Congratulations go to Wenjing Liao for being awarded an NSF CAREER grant, with the title:  Exploiting Low-Dimensional Structures in Data Science: Manifold Learning, Partial Differential Equation Identification, and Neural Networks.
 

See also the CoS news item on our website.

Wenjing Liao

Wenjing Liao is an Assistant Professor in the School of Mathematics with interests in imaging, signal processing,  high dimensional data analysis and machine learning. Prof. Liao won a National Science Foundation (NSF) award in deep neural networks for structured data as a principal investigator in 2020, representing the third NSF award and fourth award overall she has won since becoming an assistant professor at Tech in 2017. Prof. Liao is also very active in the REU Program in SoM, mentoring undergraduates and leading them in undergraduate research projects, having worked with nearly a dozen REU students in several projects including The Double Descent Phenomenon in Machine Learning, and Using Neural Networks to Classify PDE's.

NSF CAREER Grant

The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization. Activities pursued by early-career faculty should build a firm foundation for a lifetime of leadership in integrating education and research.

Previous recipients of the NSF CAREER Award include:

Congratulations go to Associate Professor Xu-Yan Chen, the 2021 recipient of the SoM Fulmer Prize.

The prize recognizes Xu-Yan's work over a number of years, contributing significantly to student success with a broad impact on engineering students at Georgia Tech.

2021 School of Mathematics Fulmer Prize

We thank the late Howard Woodham (Georgia Tech alumnus, Engineering ’48) for the establishment of the Herman K. Fulmer Faculty Teaching Fund Endowment for the School of Mathematics (SoM), in memory of Professor Herman Fulmer, his former mathematics professor. Each year this award recognizes one of our faculty who exhibit genuine regard for undergraduate students during the first few years of their Engineering studies at Georgia Tech. 

2021 Fulmer Prize: Xu-Yan Chen

The prize recognizes Xu-Yan’s significant contributions to student success, concentrated in engineering students. Over the past decade, Xu-Yan  has been teaching a large number of students, particularly from engineering, in Differential Equations, Linear Algebra, and Calculus.  In recent years he has taken on the role of Course Coordinator for Differential Equations (MATH 2552), also providing valuable materials for the other instructors in that course. His section is regularly requested by students, a further recognition of his dedication to student success. 

Xu-Yan Chen is an Associate Professor in the School of Mathematics, who specializes in Differential Equations and Dynamical Systems. 

Previous Fulmer Prize Winners

Prof. Kuske and colleagues cited in press release from Heriot -Watt University "Bridge Energy to Be Harvested in Pioneering Research Project".

 

The multidisciplinary project, entitled, Stochastic Nonsmooth Analysis For Energy Harvesting, is due to complete in 2024.

Professor Rachel Kuske, head of mathematics at Georgia Tech, said: “While the device has nonlinear behaviour, which is beneficial in generating more energy than is used to power the device, the same nonlinearity can result in a range of complex responses to the vibrations.  

“We will use dynamical analyses to predict the different types of responses, as well as to select design choices for responses that optimise energy output. As the bridge vibrations are also inherently noisy, the analysis will also identify how to leverage noise sources that are beneficial and mitigate effects from detrimental noise sources.”

For the full story please see:

https://www.hw.ac.uk/news/articles/2021/bridge-energy-to-be-harvested-in-pioneering.htm

The College of Sciences is pleased to announce the appointment of Michael Wolf as the new chair of the School of Mathematics, effective summer 2022.

“Dr. Wolf plans to assume his new post on July 1, 2022,” shares Susan Lozier, dean of the College of Sciences and Betsy Middleton and John Clark Sutherland Chair. “I look forward to working with him to advance the teaching and research missions across the School of Math and of the College of Sciences — and to the energy, creativity, and strategy that he will bring as we welcome him to the Georgia Tech community.”

“I was thrilled to be invited to chair the School of Math,” Wolf says. “Georgia Tech’s Mathematics faculty is world-renowned for its strength and scope, and it is an honor to participate in its leadership. Mathematics is an engine for modern science and technology — from codes for cybersecurity, to differential equations that explain black holes and the interfaces of materials, to machine learning and mathematical neuroscience, and through beautiful advances whose applications will only be revealed to our grandchildren. Mathematics is everywhere, and Georgia Tech’s mathematicians are at the frontier.”  

