# Faculty News Briefs

### March 2014

On 22 February 2014, Professor Rob Kusner lectured on "Chirality for Curves and More" at UTAustin. The following week he visited the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, England, for their Foams and Minimal Surfaces workshop where he collaborated with colleagues and gave a plenary talk about "Materials and Meromorphic Differentials" on 25 February 2014.

Professor Michael Lavine delivered a talk 26 February 2014 at the Institute for Social Sciences Research at UMassAmherst -- "Before You Analyze, Know Y" -- on why it is dangerous to choose a statistical analysis without seeing the data.

Lecturers Jeff Beaulieu, Catherine Benincasa, Adena Calden, Erica Farelli, John Gambino, and Jinguo Lian each won the Residential First Year Experience Award. To receive this award, instructors must be nominated by a first-year student. The award recognizes instructors who inspire students to learn, who host interesting and motivating lectures, who go above and beyond the call of duty to support first-year students, help them adjust to college, challenge them to reach their full potential, and more.

### February 2014

On 6 January 2014, Visiting Assistant Professor Christopher Chong spoke on "Localization in Nonlinear Coupled Oscillators" at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland in a seminar within the Department of Mechanical and Process Engineering.

A recent major DOE grant awarded to Professors Markos Katsoulakis and Luc Rey-Bellet has been highlighted by the University News Office.

The research, service and teaching of Professor Panos Kevrekidis were recognized with a number of honors.

Panos has been awarded the biennial J.D. Crawford prize from the Activity Group on Dynamical Systems of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He has also been honored with the Aristides F. Pallas award of the Academy of Athens, Greece for his work "Nonlinear Waves in Lattices: Past, Present, Future." As part of his service to the Dynamical Systems community, Panos has been selected as one of the two Co-Chairs for the major biennial conference in the field, scheduled to take place at Snowbird in May 2015.

Panos also received an IRSES grant from the European Union, jointly with the universities in Thessaloniki, Greece, and Oldenburg, Germany, allowing several researchers from Greece and Germany to visit our Department over the next 4 years. This grant is supporting the research of the first postdoctoral scholar, Dr. Stathis Charalampidis from Thessaloniki, from November 2013 until November 2014.

Finally, Panos recently garnered the Outstanding Teacher Award of the College of Natural Sciences.

Professor Michael Lavine gave an invited seminar 10 December 2013 at the University of Waterloo's Department of Statistics and Actuarial Science titled "On Rigorous Specification of ICAR Models."

On 16 December 2013, Professor Ivan Mirkovic gave a talk at the Moscow conference on "Representation Theory and applications to Combinatorics, Geometry and Quantum Physics" dedicated to the 60th Birthday of Boris Feigin. Earlier he lectured twice in Stony Brook: a colloquium on "Loop Grassmannians" (7 May 2013) and at the Simons Center "Quiver Varieties" workshop (15 October 2013).

Professor Alexei Oblomkov has just been awarded an Early Career Award by the NSF - congratulations Alex! He also visited Professor Motohico Mulase at the University of California Davis the last week in January. Alex delivered three lectures while there: "Plane curve singularities, knot homology and the Hilbert scheme of points in the plane" for their Topology Seminar; "Khovanov-Rozansky homology" for their Graduate Seminar; and "Plane curve singularities and the topological vertex" for their String Theory Seminar.

