Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

EDITOR'S NOTE: This article was revised on July 21, 2017, to reflect that additional funding was provided by the College of Sciences.

Two Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) programs will take place in the School of Mathematics from May 22 through July 12, 2017.

Sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF), REU programs provide opportunities for undergraduate students to work closely with faculty and other researchers on a real-world research topic. Students are granted stipends and, in many cases, assistance with housing and travel. The College of Sciences provided additional funding for the 2017 REUs .

Altogether, 20 math students from nine universities are participating.

The program organized by School of Mathematics Professor Michael Lacey aims not only to provide research experience to undergraduates, but also to train postdoctoral fellows to design a program of research study, select students, and supervise students’ research over an extended period.

Projects will center on one-bit sensing and fluid dynamics. The program will culminate in a capstone poster session on July 12, 2017 at 2-5 pm in Room 005, Skiles Building.

The Georgia Tech postdoctoral fellows in Lacey’s REU program are Robert Kesler, Michael Northington, and Andre de Souza. They will be mentoring seven students from Alabama and Georgia Universities:

• Amadou Buh, Perimeter College at Georgia State University
• Korynn Claiborne, Alabama State University
• Samuel Hood, Morehouse College
• Bryson Kagy, Georgia Institute of Technology
• Allison Madson, Georgia Tech
• Jade Redding, Alabama State University
• Emily Smith, Agnes Scott College

In the second program, organized by School of Mathematics Professor Igor Belegradek, 13 math students will work with Georgia Tech researchers on a variety of research topics. The students are expected to help achieve the research outcomes envisioned by the principal investigators.

This REU will also culminate in a capstone poster session in July 12, 2017, time and location to be determined. Additional funding comes the College of Sciences

In this program, students from Georgia Tech are joined by peers from California, Massachusetts, Michigan, and Virginia universities:

• Ken Adams, Georgia Tech
• Santana Afton, College of William and Mary
• Nicholas Barvinok, University of Michigan
• Catherine Chen, Georgia Tech
• Nhu Do, Mount Holyoke College
• Sam Friedman, University of Michigan
• Andrea, Martinez, Georgia Tech
• Rose McCarty, Georgia Tech
• Hunter Vallejos, Georgia Tech
• Yandi Wu, University of California, Berkeley
• Jun Xiang, Georgia Tech
• Queena Zhou, Georgia Tech
• Yihan Zhou, Georgia Tech

Mentors are seven Georgia Tech mathematics professors and one postdoctoral fellow, Caitin Leverson. Mentors and their research projects are:

• Mohammad Ghomi, Unfoldings of Convex Polyhedra
• Christian Houdre, Estimation of the Chvátal-Sankoff Constant
• Sung Ha Kang, Video and Image Restoration with Atmospheric Turbulence Distortion
• Caitlin Leverson, Augmentations of Legendrian Knots and Links
• Doron Lubinsky, Asymptotics for Special Toeplitz Determinants
• Dan Margalit
  • Generating Sets for Big Mapping Class Group
  • Implementation of the Fast Nielsen-Thurston Classification 
  • Kernel of the Magnus Representation
• Robin Thomas 
  • Colin de Verdiere Invariant of Graphs 
  • Extremal Function for Bipartite Linklessly Embeddable Graphs
• Josephine Yu, Matroid Theory and Tropical Geometry

Geometric group theory – the study of the symmetries of objects – is a relative newcomer to the math world, having truly become its own area of study in the late 1980s. Georgia Tech School of Mathematics Professor Dan Margalit figured that a different approach is needed to teach undergraduates about the theory. That’s why he has co-edited a new book, “Office Hours With A Geometric Group Theorist” (Princeton University Press).

The print version of the book publishes on July 11; a digital version is available now.

“What is most novel about the book is that, unlike most math textbooks, the tone is very informal,” Margalit says. “The different chapters – or ‘office hours’ – are all written by different authors.” Margalit wanted his authors to explain these concepts to his students in an accessible, relatable way.

Margalit, who edited the book with University of Arkansas Associate Professor Matt Clay, says geometric group theory has many important applications within mathematics, such as the award-winning University of California, Berkeley mathematician Ian Agol’s groundbreaking work into the possible shapes of three-dimensional spaces. Real-world applications include the coordination of robots as they move on factory floors, the creation of secure cryptosystems, and even the design of more efficient blenders.

But that’s not why Margalit studies geometric group theory. “There is beauty and depth in the symmetries,” he says, “that one can only appreciate by taking the time to learn the subject.”

As an example, he points to an illustration from the book – a Farey graph. The swirling and folding loops look like something created with a Spirograph toy from the 1970s, but Margalit sees art in its symmetries. “There are many facts about matrix multiplication that you can understand just by considering this beautiful object,” he says.

Dan Margalit received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and did postdoctoral work at the University of Utah before arriving at Georgia Tech in 2010. He researches the intersection of low-dimensional topology and geometric group theory, focusing on the symmetries of surfaces.

Eight high school students today begin a four-week summer job doing mathematics. The interns will be computing sunrise and sunset times, a classic trigonometry and geometry problem, as part of the Mathematics Employment Experience for High School Students (MEEHS), a summer program at Georgia Tech.