“What’s also wonderful about the School is the unusual extent of the connections between the research in the School and the rest of campus,” he adds. “Of course, mathematics is central to most fields of inquiry, and all fields grow increasingly quantitative over time, but at Tech, one sees the interactions on personal levels. ”

“Simultaneously, the nation’s student population is at a moment of change,” Wolf notes. “The population is more diverse than ever before, with income distributions more attenuated than at any other time in our lifetimes, with shortages of STEM professionals in the millions in the coming decade. Almost all of those students will pass through our mathematics classrooms multiple times, so we need to find ways to support all of these young people so they can achieve their ambitions in science and engineering,” he explains. “Georgia Tech is already in the leadership of programs that welcome their students into the community of mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. I look forward to participating in building on that success.”

Meet Mike Wolf

Wolf received his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Stanford University as an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow after completing math and philosophy studies at Yale University as an undergraduate. In 1986, Massachusetts Institute of Technology named Wolf a C. L. E. Moore instructor, a role for recent Math Ph.D.s who show promise in pure mathematics research.

Two years later, Wolf joined the faculty at Rice University, where he served most recently as Milton B. Porter Professor. During his one-third of a century at Rice, Wolf has held many positions, including two periods as chair of the Department of Mathematics, head of a residential college, and co-founder and co-director of the Rice Emerging Scholars Program.

The scope of Wolf’s tenure at Rice and beyond stretches through mathematics research and education, to diversity and equity, undergraduate admissions and life, to strategy and development. “There are very few offices on the Rice campus I haven’t interacted with in a meaningful way,” he shares.

Residential College Magister

“About 15 years ago, I took an unusual administrative position, that of a residential college ‘magister’. At Rice, my family and I lived on campus in a house astride an undergraduate residence for five years,” Wolf says. “During that time, I got to know about 750 undergraduates quite well, serving as a mentor to them as they lived their lives as young people trying to manage semi-independently for the first time while also trying to navigate their way through college. I was left with a far richer understanding of contemporary undergraduate life and education than I had had before.”

Wolf shares that during that half-decade living on campus, he “became frustrated by the experiences of our students of high potential from under-resourced high schools. These are kids who are valedictorians of their class in rural or urban high schools, often the first of their family to go to college, and whose preparation for college was just well behind those of their upper middle class suburban peers,” he says. 

“Often from a family background of job insecurity, most wanted a career in science or engineering. They were smart and at least as hard-working and mature as the rest of their freshman competition — but the pace, rigor, depth and scope of what they were asked to do as matriculating science and engineering students was just too much to handle with a background that often included far fewer AP or even regular science classes.” 

The result? “They left STEM in droves, sometimes even failing to make it to their junior year as college students,” he says, but also that “four years after I began to gather statistics and highlight this issue to the senior university leadership, Rice asked me in 2010 to co-lead an effort to address the problem.”

Equity, diversity, access, representation — and retention

That effort led to the Rice Emerging Scholars Program (RESP), which takes in a number of incoming science and engineering matriculants and, “through a summer bridge program and aggressive term-time interventions, seeks to have this group, whose preparation leaves them most at risk to not achieve their dreams, succeed at the level of their peers,” Wolf says. 

Now, in a typical year, “more than 80% of our group has, in their fourth semester, declared a major in science or engineering, while a similarly prepared control group averages about 50%, and the general peer group is at 75%.” 

“We comprehensively attack the obstructions these students face, from an ‘anti-remedial’ bridge program that focuses on very difficult topics in STEM to advising that encompasses the idiosyncratic problems these folks face as typically low-income, first generation, and/or students of color,” he shares. 

Wolf says that work must also focus on anticipating the arc of a student’s career and identifying inherent milestones — and also in carefully defining every obstruction that might stand in their way, and proactively producing sustainable solutions and ongoing support for each student, focusing first on those most likely to fall behind their peers. “Many programs address just some of the obstacles students must overcome,” he says, “but those approaches leave them vulnerable to the remaining barriers. You simply have to confront every issue.”

“This program has been important for Rice,” he shares. “We were the first program on campus that intervened academically for cohorts like the one we address.” Since then, a new ‘holistic’ advising office has opened on campus that is modeled on the team’s practices, and that today, access and inclusion stand as one of eight planks in Rice’s new strategic plan.

