August 29, 2004
Liang Peng named von Humboldt Professor
Professor Liang Peng has just received a Humboldt Fellowship,
which will support a 6 month's stay in Germany
within the next year.
The von Humboldt Foundation sponsors a large number of scholarhips and fellowships in a full range of academic disciplines for study and research at German universities and institutes.
Congratulations, Liang Peng.
August 27, 2004
East Asia Summer Institutes, Opportunity for Grad Students
A letter from the NSF
Dear Colleague,
The Summer Institutes in Asia and Australia 2004 program is complete and it
is now time to prepare for the 2005 program. One hundred and fifty US
graduate students became internationally experienced researchers by spending
eight weeks conducting research and experiencing life in Australia, China,
Japan, Korea and Taiwan. Congratulations to all of them for taking that
first step towards a lifetime of collaboration. With your encouragement
more students will learn about and apply to this program for the next cycle.
I would like to ask for your cooperation with the broad distribution of this
information to your colleagues, peers and various institution offices
responsible for advising students and promoting international collaboration.
The deadline for applying to the 2005 program is December 10, 2004.
Top 2 websites for this program
http://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2003/nsf03608/nsf03608.htm - Program Announcement
http://www.nsftokyo.org/spmenu.html - Covers important topics including the
following:
* Handbooks on 2005 East Asia Summer Programs
* Potential Host Institutions for East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes
* How to Apply to the East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes
* Hints to East Asia and Pacific Summer Institutes' Applicants for
Initiating
* Contact with Prospective Hosts
* Participants for Summer Programs in Japan 2003
* NSF Advice to Participants in EAPSI in Japan
* Advice Letters from Previous Participants in Summer Programs
* Research Reports from Previous Summer Programs Participants
2004 Summer Press Release
150 U.S. Graduate Students Embark on Research Experiences in East Asia and
Australia
http://www.nsf.gov/od/lpa/newsroom/pr.cfm?ni=10000000000104
Best regards,
Tony Teolis
Program Specialist
Office of INT Science and Engineering
National Science Foundation
Tel: 703-292-7343
ateolis@nsf.gov
www.nsf.gov/sbe/int
August 25, 2004
Undergrads at January Math Meeting
Mason Porter's message to undergrads about the January annual meeting of the American Mathematial Society to be held in Atlanta, January 5th to 8th.
Every January, the MAA and AMS host their joint mathematics meetings, which is a very large international math conference with tons of good
opportunities for undergrad students to present their work, interact with professionals, etc. In 2005, the meeting will be occurring in
Atlanta from 1/5-1/8!
The website for the meeting is: http://www.ams.org/amsmtgs/2091_intro.html
Because of how easy it will be for you to attend this meeting, I _highly_ suggest that you submit an abstract (deadline 10/5) to present your
work. I particular recommend that do a poster presentation, although short speaking slots (10 min) are also available.
(The website above contains submission procedures for abstracts.)
Please submit an abstract even if you don't know if you'll be in town then. Registration for undergrads costs $21 if done by 12/10 and $27
at the door (and this should be trivially fundable for those of you who have participated in VIGRE), and submitting your abstract now is
_not_ a commitment to attend. (You'll just send an e-mail later to cancel if you can't come.)
For people who are not math majors: Theoretical projects in other sciences are still applied math projects and therefore highly relevant, so
it doesn't matter what subject it shows on your diploma, etc. You'll still get _a lot_ out of going to this conference.
For people just starting their projects: The worst case scenario is that you'll make an expository poster discussing the background of the
problem, and that is also worth doing.
August 24, 2004
Three Links of interest
Three links that shed light on the level of activity at the School of Mathematics
follow.
1. Currently active NSF grants.
These are grants awarded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences, to a researcher with instituional affiliation at Georgia Insituite of Technology.
An interesting list, with 47 currently active grants. (The full list is after the jump.)
Of course, not every grant in the School of Math goes through the DMS,
nor is every such grant given to a member of the Mathematics faculty.
2. MathSciNet papers, with an author listed as
Georgia Tech School of Mathematics, and published after 1999. (Georgia Tech
MathSciNet acess required.)
