News

One of our undergraduate teams from the Math Modeling Experience, Bryan Bell, Yaroslav Gelfand, and Simpson Wong, competed in the prestigious Mathematical Contest in Modeling, and have had their solution designated as outstanding! For comparison, last year's contest had 664 entrants and 11 Outstanding designees (including teams from Harvard, MIT, RPI, Berkeley, Harvey Mudd, and Duke). Their report will be published in an upcoming issue of the UMAP Journal.

Anne Schilling has been selected to be a 2006-2007 Chancellor's Fellow. She is the fourth Mathematics professor to receive this honor.

Craig A. Tracy, has been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. This highly esteemed recognition places him amongst 195 of the finest minds and most influential leaders from this generation.

Gerry Puckett is proud to announce graduate students Sarah Williams won a dissertation year fellowship, Mike Barad won an NSF Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Fellowship, and Eva Strawbridge won 2006-07 Professor for the Future Fellowship. Joel Thomas, a math undergraduate, won a CWEA Kirt Brooks Scholarship.

Robin Wilson, Ph.D. graduate student in Mathematics, one of Abigail Thompson's students, has been selected for the Office of the President's Postdoctoral Fellow for the 2006-07 academic year. One of the primary goals is to honor students with a "record of mentoring or outreach activites that promote access and opportunity in higher education." Robin will be employed by the University of California, Santa Barbara, under the supervision of Martin Scharlemann in the Department of Mathematics.

Benjamin Morris has been selected for a 2006 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. This prestigious award is given to scholars who show the most outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge.

Jesse Johnson, Ph.D. graduate student in Mathematics, has been awarded an NSF Fellowship to Yale beginning Fall 2006. Jesse began his UCD studies in Fall 2002 after having completed his undergraduate work at Middlebury College in Vermont. Abigail Thompson is Jesse's dissertation adviser and his area of research is Heegaard splittings of 3-manifolds. He will do his postdoc at Yale under the supervision of Andrew Casson, a world-reknowned geometer, who was Greg Kuperberg's dissertation adviser.

Professor Evelyn Silvia, our colleague of 33 years, passed away on 1/21/06, after a courageous fight with ovarian cancer. She was 57 years old. The Mathematics Department has established the Evelyn M. Silvia Scholarship Fund for future mathematics teachers, in recognition of Evelyn's advocacy for the improvement of K-12 math education. The recipient of this scholarship will be announced at the Department's Annual Award Ceremony held in late May/early June each year.

For more details about Evelyn's life and contributions, peruse the articles below:

• UC Senate - In Memorium, Jan 2006
• UC Davis Dateline - Obituary: Evelyn Silvia, Mathematician and Educator, Jan 2006
• Business Journal - UC Davis gets $1.5M to improve K-12 teaching, Feb 2004
• UC Davis Dateline - Silvia is top math prof in the nation, Jan 2001

Arthur Krener has been selected as the winner of the 2006 Hendrik W. Bode Lecture Prize of the IEEE Control Systems Society. The award was announced at the 44th IEEE Conference on Decision and Control and the European Control Conference ECC 2005, held in Seville, Spain.