The Department

The Department of Mathematics at the University of Georgia is active in a wide range of research areas, and currently ranks first in the southeastern United States in National Science Foundation funding in pure mathematics. It is among the top forty mathematics departments in the United States and rates among the very best in the country in several research disciplines (for example, it comes fourth in NSF funding in the U.S. for ``Algebra and Number Theory''). There are currently 41 faculty members who, 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, J.F. Carlson was an invited lecturer at The International Congress of Mathematicians in Japan in 1990.  A. Granville spoke at the ICM in Switzerland in 1994. An invitation to speak at an ICM is considered one of the most prestigious speaking engagements in a mathematician's career. Several faculty have won highly regarded awards: for example, A. Granville is a Presidential Faculty Fellow (1994-1999), which carries an award of half a million dollars. D. Benson won the Junior Whitehead Prize of the London Mathematical Society in 1993; the research of C. Pomerance and R. Rumely was presented to Congress by the National Science Foundation in 1982. Four current members of the department, R. Rumely, V. Alexeev, A. Granville, and W. Graham have received fellowships from the Sloan Foundation. J.F. Carlson has been selected as Fulbright Fellow. Moreover, nine faculty members in the Mathematics Department have won the University of Georgia 's Creative Research Medals. 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 new 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 recent conferences 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, two preeminent mathematicians are invited to the University of Georgia to deliver the University Center Lectures in Mathematics and 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 have been on editorial boards of journals, such as Transactions of the American Mathematical Society, Mathematics of Computation, The Journal of the Ramanujan Math. Soc., Communications in Algebra, The Journal of Dynamical Systems and Applications, The Journal of Supercomputing, and mathematics first fully electronic journal, The New York Journal of Mathematics.

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 has won the highly coveted Meigs Award. Nine other department members have won Beaver Awards. The Outstanding Honors Professor and Honoratus Teaching Medal have been awarded to members of the Department over thirty-six times.

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.