The search returns 377 papers, by School of Math faculty, visitors, postdocs, and graduate students. Of course there are some anomolous records among the list, but probably no more than about 10% are such.
3. arXiV papers from Georgia Tech This is only posts to the mathematics
section of the arXiV, which are initiated from Georgia Tech. Some faculty post
much more frequently to the non linear science portion. Still there
are about 30 papers for 2003, and 31 for the year 2004, to date.
Welcome to New Faculty
We welcome to Georgia Tech, and the School of Mathematics,
two new tenure track faculty, and three VIGRE postdocs.
Matt Baker brings to the faculty expertise in algebraic number theory,
and a lot interest in sharing that expertise with GT undergraduates and
graduate students. He comes to GT most recently from University
of Georgia at Athens. Matt is a 1999 Berkeley PhD, and had a postdoctoral
position at Harvard.
Serge Guillas has expertise in Statistics, and for the last two years, has been involved in an interdisciplinary effort to assess the long term evolution of stratospheric ozone.
The three VIGRE postdocs are Nathan Geer, from the University of Oregon,
with an interest in knot theory. Svetlana Krat and Dmitry Gerenrot both come from Penn State University. Svetlana does research in geometry, and Dmitry in non-commutative geometry.
Houdre Named IMS Fellow
A message from Professor Trotter:
External recognition of the singular achievements of
members of the School of Mathematics family continues
to pour in ... a ringing tribute to the talent and energy
exhibited throughout the halls of Skiles. Here are three recent
examples.
Christian Houdre has been named a Fellow of the Institute
of Mathematical Statistics. Professor Houdre received the
award for his outstanding work in the theories and applications
of non-stationary, non-Gaussian processes, wavelet transforms,
and isoperimetric inequalities.
Each Fellow nominee is assessed by a committee of his/her peers for the
award. In 2004, after reviewing 37 nominations, 12 were selected for
Fellowship. Created in 1933, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics is a
member organization which fosters the development and dissemination of the
theory and applications of statistics and probability. The IMS has 3800
active members throughout the world. Approximately 10% of the IMS
membership has earned the status of fellowship.
August 21, 2004
2 REU Projects at Ohio State Conference
Ohio State is hosting an annual Young Mathematicians Conference.
This looks like a nice conference, with a wide set of excellent speakers, including the incomparable John Conway. GT undergrads should keep this in mind for next year.
Georgia Tech has two REU projects represented in the poster session , scroll half way down to see the abstracts of Thomas Callaghan's abstract, and of Julie Bjornstadt and Alexei Dachevski.
Julie and Alexi are reporting on work from the GT REU from this past summer.
It is in the area of math biology, and was done under the supervision of Professors Porter and Bunimovich in Mathematics, and Professor Christopher Klausmeir of the School of Biology.
The project concerns the dynamical behavior of photoplankton populations. These are critical populations in the oceans, motivating the study. The methods are from dynamical systems. They report that these populations exhibit long time stability, with relaxed oscillations. The bifurcation behavior is studied, as a function of the amount of nutrient available.
Thomas Callaghan is speaking on College Football Rankings. And if you don't know about this project a google search on "monkey bcs" is amusing. The top links are to Thomas Callaghan's work with Professors Peter Mucha and Mason Porter on this topic. A powerpoint file of his poster is available.
Mona Meddin in the Math Lab
Mona Meddin has joined the School of Mathematics as an Academic Professional. Ms Meddin, who has been at Georgia Tech since 1986,
has a long involvement with specialized help for students outside of the
classroom setting.
The MathLab is a long running lab for drop in tutoring for core curriculum
math courses, all of the Calculus classes for instance. With no person
directly involved in the operation of the Lab, it is probably an under utilized
service. Ms Meddin has a number of ideas for improving the usefulness
of the Lab.
This includes expanding the list of client courses, up to the Junior level courses, which are largely service courses for other departments, to widening the expertise of the tutoring availible. One of the more interesting ideas is encouraging Professors to hold an office hour in the Lab.