School of Mathematics Assistant Professor Kirsten G. Wickelgren created the program to introduce high school students to mathematics as a career option. "Employing high school students to do math is a direct way of to communicate this option," Wickelgren says. The experience could attract talented students to pursue higher math or mathematics research in their careers. 

Participating students from Creekside High School, Fairburn, Georgia, are John Igieobo, Ashauna Pearson, Steven Sanchez, and Dae'Shawn Taylor. They will be accompanied by mathematics teacher Alicia Scott.

From Westlake High School, Atlanta, Georgia, are Tatyana Cook, Micah Dabney, Naomi Davis, and Aaron Woolfolk, accompanied by mathematics teacher Latricia Gladden.

The students will be based in the School of Mathematics during the first week of the internship, July 10-14. They will complete the final three weeks in their respective high schools.  

Funding for the program comes from Wickelgren's NSF CAREER grant and from the Georgia Intern Fellowships for Teachers (GIFT) a program implemented by the Center for Education Integrating Science, Mathematics, and Computing (CEISMC). CEISMC's Douglas Edwards and Marion Usselman are assisting Wickelgren in organizing this summer internship. 

Thanks to all who nominated their talented students to recieve one of the endowed awards this year. There were superb students which made selecting the awardees a real challenge to a small committee of faculty. The SoM will be recommending the following students to the OSFA for a final decision.

Charles Wang for the Peirotti Award

Chi Huynh for the Wartell Award

Thanks again for nominating your talented students. 

Undergraduate students stay busy studying for their majors, but they do not always get a chance to work on research projects – tasks that will dominate their lives if they go to graduate school. So how important is it for undergraduates to get that early shot at research?

For Korynn Claiborne, doing undergraduate research is the difference between learning advanced mathematics concepts in a classroom and applying them in real life. “This helps so much because you actually see the math at work,” says Claiborne, a senior at Alabama State University.

Claiborne is part of the School of Mathematics’ 2017 Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program. She presented her work during a July 12 poster session with 19 other students. Claiborne says the eight weeks she spent researching her project in the Skiles Classroom Building confirmed her love of math.

That outcome serves as priceless validation of the program, says School of Mathematics Chair Rachel Kuske. “The undergrads get exposed to more open-ended problems and new areas of math,” Kuske says. “They also learn soft skills important in research. How do you talk about research? How do you work within a group? How is research different from classwork?”

REU is an eight-week summer program funded by the National Science Foundation to give undergraduates a taste of high-level, real-world research.

The 2015 and 2016 REU classes were funded in partnership with the school’s Interdisciplinary Mathematics Preparation and Career Training (IMPACT) program, a postdoctoral-training initiative. For the 2017 program, support from the College of Sciences boosted participation, resulting in the largest group of students in the school’s 16-year history of REUs. Students from Georgia Tech and other Georgia colleges, plus universities in Alabama, California, Virginia, Michigan, and Massachusetts took part.

Ian Katz had opportunities to work on research while an undergraduate at the University of California, Berkeley, but didn’t take them. He found out about Tech’s program after an exchange of emails with School of Mathematics Professor Dan Margalit and was able to enroll at the last minute. Now Katz says he has a chance to fill the research gaps in his résumé and focus on starting graduate school at Tech.

“I didn’t even know what I wanted to do coming into grad school,” Katz says. He was interested in topology, the study of shapes and how they can be manipulated without breaking or tearing them. “REU gave me a really in-depth idea of what topology is about.”

Claiborne opted to work on the Lorenz system, equations used in atmospheric science prediction and weather modeling. “There’s a lot of computational mathematics, and that’s what I enjoy,” she says.

Two postdoctoral fellows, Michael Northington and Andre Souza, shared their expertise in research and presentation skills with Claiborne. “It gives the postdocs good experience in training and mentoring as well, so it helps everybody,” Kuske says.

Kuske adds that the program includes a lot of Atlanta-area students, which she is happy to see. She hopes to increase the local talent stream by seeking additional funding, along with more partnerships with local colleges.

“It’s more important these days, when students are applying to graduate school or a job, to be able to say they worked on a research team, or gave a presentation or poster session, or went to this or that conference,” Kuske says, “Students need a broad range of experiences to pursue whatever careers they choose.”

Congratulations go out to Samantha Petti, a second year Ph.D. student in the multidisciplinary Algorithms, Combinatorics, and Optimization (ACO) program at Georgia Tech has been awarded a 2017-18 ARCS - Acheivement Rewards for Academic Scientists - Scholar Award.

The ARCS Foundation is a national organization dedicated to supporting the best and brightest U.S. graduate and undergraduate scholars by providing financial awards in science, engineering and medical research.

The ARCS Scholars Award recognizes outstanding doctoral students who have a record of past achievement and who show excelptional promise of making a significant contribution to teh worldwide advancement of science and technology.