“Most of my administrative work in the past decade or so has been in the direction of transitioning to successful science and engineering undergraduate students whose background puts them at risk for not realizing their ambitions,” Wolf says. “Most of these students in the Emerging Scholars Program are from groups poorly represented in the sciences — about one-third are first generation collegians, almost all are from underrepresented minority groups, most are women, and almost all are low income.” 

“The really cool part of this work is engaging with these students as pre-matriculants and then freshmen and then seniors and finally graduates,” he adds. “I get to watch them mature from not knowing their own potential to succeeding and finally realizing that they can take on and surmount very difficult challenges and lead in that work: I think this is the most personally gratifying administrative work there can be.”

Wolf received Rice’s George R. Brown Award for Superior Teaching and the Marjorie Corcoran Award for those contributions to the advancement of women and underrepresented minorities in STEM. His service leadership there has also included appointments on the University’s strategic planning group on diversity and equity, as Faculty Senate Parliamentarian, the University Faculty’s Officer for Grievances and Appeals, and on numerous committees on issues across the University — from General Educations, to Benefits, to Data Warehouses, to a committee he chaired that rewrote Rice’s calendar — along with several diversity and equity initiatives.

Vertically integrated student support: NSF VIGRE

Wolf has also served as PI and co-I of the Rice VIGRE Program, an NSF-funded initiative whose primary goal is to “increase the number of well-prepared U.S. citizens, nationals, and permanent residents who pursue careers in the mathematical sciences and to broaden their background and perspective” through sustained mentoring, education, and training.

VIGRE stands for Vertical InteGration of Research and Education and in the NSF program’s context, “vertical means across academic ranks: faculty, graduate students, and undergraduates.” Under Wolf’s leadership, Rice secured two five-year VIGRE grants, and when that program became more targeted as the NSF Research Training Grant program, Wolf was part of a team that secured two more five-year grants.

“During the second VIGRE grant, I was department chair, and a consequence of that grant was that I was able to permanently grow our Instructorship pool from five to eight lines; those extra lines — quite a jump for a department in a small school — enhanced our ability to teach and are attractions when we recruit,” he says, also noting that “graduate education in the science and technical areas in this country must change. Our current systems obstruct us from welcoming into the best STEM post-baccalaureate programs whole cohorts of students with amazing potential.”

Research, recognition, outreach

An active teacher and scholar, Wolf’s research lies in geometry, at the intersection of the study of families of surfaces and geometric variational problems. His work which has garnered the most popular attention is a proof, with Weber and Hoffman, of the existence of a minimal surface — an idealized soap film — of a ‘helicoid with a handle’. This shape, announced in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences with a full proof in the Annals of Mathematics that ran for more than 100 pages, was the first example since the 18th century of a ‘topologically’ simple minimal surface which was infinitely twisted.

Over 34 years, Wolf has also served as investigator on a number of grants and programs with the NSF; his educational work has been supported by the Chao Foundation, Hearst Foundations, Doris Duke Charitable Foundation, and Alkek Foundation. He has delivered talks at dozens of universities and conferences spanning five continents, has co-authored several publications on STEM education and Bridge programs, and delivers occasional talks to groups of teachers and the general public. “We once offered a course to the public on the hardest unsolved problems in mathematics. Outreach at Rice was convinced that no one would ever want to pay $79 to listen to math lectures,” he shares. “They were astonished when the course filled to capacity and was one of the most popular courses they had ever produced.”

“There is a tremendous interest in mathematics in the community, and a tremendous need for the scientific community to find ways to explain — to both school children and the general community — what scientists and mathematicians do and why it is interesting, as well as important,” Wolf says. “One of the attractions of Georgia Tech to me is its interest in engaging in such critical partnerships.”

In 2019, Wolf was named a Simons Foundation Fellow in Mathematics and in 2013 was among the inaugural class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). In his early career, Wolf was both an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation and Research Fellow, as well as a NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellow. He has been a member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute several times, and has twice worked as a Research Professor there.

With a particular focus on geometric analysis and geometry and topology, Wolf has also long-served on several journal editorial boards including Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society and Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society.

A past member of the AMS Committee on National Speakers, Wolf is also a frequent NSF panelist and co-organizer of international math conferences, colloquia, and congresses, including serving as National lecturer for the Sigma Xi society.

 

###

About the School of Mathematics at Georgia Tech

The School of Mathematics is one of the original academic departments at Georgia Tech, dating back to 1888. The School continues to be a cornerstone of the Institute, and today is a vibrant community of faculty working on the highest caliber of mathematical research and educating a cohort of remarkable students on campus.