Each year Professor Jenia Tevelev supervises an REU in his research area, Algebraic Geometry. In 2013, he worked with Morgan Opie, who wrote a well-received paper "Extremal divisors on moduli spaces of rational curves with marked points" based on this REU project; she is now expanding it into an Honors thesis. Morgan presented a poster on this at the Young Mathematicians Conference at Ohio State University and at the Boston University AGNES (Algebraic Geometry Northeastern Series) Conference. She was also invited to give lectures at seminars and research conferences at the University of Massachusetts, University of Georgia, and University of Illinois at Chicago. For her achievements in academics and research, Opie has been recognized both on campus and nationally. She is the runner up for the 2014 Alice T. Schafer Prize, a national prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman, awarded at the January 2014 joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Association of America. Opie is also one of four students selected to receive the 2013 UMass Amherst Rising Researcher award. Morgan has recently received a very prestigious Churchill scholarship which funds a year of postgraduate study at the University of Cambridge in England. Worth about $50,000, the scholarship covers a year of tuition, fees, living expenses and travel. Morgan was also admitted to top graduate schools in the United States (Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, Brown,...). In Fall 2013, Professor Jenia Tevelev spent three weeks visiting a former UMass postdoc, Professor Giancarlo Urzua, at Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile; Jenia delivered a colloquium talk there. Over the next three weeks he lectured twice at Ohio State University and visited another former UMass postdoc, Professor Ana-Maria Castravet. Jenia then spent two months at the University of Texas in Austin visiting Professor Sean Keel, Jenia's postdoctal mentor. Tevelev gave two talks there plus another at the University of Texas A&M, where he visited Professors JM Landsberg and Frank Sottile, a former UMass faculty member, who sends his regards. In Austin, Jenia enjoyed conversations with UMass alum Nicky Reyes, who is now a graduate student at UT; Jenia supervised an REU with Nicky in Winter 2012. Tevelev and Castravet recently published a paper "Hypertrees, Projections, and Moduli of Stable Rational Curves" in Crelle's Journal which contains some results obtained by UMass alum Nate Harman when he was working on an REU project with Jenia in Summer 2011; Nate is now a graduate student at MIT. Jenia Tevelev is also the recipient of NSF grant DMS-1303415 "Moduli Spaces of Curves and Surfaces." On 14 January 2014, Visiting Assistant Professor Pengfei Zhang gave an invited talk titled Hyperbolicity of some generalized lemon billiards in the Northwestern University Dynamical Systems Seminar. ### December 2013 Professor Erin Conlon gave an invited seminar at UMass Medical School in the Department of Quantitative Health Sciences on December 3, 2013. The title of her talk was "Bayesian Meta-Analysis Models for Gene Expression Studies". Professor Franz Pedit visited Rice University the week of November 12-16, 2013, to work with Mike Wolf on superminimal surfaces, opers, representation varieties and Higgs bundles. While there, Franz delivered two lectures: a geometry seminar titled "Constrained Willmore surfaces: theory and experiments," and a colloquium on "Constant mean curvature surfaces: an integrable perspective." Professor HongKun Zhang visited CIRM, Marseille, France, the week of December 1-7, 2013, where she was a keynote speaker at an international conference on Hyperbolicity and Dimension. She also gave a talk on "Lower bound for decay rates of correlations of nonuniformly hyperbolic billiards" while at the conference. News Briefs will be on Winter Break till February 2014. In the meantime, have a wonderfully warm winter solstice and a perfectly pleasant perihelion! ### November 2013 On October 16th, Visiting Assistant Professor Christopher Chong spoke on "Solitary Waves of Discrete Nonlinear Schrodinger Equations" at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, Physics Colloquium. Professors R. Inanc Baykur and Weimin Chen, together with Professor Daniel Ruberman from Brandeis University, organized a 2-day workshop "Group Actions on Smooth 4-Manifolds" at UMass Amherst, between October 25-26, 2013. The workshop brought together experts and active researchers in the field. Several graduate students from Brandeis and UMass participated in the event. The program neatly consisted of 2 talks by leading experts, 2 by young researchers, and 2 by recent PhDs, topped with 2 discussion sessions on open problems. For more details, please see the Group Actions workshop website. On October 19, 2013, Professor HongKun Zhang, jointly with Renato Feres and Timothy Chumley, organized a Special Session on "Statistical Properties of Dynamical Systems" at the AMS sectional meeting at Washington University in St. Louis. HongKun also gave a talk "Optimal bound for decay of correlations of nonuniformly hyperbolic systems" at this meeting. She is the PI on a recently-submitted NSF-FRG proposal "Stochastic perspectives in dynamics: fundamental problems and novel applications" with a total budget of$1,095,229 and collaborators from 5 other institutions in the US. UMass is the lead institution, and visiting assistant professor Pengfei Zhang is serving as a Co-PI.

Our statistics group hosted the University of Connecticut statistics department on Wednesday October 16. Xiaojing Wang from UConn delivered a seminar on "Shape constrained functions and Gaussian processes."

### October 2013

On 27 September 2013, Professor Franz Pedit gave a talk titled "Constrained Willmore surfaces: theory and experiments" at the Differential Geometry Workshop, Aarhus University, Denmark.

Emeritus Professor Floyd Williams was appointed to the 4-member Scientific Committee for the Third International Satellite Conference in Mathematical Methods in Physics, to be held in Londrina-PR, Brazil, 21-26 October 2013. This year's Satellite Conference will focus on spectral theory, group theory, differential and algebraic topology, with applications to topological field theory, quantum gravity, strings and cosmology, and will feature 11 international speakers. Although Professor Williams, an AMS Fellow, will not lecture at this conference, he has spoken several times at similar conferences in Brazil over the past 15 years.