VIGRE

Buy your Erdos Number

William Tozier, who will be a graduate student in Operations Research
at Ann Arbor, has auctioned his research services on ebay.

The winner of the auction Ian Grove-Stephensen, will get 40 hours of Mr Tozier's services. Any publication that results will be a jointly authored paper.
Since Mr Tozier has an Erdos number of 4, Mr Grove-Stephensen will be then
have an Erdos number of 5.

Paul Erdos, who died just a few years ago, was a fantastically prolific mathematician, with well over 1000 publications, most of them joint.
The Erdos number is a crude measure of Paul Erdos' influence on mathematics.
An individual's Erdos number is the mininum number of coauthors needed to trace back to Erdos himself. So direct coauthors with Paul Erdos would have a
Erdos number of 1. Their coauthors would in turn have an Erdos number of 2, and so on.

The Chronicle of Higher Ed has an article about the auction. You can also see Mr Tozier's
blog .

Spring Picnic Photos

Rena Brakebill has set a page with a number of photos of the
Math Spring Picnic.

Featured in this photo are, left to right, Alan Michaels (grad), Trong Nguyen (under), Stephanie Bent (under), and Patty Pichardo (grad). They are receiving an award for their outstanding work in getting the High School Math Competition up and running this year.

Problem of the Week

David Jimenez, a graduate student, has set up a Problem of the Week page.

Email subcriptions to the Page are availible.

Primes in Arithmetic Progression

Ben Green, of the Pacific Institute for Mathematical Sciences, and Terrance
Tao of UCLA, have established a remarkable result on the prime numbers, that
they contain arbitrairly long arithmetic progressions, and indeed, every
subset of the primes of postivie density also contain such progressions.

The paper is at the arXiv.

Ivars Peterson has a nice write up of it at Science News.

And also see Terrance Tao's What's New page for more background on how this
remarkable proof was found.

SACNAS annual meeting in October 2004

The Society for Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science
(SACNAS) is committed to increasing the participation of groups that
have traditionally been underrepresented in mathematics and science. In
particular, SACNAS has worked for 30 years to encourage Chicano/Latino
and Native American students to pursue the graduate degrees necessary
for research careers in science and mathematics.

The 2004 SACNAS annual conference will take place in Austin, TX on
October 21-24. The Conference will include workshops on the graduate
school process, recruiter and exhibitor sessions, scientific symposia,
and oral and poster presentations by graduate and undergraduate
students. This year, with sponsorship from the National Security Agency,
the National Science Foundation, and the American Mathematical Society,
the SACNAS Conference will have a large number of mathematics
activities, including

* two concurrent mini-courses for students, one in coding theory
and one in mathematical methods in bioinformatics
* one mathematics minisymposium
* one statistics minisymposium
* one bioinformatics minisymposium
* graduate students oral presentations

Our goal is to bring together approximately 200 mathematicians and
students to develop and strengthen professional networks. We encourage
you to visit the SACNAS mathematics web site
(http://www.uprh.edu/~sacnas) for more information on the mathematics
activities and the SACNAS web site (http://www.sacnas.org) for
information on the conference, registration and financial aid for
students. Please note that the financial aid deadline is June 14, 2004.
Students of all levels are strongly encouraged to submit abstracts for
poster or oral presentations.

The participants at the SACNAS conference will include approximately
1000 students majoring in the sciences and mathematics. This represents
an excellent recruiting opportunity for your institution/agency.
Securing a booth or table as an exhibitor at the conference also allows
SACNAS to fund more students to the meeting. For more exhibitor
information, please write to exhibit@sacnas.org.

National Science Board on declining US PhDs

The New York Times for the second time this week has an article about declining numbers of science PhDs.

The impetus this time is a new report by the National Science Board. From the NYT article:

"For many years we have benefited from minimal competition in the global science and engineering labor market," he said. "But attractive and competitive alternatives are now expanding around the world."

The press release from the National Science Board states that "U.S.-based authors continue to produce the largest share of scientific journal articles, but U.S. article output has flattened since 1992, a trend that has not been observed in other developed countries. The National Science Foundation (NSF) is engaged in an in-depth study of worldwide trends in article production and how and why they may be changing (Chapter 5)."

The full report is here.

School of Math gets 2 FRG awards

Faculty at the School of Mathematics have received two Focused Research Groups awards.
These are highly competetive awards, with well under 10% of all applications funded. The awards fund research that cannot be done within the scope of a single mathematics department. These awards are:

 

1.  Robin Thomas - Georgia Tech  

     Paul Seymour - Princeton

     Neil Robertson - Ohio State

 

To investigate questions in Graph Theory, building upon the recent solution of the Perfect Graph Conjecture.

 

2.  Wilfrid Gangbo - Georgia Tech (total budget $804K)

      Luis Caffarelli - Texas

      Lawrence Evans - Berkeley

      Mikhail Feldman - Wisconsin

     Robet McCann - Toronto

 

For investigations into Monge Ampere equation and mass transfer. This is the second FRG award to go to this group of people.

US leading role in Science in Decline

An article in the New York Times points to a recent trend of the United States position of a leader in science and innovation as being eroded.

Europe and Asia are increasingly the locations of authors of the patents, and papers published in leading scientific papers. The number of PhDs is up in these regions. And the number of PhDs from these regions who are trained in the US, and then return is also up. Of course graduate admissions from this area are also down. All of this points to an area of significant concern about the role of science and technology in the future of the US.

A Gerogia Tech professors from Public Policy, Dana Hicks, is quoted prominently in the article.

Patricia Pichardo a Sam Nunn International Security Fellow

Patricia Pichardo has been selected to participate in the
Sam Nunn International Security Fellows Program. The purpose of this program is to engage scientists at all levels of their career in security issues.

This is part of a large iniatiative, supported in part by the Macarthur Foundation, and involving several universities. Congratulations Patty.