August 18, 2004
The Bidding for an Erdos Number of 5
A few weeks ago, an auction held at Ebay gave the winning bidder
40 hours of research time from an erstwhile graduate student.
The person in question has an Erdos Number of 4, so the winning bidder
would have an Erdos number of 5.
An Erdos number refers back to the number of links through coauthors on published papers needed to trace back the famously prolific Pal Erdos.
It turns out that the auction had an unusual denoument, as detailed in this article from Science News.
Georgia Tech students don't have to go to Ebay for this small piece of fame.
Professors Duke, Trotter, and Tetali are all among the 509 coauthors of Uncle Pal. Write a paper with one of them, and you'll join the nearly 7000 people with
an Erdos number of 2. More such facts can be found at the Erdos Number Project.
August 17, 2004
Football Bowl Rankings
Peter Mucha, Mason Porter, and Thomas Callaghan's having been thinking about the problems and alternatives in Football Bowl Rankings. Their article has just been posted at the
Notices of the AMS.
It is free to the world to read. This project begain as an VIGRE sponsored REU project. The work
has captured a wide audience, having been reported in Nature Online, and ESPN Magazine.
In fact ESPN was the first to publish a piece on their work.
Steven Lansel's Billiards Software
Steven Lansel is an undergraduate, with double majors in EE and Math. He, with
Professors Porter, Bunimovich, and Mucha, has been developing software to simulate the
dyanimics of billiard tables of general specification.
Above, is a `mushroom.' Half of an ellipse sitting on a rectangle. Some periodic orbits are shown.
The website has a lot more pictures,
some documentation, and the MATLAB code.
August 16, 2004
Problem of the Week
I hope all of you have had a good summer. Now, here we are, back for the
fall. I am writting all of you because this semester we are running again
the project "Problem of the Week" and I would like you (specially those
of you who are teaching for math undergrads) to encourage your students to
try this problems. I have already posted the first problem of this
semester on the web at
http://www.math.gatech.edu/~pow/
Thank you very much. Have a nice semester,
________________________________________________
________| David Jimenez |________
\ | Mail: djimenez@math.gatech.edu | /
\ | gtg354q@mail.gatech.edu | /
\ | MSN: davidjimenezlopez81@hotmail.com | /
/ | ICQ# 56881161 Tel. 1 (404) 894 4756 | \
/ |________________________________________________| \
/_______) (_______\
August 13, 2004
Tiffany Gobles to Defend Thesis
Tiffany Gobles will defend her thesis, on the subject of automatic theorem proving, on
August 17. Her thesis director is Professor Belinfante.
August 11, 2004
Quantum Info Theory
New Course Announcement for the Fall Semester
Physics 8803C - Special Topic - Quantum Information Theory
Instructor : Dr. John Cortese (GTRI)
This course is a broad introduction to quantum information theory
and quantum communication theory. Topics to be covered include :
* Closed and open quantum system dynamics.
* Mathematical formulation of a quantum channel.
* The complete positivity constraint on quantum channels.
* Measurements in closed and open quantum systems.
* The classical channel capacity of a quantum channel -
How many classical bits can one send over a quantum channel ?
* The quantum state channel capacity of a quantum channel - How well
does a quantum state "survive" transmission over a quantum channel ?
* Quantum state compression.
* Quantum state coding theory.
* Open questions in Quantum Information Theory.
The discussion of each topic will begin with an overview of
the classical concept, and proceed to the quantum version.
The target audience for this course is advanced undergraduates and
graduate students in Physics, Mathematics, Electrical Engineering
and Computer Science. Prerequisites are an undergraduate course in
quantum mechanics or permission of the instructor.
Grading Scheme : Pass/Fail
Course Credits : 3 Credit Hours
Time/Location : MWF 2-3 PM, Room : Howey N210
Text : Quantum Computation and Quantum Information
by Michael Nielsen and Ike Chuang.
For more information, please see the course url at
www.physics.gatech.edu/academics/Classes/fall2004/8803/c.
Also feel free to contact John Cortese at (404) 385 - 2930
or john.cortese AT gtri.gatech.edu.