Dear
friends of Georgia mathematics,
It
is a pleasure to write to you all again this year. I hope your 2005 was happy
and prosperous and that 2006 holds more of the same for you. A lot of good
things have been happening around here.
In
a big honor both for him and for the Department, Prof. Valery Alexeev has been invited to give a lecture at the International
Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid this summer. Although we were sad to see
Prof. David Benson leave the
Department for the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, we are happy to welcome
Profs. Sa’ar Hersonsky and Caner Kazanci to our number. Sa’ar
is a topologist and differential geometer who comes to us from Ben Gurion University in Israel, by way of a visiting position
at Princeton. Caner works in mathematical biology and completed his PhD at
Carnegie Mellon University last year. He holds a joint appointment between the
Mathematics Department and the Faculty of Engineering, the second appointment
of this kind we have been fortunate enough to make (the first being Prof. Andrew Sornborger two years ago).
Furthermore
we were very happy to receive authorization from the College to recruit three
new faculty members this year. We are now deeply immersed in the hiring
process, and have been very pleased to meet a number of outstanding candidates
so far. We are very hopeful that we will be able to fill these positions with
some excellent scholars.
Exciting
news arrived from Washington last weekend: following our submission in the Fall
of an application for a new VIGRE grant, we learned that the Department has
been selected by the National Science Foundation for a site visit from the
VIGRE selection committee. If winning the award is something like winning the
Super Bowl, then this step may be compared to making the playoffs: we’re
pleased to be playing, but the real goal lies ahead. The competition is stiff,
but we are confident that a strong and disciplined effort can get us to the
goal.
In
the mean time our current VIGRE grant continues to make waves in the graduate
program, particularly through the collaborative research groups for graduate
students--- the “VIGRE groups”--- we instituted back at the start of the
project. The subject of this year’s groups include mathematical cardiac
physiology, led by Prof. Sornborger; algebraic geometry, led by Prof. Elham Izadi; mathematical physics
(Feynman diagrams), led by Profs. Robert
Varley and Mitch Rothstein;
number theory (the Riemann-Siegel formula), led by Prof. Bob Rumely; Lie algebra cohomology and
its applications, led by Profs. Brian
Boe and Lenny Chastkofsky;
geometric knot theory, led by Prof. Jason
Cantarella; and the topology of lens spaces, led by Dr. Ken Baker.
A
number of distinguished mathematicians are visiting us this year:
Professor Bo Zhang visited with Prof. Dan
Kannan; Professor Michel Brion is now visiting Prof. Alexeev from the University
of Grenoble in France; Professor Frank Zeilfelder, University of Essen,
Germany will visit to work with Prof. Ming-jun Lai;
Professor George Yin of Wayne State
University will visit Prof. Qing Zhang; Prof.
Gail Letzter of
Virginia Tech will come to work with
Prof. Bill Graham; Prof. Gerd Mockenhaupt
of the Katholische Universität
Eichstätt-Ingolstadt in Germany will visit Prof. Akos Magyar; and Prof. Andreas Bernig of
the University of Perolles in Switzerland will visit
with Joe Fu (i.e. me).
In addition we enjoyed marvelous
Colloquia from Mike Wolf of Rice University on Minimal Desingularizations
of Planes in Space; from Alexander Kleshchev of the University of
Oregon on Polynomial representations of GL(n); Sergey Levendorsky of the Department of Economics, University of Texas
at Austin, on A short overview of
financial mathematics; and Yuesheng Xu, of Syracuse University on Convergence Theorems for Multi-Parameter Regularization Methods for
Solving Ill-Posed Operator Equations.
Of
course the Main Event awaits us later in the Spring,
as the 12th Annual James
Cantrell Lectures will be given by Professor Steven
Smale on March
22-24, 2006. I hope that many of our
old friends will be able to join us then for what promises to be a very
exciting series from one of the greatest mathematicians of our time.
The
Department offered two successful Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU)
programs last summer. The first group, led by Prof. Magyar, studied the beautiful area of Ramsey Theory.
This deals with finding regular structures in large but otherwise arbitrary
sets using a splendid array of tools from combinatorics,
ergodic theory and elementary Fourier analysis. A
famous example is Szemeredi's theorem, stating that
if a set contains a "positive proportion" of the natural numbers,
then it must contain arbitrary long arithmetic progressions. The second group
was entitled “Polynomial Splines, Bezier Curves, Barycentric Coordinates” and
worked under the leadership of Dr. Tatyana
Sorokina, a Postdoctoral Associate working under Prof. Lai. Their work
revolved around fundamental mathematical tools used in the design of surfaces
(airplanes, automobiles, molecules) and image processing (animation,
compression, transformation).
As
always, please send us news about yourself or others connected to UGA
Mathematics. We have set up an email address for this purpose:
alumnews@math.uga.edu. If you'd prefer to receive this newsletter
electronically, please send an email to this effect to that address. This will
save the department some postage and copying expenses, and we'll be able to
include full-color photos without spending our operating budget on color
copies.
Please
come see us whenever you're back in Athens.
Best
wishes,
Joe
Fu
Professor
and Head
