Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

Congratulations go to SoM Professors Michael Lacey and Mohammad Ghomi for their recent award of the prestigious Simons Fellowship for 2020. This fellowship aims to make sabbatical research leaves more productive by extending them from a single term to a full academic year.

Awards are be based on the applicant’s scientific accomplishments in the five-year period preceding the application and on the potential scientific impact of the work to be done during the leave period. 

A Simons Fellowship in Mathematics provides salary replacement for up to half of the Fellow’s current academic-year salary, and up to $10,000 for expenses related to the leave. The Fellow’s home institution will receive an additional 20 percent overhead on allowable expenses.

The full list of 2020 Awardees is here.

Georgia Institute of Technology is ranked 31 out of 488 for the institution rank based on 2019 Putnam Competition student scores.

A total of 4,229 students from 570 instututions participated in the competition on December 7, 2019. Below are the students ranked 199th to 478th from the Georgia Institute of Technology:

• Mridul Bansal
• Tolson Bell
• Jeffrey Chang
• Alvin Chiu
• Daniel Hathcock
• Shyamal Patel
• Kalen Patton
• Matthew York
• Eric Zhu

Series Joint School of Mathematics and ACO Colloquium

Time Thursday, February 6, 2020 - 1:30pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)

Location Skiles 005

Speaker Wesley Pegden – Mathematics, Carnegie Mellon University

Organizer Prasad Tetali

In recent years political parties have more and more expertly crafted political districtings to favor one side or another, while at the same time, entirely new techniques to detect and measure these efforts are being developed.

The speaker will discuss a rigorous method which uses Markov chains---random walks---to statistically assess gerrymandering of political districts without requiring heuristic validation of the structures of the Markov chains which arise in the redistricting context. In particular, we will see two examples where this methodology was applied in successful 
lawsuits which overturned district maps in Pennsylvania and North Carolina.

The lecture video is now available in Georgia Tech's Institutional Repository, SMARTech.

Congratulations go to John Etnyre and Ronghua Pan, both recipients of the 2017 College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Award. This award recognizes the important contributions made by them – in the form of informal consultation, shared experiences, and advice and encouragement provided – which help the next generations succeed. 

College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Awards: Since 2002, the College of Sciences has supported various forms of formal mentoring for junior faculty. In addition, each of our schools has its own faculty mentoring program where, through informal consultations, the members of the community share their experience, provide advice and encouragement, and help the next generation succeed. The College and its ADVANCE Professor jointly established the College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Award to recognize these mentors. These awards recognize the efforts and achievements of College faculty members engaged in mentoring of faculty. Dean Goldbart is pleased to announce the recipients of the 2017 College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Award:

Professor John Etnyre (School of Mathematics)

Professor Ronghua Pan (School of Mathematics)

Associate Professor Raquel Lieberman (School of Chemistry & Biochemistry)

Recipients will receive the award along with $500. Recent recipients of College of Sciences Faculty Mentor Awards include:

• Shui-Nee Chow (Mathematics),
• Wendy Kelly (Chemistry & Biochemistry),
• Jennifer Curtis (Physics),
• Brett Wick (Mathematics),
• Christine Heitsch (Mathematics),
• Rigoberto Hernandez (Chemistry & Biochemistry),
• Joel Kostka (Biological Sciences; Earth & Atmospheric Sciences),
• Facundo Fernandez (Chemistry & Biochemistry),
• Rodney Weber (Earth & Atmospheric Sciences), and
• Luca Dieci (Mathematics).

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. 

Lutz Warnke is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Georgia Institute of Technology., whose research focuses on probabilistic combinatorics and random discrete structures. Prof. Warnke research interests include random graphs and processes, phase transitions, and combinatorial probability as well as applications thereof to extremal combinatorics, Ramsey theory, and related areas.

Professor Warnke completed his PhD at the University of Oxford in 2012 under the supervision of Oliver Riordan, and was afterwards elected a junior research fellow in mathematics at Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge.

Professor Warnke's other accolades include 2014 the Richard-Rado-Prize (German Mathematical Society), and in 2016 the Dénes König Prize (SIAM), and his research is supported by NSF grant DMS-1703516, a 2018 Sloan Research Fellowship, and now this 2020 NSF CAREER award.

Prior to summer 2017, the SoM offered degrees BS Applied Math and BS Discrete Math. Starting in Summer 2017, the School of Mathematics offers a BS in Mathematics with four optional concentrations:

• BS in Mathematics
• BS in Mathematics with a Concentration in Applied Mathematics
• BS in Mathematics with a Concentration in Discrete Mathematics
• BS in Mathematics with a Concentration in Probability and Statistics
• BS in Mathematics with a Concentration in Pure Mathematics  

No students have been admitted to the BS in Discrete Mathematics DMTH since Spring 2017. Students admitted to the BS in Discrete Mathematics DMTH program Spring 2017 or earlier had the option of completing the BS in Discrete Mathematics DMTH program earning a BS in Discrete Mathematics.

The teach-out plan is that current Discrete Mathematics students will be allowed to complete the requirements for the BS in Discrete Mathematics Catalog 2016-2017, the last catalog year in which students were admitted to BS in Discrete Mathematics. Such students would be awarded BS in Discrete Mathematics DMTH. 