About the College of Sciences at Georgia Tech

The College of Sciences cultivates curiosity, encourages exploration, and fosters innovation to develop scientific solutions for a better world. Our connected community of scientists and mathematicians collaborates across disciplines and challenges to achieve excellence in science, teaching, and research. Working across six internationally ranked schools with the brightest young minds in our fields, we mentor future leaders to identify and push the frontiers of human knowledge, imagination, and innovation.

We nurture scientifically curious students by offering diverse educational and research experiences. As an internationally recognized, preeminent institution in the sciences and mathematics, we help students build empowering foundations in the sciences and mathematics — educating and preparing the next generation of scientists who will create the technologies of the future.

Most of the disciplines within our six schools — Biological Sciences, Chemistry and Biochemistry, Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, Mathematics, Physics, and Psychology — are ranked in the top 10%. We organize ourselves in multidisciplinary research neighborhoods to promote broad exchange of ideas. We also offer exciting opportunities for students to engage in research, and train with top professors in chosen fields.

Our internationally recognized senior faculty and an extraordinarily talented group of junior faculty are genuinely concerned about undergraduate and graduate education, and they bring the excitement of new discoveries in the research laboratory to the classroom. The quality of the faculty and the curriculum, combined with new state-of-the-art facilities and a low student to faculty ratio, ensure the excellent educational opportunities available to our students.

About Georgia Tech

The Georgia Institute of Technology, or Georgia Tech, is a top 10 public research university developing leaders who advance technology and improve the human condition.

The Institute offers business, computing, design, engineering, liberal arts, and sciences degrees. Its nearly 40,000 students, representing 50 states and 149 countries, study at the main campus in Atlanta, at campuses in France and China, and through distance and online learning.

As a leading technological university, Georgia Tech is an engine of economic development for Georgia, the Southeast, and the nation, conducting more than $1 billion in research annually for government, industry, and society.

External News: Alum Ben Elkins' Translation of Felix Hausdorff’s Poem “Den Ungeflügelten” Picked Up by the Journal of Humanistic Mathematics

See the webpage for more info:

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/jhm/vol11/iss2/23/

External News: Santosh Vempala and coauthor in Quanta Magazine for ACM-SIAM Best-paper Award

New Algorithm Breaks Speed Limit for Solving Linear Equations

By harnessing randomness, a new algorithm achieves a fundamentally novel — and faster — way of performing one of the most basic computations in math and computer science.

Read full article here: 

https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-algorithm-breaks-speed-limit-for-solving-linear-equations-20210308/

 

 

Please join me in congratulating our colleagues listed below, for being named to the Spring 2021 Student Recognition of Excellence in Teaching: Class of 1934 CIOS Honor Roll-- honoring instructors who have at least a 70% response rate and place in the top 25% of the composite CIOS scores for each size group of large and small classes.  I’m also including the list from Fall 2020 below, in case it was lost in the pandemic.

Your efforts on behalf of our students are greatly appreciated, both by students and colleagues!  Further details on the Honor Roll: https://ctl.gatech.edu/hg/item/645854

Large Classes: Spring 2021

Neha Gupta

Sung Ha Kang

Siddhi Krishna

Miriam Kuzbary

 

Small Classes: Spring 2021

 Gary Lavigne

Dan Margalit

Lutz Warnke

 

Large Classes: Fall 2020

Alex Blumenthal 

Hector Banos

Klara Grodzinsky

Miriam Kuzbary 

Michael  Lavigne

Wenjing Liao

Marissa Loving

Dan Margalit 

Greg Mayer 

Stephanie Reikes

Victor Vilaca Da Rocha 

Zhiyu Wang

 

Small Classes: Fall 2020

Lutz Warnke

An ICERM semester-long program is being organized by Prof. John Etnyre and others, which will focus on braid groups, mapping class groups, and their generalizations.

Abstract

Braid groups were introduced by Emil Artin almost a century ago. Since then, braid groups, mapping class groups, and their generalizations have come to occupy a significant place in parts of both pure and applied mathematics. In the last 15 years, fields with an interest in braids have independently undergone rapid development; these fields include representation theory, low-dimensional topology, complex and symplectic geometry, and geometric group theory. Braid and mapping class groups are prominent players in current mathematics not only because these groups are rich objects of study in their own right, but also because they provide organizing structures for a variety of different areas. For example, in modern representation theory, important equivalences of categories are organized into 2-representations of braid groups, and these same 2-representations appear prominently in parts of geometry and mathematical physics concerned with mirror dualities; in low-dimensional topology, manifolds are presented and related to each other via braids and mapping classes.

