The summerwill see several new PhDs defend or graduate. They are
availible at
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~harrell/GP/Dissert/
Read on for the list of all seven PhDs.
1. Xuelei Wang, 8 November, 2002,
Level Set Model of Microstructure Evolution in the Chemical Vapor
Infiltration Process (abstract)
Advisor: Shi Jin.
2. Erik Boczko, 13 November, 2002,
Polygonal approximation for flows
Advisor: Konstantin Mischaikow.
Eric is an assistant professor of biomedical Informatics at Vanderbilt University.
3. Milena Khlabystova, 3 April, 2003,
Dynamical and Statistical Properties of Lorentz Lattice Gases,
Advisor, Leonid Bunimovich
4. Kasso Okoudjou , 22 April, 2003,
Characterization of function spaces and boundedness of bilinear
operators through Gabor frames (abstract)
Advisor, Christopher Heil.
Kasso will be taking a postdoctoral position at Cornell University.
5. Laura Sheppardson , 27 June 2002
Grah Theory
Advisor, Xingxing Yu
Laura will be taking a tenure track position at Ole Miss.
6. Sean Curran
Graph Theory
Advisor, Xingxing Yu
Sean will take a position with the National Security Agency.
7. Sarah Day
Dyanmics
Advisor: Konstantin Mischaikow
Sarah will take a one year postdoc at Leiden, Netherlands, and then
a postdoc at Cornell University.
Also at the NYT, I learned of the annual artistic competition at the journal "Physics of Fluids."
The journal has an annual competition to create beautiful and artistic images of fluid motion.
There are 15 years of archives at the web sites above. And each year there are about 10-15 winners, which can be photos, simulations, and movies of either.
Our own Peter Mucha submits pics to the competition, but there is some bias against simulations, as they can be very easy to compute.
Peter writes "Many of my favorite Gallery pictures are from John Bush in Math at
MIT. He has openly made it his goal to get a winner in the contest
every single year, and has been on a streak of 4 or 5 years in a row.
One of his earlier years he was doing this, he had two beautiful
submissions with only one winner, and we all concluded that there must
be an unwritten rule (or very strong bias at a minimum) against giving
two simultaneous "winner" ribbons to the same group or person. So he
keeps a backlog of potential winning photographs in his lab, and
submits only one set each year."
Indeed, check out Bush's Fish Bones, from 2002, or from 2001, his Polygons .
I also like the Sound of Snapping Shrimp. The snap comes from a popping bubble.
Dr. Lawrence Sirovich, a mathematician at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine examined the votes on Supreme Court decisions. He shows that the range of voting patterns is very limited. Most of the decisions can be modeled by flipping about 4.5 coins.
This is hardly surprising---all it takes is five votes to win a case in the Supreme court. But it is interesting that such things can be quantified in specific ways.
Using singular value decomposition, Sirovich shows that the voting patterns can be described almost exclusively by a linear combination of two vectors, one being the unanimous decision, and the other being the 5-to-4 decision.
This past week, the NYT has had three articles of interest to the Math crowd.
The first is an article about one Professor Alan Synder
of the University of Sydney Australia. The good professor hooks up people
to a magnetic head dress. And the a few minutes later, these people exhibit
a remarkable improvement at skills like drawing, and mentally identifying primes.
The article compares these mental tricks to savants, like Dustin Hoffman's "Rainman." Savants can be denigrated as people who are amazingly good at things most people do not want to do. But savants do exhibit a range of remarkable skills, from music to arts. Russell Lyons pointed me to
the web site hosted by the Wisconsin Medical Society with extensive information about savants.
From kessar@math.ohio-state.edu Wed Jun 11 16:18:06 2003
Date: Tue, 10 Jun 2003 20:34:08 -0400 (EDT)
From: Radha Kessar
To: SURC: ;
Dear Colleague,
This is a first anouncement for a
summer undergraduate research conference in mathematics
at The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio from August 8-10. Please
see the attached pdf file for details.
Paper posters will be mailed to you soon as well.
We very much hope that you will let your students know about this
conference and will encourage them to attend. Also, we would appreciate it
very much if you could forward this announcement to any of your colleagues
who might be interested.
Thank you.
Sincerely,
Phil Huneke,
Thomas Kerler,
Radha Kessar.
Mason Porter, VIGRE/GT postdoc, in his second year of the position, will be a Project 2003-04 NEXT fellow. Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) is sponsored by the MAA, and is aimed at new or recent Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences who are interested in improving the teaching and learning of undergraduate mathematics.
Project NExT is the web.
Mason will teach a course in mathematical modelling as part of his participation in this program.