There are currently 3 students in the DMTH program. One student is majoring in CS and DMTH but will drop the DMTH major this spring. The other two students: Sunny (Savannah) Thomson and Judith Brennan are on track to graduate with the BS DMTH degree in Spring 2020. These students will be the last to receive the BS DMTH degree from GT.

Professor Yao Yao has been selected as a 2020 Sloan Fellow.

The fellowships, awarded yearly since 1955, honor early-career scholars whose achievements mark them as among the very best scientific minds working today. A full list of the 2020 Fellows is available at the Sloan Foundation website at https://sloan.org/fellowships/2020-Fellows.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation awards this coveted fellowship to 126 early-career scholars which represent the most promising scientific researchers working today. Their achievements and potential place them among the next generation of scientific leaders in the U.S. and Canada. Winners receive $75,000, which may be spent over a two-year term on any expense supportive of their research.

Yao Yao is an Assistant Professor in SoM whose research interests include the mathematical analysis of nonlinear PDEs arising from fluid mechanics and mathematical biology. Prof. Yao recieved a postdoc at University of Wisconsin, Madison, under Alexander Kiselev and Andrej Zlatoš, and recieved her Ph.D. in Jun 2012 from UCLA, under the supervision of Inwon Kim. 

Matt Baker, the 2019 Greater Atlanta Magician of the Year, has been fascinated by feats of magic since he was a toddler. Because Baker is also a professor in the School of Mathematics, he has proof.

There he is, in a photo from his fourth birthday party, watching a magician entertain the youngsters. The photo is in his 2019 book about magic, The Buena Vista Shuffle Club. “I’m the kid with his mouth agape,” Baker writes in the introduction.

The book’s title, a play on the name of a famous group of Cuban musicians, describes his love of card tricks, the enduring appeal of magic, and how it followed him into adulthood. His “shuffle club” is a fictional group of magicians providing running commentary throughout the book.

“For some reason that I can’t fully explain, I’m passionate about magic and have been since I was a little kid,” Baker says in his book. “It’s not always clear to me how magic fits in, or should fit in, my already frenetic life. Even with the demands of family and a busy professional life, magic is where my mind always wants to go out to play. I’m unable to shake it, even when I try.”

Just how frenetic is Baker’s life? In addition to teaching math classes in some challenging topics like algebraic and arithmetic geometry, he is the College of Science’s first Associate Dean for Faculty Development. Named to the role in 2018, Baker helps develop programs that enhance the instructional, research, and career opportunities for faculty, with a focus on hiring, mentoring, retention, diversity, and inclusion.

Baker has published many mathematics research papers, and his accomplishments have won him numerous awards and honors, including his election as a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2012, and selection for the Simons Fellowship in Mathematics in 2017.

Baker has also edited or written four books, but only his most recent one, The Buena Vista Shuffle Club, is about his magic obsession. In this arena, Baker has earned his share of honors as well. He previously won the Greater Atlanta Magician of the Year award in 2015, and has now been crowned with the honor for a second time.

“It’s a big honor to win the Greater Atlanta Magician of the Year award, especially given that we have so many amazing magicians in the Georgia Magic Club, including a number of full-time professionals,” he says.

2019’s good year for Baker not only included publishing his first book on magic. He also recorded a two-hour video lecture for magicians through Murphy’s Magic, and gave an invited lecture at the International Brotherhood of Magicians’ National Convention in Scottsdale, Arizona.

On its website, the IBM calls itself “the world’s largest organization for the magical arts.” Baker belongs to the Atlanta branch, known as Ring 9, or the Georgia Magic Club. Ring 9 offers services for those who are wannabe Houdinis, or those who are making a living as a magician. The Society of American Magicians (SAM) is the other major magic organization in the U.S., and it offers similar resources. Both have local chapters all around the country, including the Atlanta Society of Magicians. Baker is a member of both organizations, and the Magician of the Year Award is a joint effort of the two groups.

A mathematician who moonlights as a working magician might make some think of one of Arthur C. Clarke’s “three laws” dealing with science, discovery, and the future.  The famed science fiction author, who wrote the original story that director Stanley Kubrick turned into 2001: A Space Odyssey, addressed magic in his third law:

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

“Definitely there are lots of connections between science and magic, and also between math and magic,” says Baker. “For example, there are many interesting magic tricks -- especially card tricks -- which are based on clever and intriguing mathematical principles.” Baker cites two books on this subject: Magical Mathematics: The Mathematical Ideas That Animate Great Magic Tricks, by Persi Diaconis and Ronald Graham, and Mathematical Card Magic: Fifty-Two New Effects, by Spelman College professor Colm Mulcahy.

Read the full Phys.org article here:

https://phys.org/news/2019-11-longstanding-conjecture-area-negatively-spaces.html

Read the full Johns Hopkins University article here:

https://hub.jhu.edu/2019/11/07/joel-spruck-mathematics-cartan-hadamard-manifolds-proof-science/

Johns Hopkins mathematician Joel Spruck and a former student recently succeeded in proving a long-standing conjecture about the area of negatively curved spaces, such as flower petals or coral reefs, a yearslong endeavor full of unexpected hurdles and sleepless nights. "This was quite emotionally difficult," Spruck says. "We died a thousand times and then lived. You have the feeling that the gods saved you somehow."