Promotion to Full Professor:

Dr. Sung Ha Kang works in applied mathematics, specifically in variational approaches to image processing, with various applications such as image denoising, debarring, imaging through turbulence, curvature based models, image segmentation and optimization. Following a PhD in Applied Mathematics from UCLA, she held an Assistant Professorship at University of Kentucky. In 2008 she joined Georgia Tech, where her research has been supported through NSF, the Simons Foundation, and the CoS Cullen-Peck Award. She has supervised 16 undergraduates, 2 PhDs, and 3 postdocs, and has held leadership roles in the GT-Math and Applications Portal and the Computational Science and Engineering program.

Promotions to Associate Professor

Dr. Michael Damron’s research is in probability theory and mathematical statistical mechanics, specifically in the areas of percolation, random growth models, spin systems, and symbolic dynamics. Following his Ph.D. at the Courant Institute at NYU, he held postdoctoral and instructor appointments at Princeton, and was an Assistant Professor at Indiana University. In 2015, he joined Georgia Tech, where his research has been supported through NSF grants, including an NSF CAREER grant, and the LexisNexis Dean’s award of GT. He has supervised 8 undergrads, 2 Ph.D. students, and 2 postdocs.

Dr. Josephine Yu's research is in combinatorics and computational algebraic geometry. In particular she studies how discrete properties of a system of polynomial equations determine geometric or topological properties of the solution set. Her recent work has applications in economics and causality. Following a PhD in mathematics from UC Berkeley, Dr. Yu held a Clay Math Institute Liftoff Fellowship and an NSF postdoctoral research fellowship and an instructorship at MIT. In 2010 she joined Georgia Tech, where her research has been continuously funded by NSF. She has supervised eleven undergrads and two PhD students at Georgia Tech.

Georgia Tech’s School of Mathematics is set to play an important role in the rapidly expanding field of data science, thanks to a National Science Foundation initiative that will fund foundational research and educational training on campus.

The new institute, the Transdisciplinary Research Institute for Advancing Data Science (TRIAD), is one of 12 national data science projects to receive $17.7 million in NSF funds, the agency recently announced. The School of Mathematics is one of six Tech schools taking part in TRIAD, which will receive $1.5 million of the NSF funding.

“The successful funding of the TRIAD partnership between the Colleges of Science, Computing, and Engineering recognizes Georgia Tech as a leader in the foundations of data science,” says School of Mathematics Professor and Chair Rachel Kuske. “We welcome the opportunities and challenges that come with this recognition. TRIAD will be an important base as our leadership in the mathematical and quantitative sciences continues to expand, addressing both fundamental and applied questions.”

Other schools participating in TRIAD are the H. Milton Stewart School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering, the George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, the School of Biological Sciences, the School of Computational Science and Engineering, and the School of Computer Science.

The rise of technology in everyday life has come with an increase in raw data generated by an ever-expanding number of connected devices. Media outlets are calling this information explosion “big data.” Companies, organizations, and governments are now on the hunt to find better ways of analyzing and modeling big data, with potential benefits for business, science, education, and law enforcement.

The NSF initiative Transdisciplinary Research in Principles of Data Science (TRIPODS) hopes to leverage academic expertise in mathematics, statistics, and theoretical computer science. In Phase I of TRIPODS, the NSF put out a call to support the development of small collaborative institutes. Georgia Tech responded with TRIAD, which will be operate alongside the recently launched Institute for Data Engineering and Science (IDEaS).  Xiaoming Huo, professor in the School of Industrial & Systems Engineering, will be TRIAD’S executive director; Prasad Tetali, professor in the School of Mathematics with a joint appointment in the School of Computer Science, will serve as co-principal investigator.

“The emphasis on theoretical foundations of data science offers a great opportunity for mathematicians to actively engage with other scientists and help make breakthroughs in this fast-growing interdisciplinary field,” says Tetali. “Our team also recognizes the importance of being the only team, out of the dozen winners of Phase I, to have been selected from the Southeast,” he added.

Faculty from the College of Sciences with expertise in algebraic and convex geometry, applied dynamics, computational and numerical methods, discrete mathematics, quantitative and computational biology, high-dimensional probability, and statistical inference will provide research for TRIAD. Faculty members include School of Biological Sciences Professor Joshua Weitz and School of Mathematics professors Leonid Bunimovich, Sung Ha Kang, Vladimir Koltchinskii, Rachel Kuske, Anton Leykin, Galyna Livshyts, Ionel Popescu and Mayya Zhilova.

Congratulations go to Vladimir Koltchinskii, who is an invidted speaker in Probability and Statistics for the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM), to be held in Rio de Janeiro in 2018. 

As the ICM is one of the world's premier forums for presenting and discussing new discoveries in mathematics, an invitation to speak at the ICM is a major honor.

Since 1897, the ICM has helped to shape the directions and history of mathematics. For more information and the complete list of speakers, please see: http://www.icm2018.org/portal/en/icm-speakers

All students interested in graduate studies in the School of Math are invited to attend our Prospective Student Day which will be held on Friday, September 22, 2017 from 2pm to 5pm in Skiles 006. Students from underrepresented groups and from the Atlanta area or Georgia are particularly encouraged to attend.