Computational applications and questions about braid groups have also emerged in disparate mathematical contexts; in some cases, these coalesce around the same computational problem. For example, developing fast machine-based calculations of link homology invariants is a goal shared by representation theorists, low-dimensional topologists, symplectic and algebraic geometers, and string theorists. The proposed semester program aims to bring together researchers working in diverse areas through the common thread of their interaction with braid and mapping class groups. The overarching goals of the program are to establish and clarify the key questions driving each field, and to improve each group’s understanding of the tools, techniques, and perspectives of the others.

Organizing Committee

Confirmed Speakers & Participants

See the ICERM website 

https://icerm.brown.edu/programs/sp-s22/

Prof. Michael Loss has been selected as the Secretary of the International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP) and will serve a three year term, to end in 2024.

About IAMP

The International Association of Mathematical Physics (IAMP) was founded in 1976 in order to promote research in mathematical physics. IAMP brings together research mathematicians and theoretical physicists, including students. The association's ordinary members are individual researchers, although associate membership is available to organizations and companies.

The association sponsors the International Congress on Mathematical Physics (ICMP), which takes place every three years, and it also supports smaller conferences and workshops. There is a quarterly news bulletin.

IAMP currently awards two kinds of research prizes in mathematical physics at its triannual meetings, the Henri Poincaré Prize (created in 1997) and the Early Career Award (created in 2009).

 

More information can be found on the IAMP website.

http://www.iamp.org/page.php?page=page_start

Daniel Cruz and Margherita Maria Ferrari are hosting a Special Session titled  "Mathematical Models for Biomolecular and Cellular Interactions" at the Joint Mathematical Meeting 2022 in Seattle, WA,  January 5-8, 2022.  Please see 

https://www.jointmathematicsmeetings.org/meetings/national/jmm2022/2268_program_ss75.html 

for updates on their session and on the JMM overall. Their session will occur on Friday, January 7, 2022, and will include a featured talk by Dr. Suzanne Sindi (Chair of the Applied Mathematics Department at UC Merced) and talks by junior members from each of the four NSF-Simons Research Centers for Mathematics of Complex Biological Systems. Their intention for this session is not only to highlight the diverse areas of mathematics related to models involving biomolecular and cellular interactions, but also the diversity of the researchers involved in these areas. Please see the information below for more details.

JMM Special Session

Title: Mathematical Models for Biomolecular and Cellular Interactions

Date & Time: January 7, 2022 (8am - 11:50am PST and 1pm - 5:50pm PST)

Abstract:  Understanding biomolecular and cellular interactions is at the heart of vital questions in biology because such interactions have far-reaching effects on larger, fundamental processes. Mathematical models for these phenomena continue to provide new insights into open biological questions and serve as catalysts for advancing both biology and mathematics. In recent years, techniques from algebra, topology, and combinatorics have complemented more traditional approaches involving ordinary and partial differential equations in the development of tools describing biomolecular and cellular structures and dynamics. This session will focus on current advancements and open problems involving such methods. To highlight the breadth of these mathematical approaches, topics will include models for neuroscience, cancer evolution, genome sequence analysis, regulatory networks, and RNA/DNA structures. Moreover, we have invited junior and senior speakers from under-represented minorities in order to promote inclusivity and diversity within the associated research communities.

Current List of Speakers:

  1. Mario Banuelos (CSU Fresno)
  2. Veronica Ciocanel (Duke)
  3. Keisha Cook (Clemson)
  4. Adriana Dawes (OSU)
  5. Stephanie Dodson (UC Davis)
  6. Joel Dokmegang (Northwestern)
  7. Lina Fajardo-Gomez (U South Florida)
  8. Alvaro Fletcher (UC Irvine)
  9. Abdulmelik Mohammed (U South Florida)
  10. David Murrugarra (U Kentucky)
  11. Asja Radja (Harvard)
  12. Alexander Ruys de Perez (Georgia Tech)
  13. Suzanne Sindi (UC Merced)
  14. Luis Sordo Vieira (U Florida)
  15. Imelda Trejo (Los Alamos National Lab)
  16. Bin Xu (Clarkson)
  17. Nora Youngs (Colby)

 

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