April 25, 2014 | Atlanta, GA

Professors Christine Heitsch, Doug Ulmer, Brett Wick and Hao Min Zhou have received a large National Science Foundation Mentoring Through Critical Transition Points (MCTP) grant to support post-docs in the School of Mathematics. This five-year, $1.3M project is called IMPACT (Interdisciplinary Mathematics Preparation And Career Training). It will bring three cohorts of post-docs to Georgia Tech for three-year appointments, providing them with a variety of research, training, and mentoring opportunities centered around interactions between mathematics and other disciplines ("Math+X"). May 3, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Adam Marcus (PhD ACO'08, advisor Prasad Tetali) will receive the 2014 George Polya Prize at the SIAM Annual Meeting in Chicago in July. He will share the prize with his coauthors Daniel Spielman and Nikhil Srivastava for their proof of the Kadison-Singer Conjecture. The George Polya Prize, established in 1969, is given every two years, alternately in two categories: (1) for a notable application of combinatorial theory; (2) for a notable contribution in another area of interest to George Polya, such as approximation theory, complex analysis, number theory, orthogonal polynomials, probability theory, or mathematical discovery and learning. May 26, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Professor Christian Houdré is a member of the organizing committee for the Seventh International Conference on High Dimensional Probability that will take place May 26-31, 2014 at the Institut d'Études Scientifiques de Cargèse (IESC). The meeting will consist of a mix of formal and informal discussions and presentations. It is not only intended to present the current state-of-the art in the field, but also to point out important open problems and to set new directions for the field. Other organizers include: A list of topics includes: • Limit Theorems • Empirical Processes and their Applications • Probability Inequalities • High Dimensional Statistics • Small Deviations • Statistical Learning Theory • Spin/Glass Methods • Convex Geometry and Applications • Random Matrices • Additive Combinatorics May 26, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Tech's School of Mathematics is a big part of the Constructive Functions 2014 Conference to be held May 26-30, 2014 at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Professor Doron Lubinsky is a member of the organizing and scientific committees and Professor Jeff Geronimo is on the scientific committee for the conference. School of Mathematics alumnus, Professor Douglas Hardin, is also an organizer of this conference. The focus of this conference is on all aspects of constructive function theory, from asymptotics to zero distribution and on minimum energy problems on manifolds. This year, the conference will honor the 70th birthday of Ed Saff. In 2004, the School of Mathematics hosted the Constructive Functions Tech-04 Conference honoring Ed Saff's 60th birthday. The topics and broad international involvement in this conference reflect Ed's seminal contributions to these areas of research as well as his career long efforts to build connections between mathematical communities around the world. June 29, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Professor Greg Blekherman is one of the lecturers at the summer school "Convex Geometry - Discrete and Computational" to be held at the Berlin Mathematical School during June 29-July 10, 2015 and organized by Martin Henk (Technische Universität Berlin) and Raman Sanyal (Freie Universität Berlin). The aim of the summer school is to introduce contemporary methods from discrete and computational convex geometry to a broad audience ranging from graduate students to postdocs and junior faculty. The central theme is the computation with non-linear convex bodies by way of structural insights. The courses will be supplemented with problem sessions and guest lectures. Lectures include: • Alexander Barvinok (U Michigan) "Integer points in polyhedra" • Greg Blekherman (Georgia Tech) "Convex geometry of nonnegative polynomials" • Jesus de Loera (UC Davis) "Convex geometry problems from optimization" • Frank Vallentin (U Köln) "Packings, coverings, and embeddings" June 30, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Professor Stavros Garoufalidis was a member of the organizing committee for the Geometry, Quantum Topology and Asymptotics Conference held June 30-July 4, 2014 at the Confucius Institute of the University of Geneva, Switzerland. Professor Thang Le was an invited speaker. Other organizers included: • J. E. Andersen (Aarhus University) • R. Kashaev (University of Geneva) • F. Luo (Rutgers University) • R. van der Veen (Korteweg-de Vries Institute for Mathematics, University of Amsterdam) • S. T. Yau (Harvard University, Chinese University of Hong Kong, Tsinghua University) The goal of the conference was to bring together world-class experts and young researchers in the field to discuss recent advances in the topics of • Chern-Simons Theory • Hyperbolic Geometry • q-series • Quantum Invariants • SYZ-Mirrror symmetry • Teichmueller Space • Volume and AJ Conjectures Poster July 12, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Professor Igor Belegradek was an organizer for the annual Geometric Groups on the Gulf Coast (G3) conference. Each year it is held on the Gulf Coast at different locations. This year it was held in Pensacola, Florida March 27-30, 2014. The G3 has a very casual format to ease interaction among the participants, speakers and organizers. The conference begins with several educational talks. These are meant to be introductory talks in certain areas related to geometric group theory and intended for general audience. Other organizers include: • Josh Barnard, University of South Alabama • Ben McReynolds, Perdue University • Igor Mineyev, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign July 25, 2014 | Atlanta, GA Professor Sung Ha Kang is one of the inaugural College of Sciences Cullen-Peck Scholars. The award includes$10,000 in research or travel funds.

The awards are made possible through the generosity of alumni couple Frank Cullen (BS '73 Math, MS '76 ISyE, PhD '84 ISyE) and Libby Peck (BS '75 Math, MS '76 ISyE), who wish to recognize and support faculty development within the College of Sciences.

Sung Ha received this award for her influential work on mathematical techniques for digital image reconstruction such as de-noising, de-blurring, de-jittering, colorization and image segmentation. The work of Sung Ha and her colleagues shows that mathematical insight in this area -- which is rooted in techniques from nonlinear partial differential equations, modeling and numerical analysis -- can greatly advance the application of digital imaging to medicine, space exploration and numerous other fields.

July 27, 2014 | Atlanta, GA

The 17th International Conference on Random Structures and Algorithms RS&A 2015 has selected Professor Prasad Tetali to be one of the plenary speaker at the next meeting to be held at Carnegie Mellon University July 27-31, 2015.

The conference, organized biennially since 1983, brings together probabilists, discrete mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists working in probabilistic methods, random structures and randomized algorithms. The program will consist of one-hour plenary addresses by the invited speakers and parallel sessions of 25-minute contributed talks. It will begin on Tuesday morning and end on Saturday afternoon. Other plenary speakers include:

• Jozsef Balogh, University of Illinois
• Amin Coja-Oghlan, Goethe University
• Shafi Goldwasser, MIT
• Peter Keevash, University of Oxford
• Eyal Lubetzky, New York University
• Andrew Thomason, Cambridge University

August 3, 2014 | Atlanta, GA

Professor Greg Blekherman is a member of the organizing committee for the SIAM Conference on Applied Algebraic Geometry to be held in Daejeon, South Korea at the National Institute for Mathematical Sciences (NIMS) and Korean Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST) during August 3-7, 2015.

The SIAM Activity Group in Algebraic Geometry brings together researchers who use algebraic geometry in industrial and applied mathematics. Algebraic geometry is interpreted broadly to include at least: algebraic geometry, commutative algebra, noncommutative algebra, symbolic and numeric computation, algebraic and geometric combinatorics, representation theory and algebraic topology. These methods have already seen applications in: biology, coding theory, cryptography, combustion, computational geometry, computer graphics, quantum computing, control theory, geometric design, complexity theory, machine learning, nonlinear partial differential equations, optimization, robotics and statistics.