The Department

The Department of Mathematics at the University of Georgia is active in a wide range of research areas, and currently ranks prominently in the southeastern United States in National Science Foundation funding in pure mathematics. It is one of only 39 departments of mathematics or statistics to have been awarded VIGRE grants by the National Science Foundation since the inception of the program in 1999. (See http://www.nsf.gov/mps/dms/awards/vigreawds.jsp). The 35 to 40 permanent members of the faculty and their postdocs, among them, work in most major areas.

The quality of the research done by the faculty at University of Georgia is continually recognized at a national and international level. Department members are regularly invited to speak about their recent work all over the globe. For example, V. Alexeev was invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid in 2006. An invitation to speak at an ICM is considered one of the most prestigious speaking engagements in a mathematician's career. Two emeritus professors were also invited lecturers at an ICM: J.F. Carlson in 1990 in Kyoto and C. Pomerance in 1994 in Zurich. Several faculty have won highly regarded awards: for example, three current members of the department, R. Rumely, V. Alexeev, and W. Graham have received fellowships from the Sloan Foundation. Emeritus professor J.F. Carlson has been selected as Fulbright Fellow. The research of C. Pomerance and R. Rumely was presented to Congress by the National Science Foundation in 1982. Moreover, eight current faculty members in the Mathematics Department have won the University of Georgia's Creative Research Medal. Many of our faculty receive significant external research funding.

Faculty members are regularly invited to spend time at prestigious research institutions. For example, thirteen faculty members have spent a year or more at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, nine have participated in programs at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley, as well as at other research institutes, such as the Isaac Newton Institute in Cambridge, England. This kind of global participation allows faculty members to bring the latest on what is happening in mathematics directly into the graduate classroom.

The friendly and informal atmosphere in the Department lends itself to close collaboration between faculty members as well as between students and faculty. The mathematical life in the Department is greatly enriched by the many mathematicians that visit the University of Georgia every year. The Georgia Topology Conference is held every summer at the University of Georgia and, in 1993, was the largest single-subject mathematics meeting in the United States, attracting more than 250 participants from around the world. The Department has also hosted conferences in the past in Harmonic Analysis, Mathematical Ecology, Number Theory, Differential Equations, and Mathematical Physics. Each spring, the Department organizes a Differential Geometry Conference in collaboration with Emory University and the University of South Carolina. Every year, a preeminent mathematicians is invited to the University of Georgia to deliver the J. Cantrell Lectures.

Our faculty serves the general mathematical community in many ways, including service on national committees of the American Mathematical Society. Many are associate editors, or on editorial boards of journals, such as Bulletin of Kerala Mathematical Society, Communications in Algebra, Communications of Applied Analysis, Global Journal of Mathematics & Mathematical Science, International Journal of Pure and Applied Mathematical Sciences, Journal of Stochastic Analysis and Applications, Journal of Dynamic Systems and Applications, Journal of Neural, Parallel, and Scientific Computation, JP Journal of Geometry and Topology, Mathematics of Computation, SIAM Journal on Control and Optimization, Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.

The Department has long put a strong emphasis on the quality of teaching. This commitment to excellence in teaching has been rewarded by one of the most distinguished records of instructional awards within the University of Georgia . Ted Shifrin and Ed Azoff have won the highly coveted Meigs Award. Five other current department members have won Beaver Awards, for a total of 17 in the last 27 years. The Lothar Tresp Oustanding Honors Professor and Honoratus Teaching Medal have been awarded to members of the Department over thirty-six times. Ted Shifrin received the 2000 Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics, Southeast section, presented by the
Mathematical Association of America.

The Mathematics Department is located in the Boyd Graduate Studies Research Center, which is directly connected to the University's Science Library. The library's mathematics collection is one of the best in the nation, containing a comprehensive collection of nineteenth and early twentieth century mathematics books and journals (we were fortunate that the university purchased the American Mathematical Society library in the 1960s). The library's catalogue contains more than 23,500 titles in mathematics, and the library subscribes to all of the important mathematics research journals.

The Department of Mathematics has close relationships with a number of other departments, including Computer Science, Statistics, Mathematics Education, and Management Science and Information Technology, as well as with the Advanced Computational Methods Center. The Department uses computers extensively for research and instructional purposes and has a large array of sophisticated equipment available.  Computers include Sun Enterprise servers, Sun UltraSPARC workstations, Pentium/Pentium II PC's and Power Macs.  In addition the university has a parallel computing research center, which includes an SGI Origin 2000 and an IBM SP2, both of which are high performance parallel computers.