. Ellis was selected to receive the 2001-2002 College of Natural Sciences and Mathematics (NSM) Outstanding Faculty Award for Research.† The award was established in 2000 for the purpose of recognizing outstanding research by faculty in the College and to honor individual faculty members for their research accomplishments.† Richard will receive a plaque and a monetary award at the College Convocation in September.† In his letter informing Richard of the award, the Dean wrote the following: "A committee of NSM faculty recently reached this decision based on the strength of a nomination packet prepared for you by your home department.† It is evident that your colleagues all across the College as well as at other educational institutions around the world hold your abilities as a researcher and scholar in the highest regard."†
Bill Meeks and Andrea Nahmod will be among the invited speakers at the Fifth Conference on Geometry and Topology, May 3-5 at Harvard University, presented by the Journal of Differential Geometry.† Their respective topics will be The Minimal Surface Revolution and Differential Geometry and On Wave Maps.
Panos Kevrekidis was recently invited to join the Editorial Board of the Mathematical Physics Electronic Journal.† He was also invited to a focused research activity meeting on nonlinear optics at Brown University for the period of July 15-30. He also recently gave a Lefschetz Dynamical Systems seminar at Brown University on Breather Type Solutions of the Discrete Nonlinear Schrodinger Equation.
Paola Sebastiani was invited to give a seminar at the Biomedical Informatics Grand Rounds series, at Harvard Medical School, on March 11, and to serve on two Oak Ridge Institute for Science and Education review panels.† She is also editing a special issue on Methods in Functional Genomics for the Machine Learning Journal (http://www.genomethods.org/mlj/), together with Marco Ramoni and Isaac Kohane from Childrensí Hospital Informatics Programs, Harvard Medical School.
Paul Gunnells spoke in the Boston University Algebra Seminar on March 18, on the subject Cusp singularities and special values of L-functions.
Frank Sottile spoke on March 20 in the Capital Region Algebra/Number Theory Seminar, on Common transversals and tangents in P3.
Ivan Mirkovic and Misha Finkelberg both gave invited lectures at the MSRI (Berkeley) workshop Geometric Aspects of the Langlands Program held March 18-22.† At the end of March, Eyal Markman gave an invited talk at another MSRI workshop, Non-Abelian Hodge Theory.
Tom Braden has been awarded a 3-year NSF grant under the program in Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics.
Rob Kusner will be giving an invited talk at the Texas Geometry and Topology Conference to be held April 5-7 at Texas Tech University.
Floyd Williams has just returned from St. Petersburg, Russia where he was invited to give two lectures.† He spoke at the Friedmann Laboratory of Theoretical Physics (on the topic:†† Cosmic Strings in a Friedmann Universe) and at the Institute for the Problems of Mechanical Engineering (on the topic:† Zeta Function for the BTZ Black Hole).† Williams was also invited to speak to the Russian children at the elementary school, no. 554.
During January, professor Ivan Mirkovic and assistant professor Tom Braden (Mathematics & Statistics) participated in special events at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, together with two UMass research visitors who are currently collaborating with Mirkovic: Maxim Vybornov (holder of an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship) and Michael Finkelberg (professor at the Independent University of Moscow).† All of them have interests in algebraic geometry and representation theory related to special programs and workshops this year at MSRI, including a weeklong workshop in January on Algebraic Stacks, Intersection Theory, and Non-Abelian Hodge Theory.† Mirkovic gave a talk on Beilinson-Bernstein localization of Lie algebra modules in positive characteristic as part of the longer program, Infinite-Dimensional Algebras and Mathematical Physics.
Eric Sommers spoke in the MIT Lie Groups Seminar on February 6, on Local systems on nilpotent orbits and weighted Dynkin diagrams.
The February 8 issue of the Campus Chronicle announced the designation of Donald Geman as a Distinguished Professor, following approval by the Umass Board of Trustees.
William Meeks is to lecture at Harvard on March 14, in the weekly Boston area mathematics colloquium which rotates among the major research departments.
Rob Kusner served on two NSF panels during the fall semester.† In October he lectured at the University of North Carolina and at University of Tennessee (Chattanooga) on mean curvature; he also gave a colloquium at University of Tennessee (Knoxville) on ropelength of knots and links.† He will be an invited speaker at the Texas Geometry & Topology Conference, to be held at Texas Tech April 5-7, 2002.
Frank Sottile gave talks in the Cornell Combinatorics and Geometry Seminar (October 29) and the SUNY Binghamton Combinatorics Seminar (October 30).† He also gave colloquium talks at Nov 9 SUNY Albany (November 9) and Purdue University (November 27).
Chris Raphael gave plenary talks at the Seventeenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence (UAI-2001), Seattle, WA, in August, and at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NIPS) conference in early December.† In October he gave a presentation at Univ. of Ghent, Belgium during the Symposium on Stochastic Modeling of Music.
Paola Sebastiani has recently been invited to serve on the editorial board of Machine Learning Journal.† She is also serving on the program committee of the workshop Intelligent Data Analysis in Medicine and Pharmacology 2002 (IDAMAP 2002), to be held in Lyon, France during July 2002.† On January 24, she gave a seminar at Childrens' Hospital Informatics Program, Harvard Medical School, Boston, describing a novel methodology for the differential analysis of gene expression data. This is part of her work in the new area of functional genomics.
Jared Anderson spoke in the Northeastern University seminar on Geometry-Algebra-Singularities-Combinatorics on January 28.
Bill Meeks has been invited to speak at the fifth Geometry and Topology Conference at Harvard (May 4-5, 2002), organized by the Journal of Differential Geometry.† This is a high-level conference held every three years, followed by publication of a special volume
Surveys in Differential Geometry.
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