VIGRE

Grad Student Science Applications Down

It is our experience that the number of graduate students applications
from especially China are down. This is nationwide phenomena is reported in
the New York Times.

In fact, at Georgai Tech last year, of a number of Chinese students admitted to the program, only one managed to get a visa.

A brief report from Budapest

This semester, there are three people associated with Georgia Tech, David Eger and Casey Warmbrand who have just graduated from GT, and Adam Marcus, who starts Grad School at GT in the Fall 2004 semester. David and Adam are there on Fulbright grants. And Casey is there as part of the
Budapest Semester in Mathematics.

Casey has been there for little over a month. The first 2 weeks were spent learning hungarian, a very unusual language. Casey has 4 math classes
and 1 history of math class, and is really enjoying all the material
covered.

"The other students in the program are a whole lot of fun, and of very
varying backgrounds, which makes working together on problem sets pretty
interesting."

Casey has also applied for grad school, and currently has full support at
the University of Arizona.

2004 REU program: Now Recruiting

Research Experience for Undergraduates

We will be running a an REU, with GT undergradutes teamed with a facutly mentor.

--> You'll get paid $4,750 (But must be an US Citizen or Permenent Resident)
More rules.

--> You will need to arrange a research topic and faculty mentor.
A starting point for a list of current faculty who have projects in mind,
or have directed past projects, go here.

--> After lining up a mentor, be sure that I am aware of it.
Deadline: March 26, 2004 (two weeks after spring break)

There are 10 slots. We'll be recruiting students until they are all filled.

--> See either me, or Professor Wang to get some pointers to possible faculty
for a topic you are interested in.

Three New VIGRE Postdocs

We have three acceptances on the VIGRE postdocs,
completing the hiring of postdocs in record time.
Those hired are:

Name, University, Faculty Mentor

Nathan Geer, U of Oregon, Stavros Garofouloudis
Svetlana Krat, Penn State, Igor Belegradek
Dmitry Gererot, Penn State, Jean Bellisard

It appears that GT has been more competitive than
in past two years in recruiting postdocs for these
positions.

These three people will join our current postdocs:

Mason Porter
Ravi Montenegro
Mark Demers
Tomasso Pacini
Daniel Fox

Recent Papers from Georgia Tech

You can get a quick summary of some of the recent research interests of the
School of Mathematics faculty and graduate students by following the two
Arxiv links, one for Mathematics .

As I write this, the lead article is by a graduate student, Rafael Komendarczyk.
Professors Carlen and Ganbo's recent Annals of Math article on the use of the Wasserstein metric in PDEs appears halfway down the list, as does Professor Croot's Annals of Math paper on coloring fractions.

This is interesting, but not complete, picture of research at GT Math. It doesn't reveal the
papers posted to the Non linear Science ArXiv. Nor do all professors actively use the ArXiv
to post their papers.

Upcoming Steltson Lectures

The Steltson Lectures will consist of three seperate events:

Two Lectures by Professor Gerhad Huisken on Feb 19 and 20th. And to lead off the events, a comic monolog by Josh Kornblouth on his experience with matheamtics at Princeton. This event will be ticketed, and GT students can
get reduced tickets of $5.

Professor Gerhard Huisken, of the Albert-Einstein-Institut für Gravitationsphysik of the Max-Planck Society, will deliver this year's Stelson Lecture on February 19th. Professor Huisken, a master expositor and expert on curvature driven flows, will describe in two lectures the striking recent developments in curvature flow and the situations in which they apply, including relations to Perelman's recent proof of the Poincaré conjecture. Huisken's first lecture, Classifying manifolds and hypersurfaces by geometric evolution equations, is intended for a general audience.

Majors Lunch, Spring Edition

Pi Mu Epsilon is happy to sponsor a spring version of "Meet the Math Majors" next Thursday (12 Feb 2004) from 11am-1pm in the Skiles
lounge. Please join us for food and fellowship -- all math majors,
professors, and staff are invited.

--Alan Michaels


Upcoming PME events:

High School Math Competition: 20 March
Annual Spring Picnic: April

PME is the Undergrad Math Club.

Geeks & the NFL

With a no-superstar Super Bowl game being played today, I was wondering about the role of statistics in Football. After all, Bill James' Statistical Abstract of Baseball had been making the press quite a bit. Long an outsider, there is
now a core of managers who follow the Jamesian approach to baseball. James
is himself an advisor to the Red Sox.

It turns out that new analyses of Football strategy are being formed, and
are incorporated into the strategies of the New England Patriots. A New York Times article reports that the Coach of the Patriots had read a working paper by David Romer on fourth down strategy.

The Boston Globe has an article on Aaron Schatz, a football Pythagoras in the words of the article.

A lot more of Schatz' football data is at his Football Outsiders web site.