News

Robert Hildebrand receives the prestigious Herman Goldstine Memorial Postdoctoral Fellowship at IBM Research for 2015–2016.

Hildebrand received his Ph.D. in Applied Mathematics in 2013. His thesis, Algorithms and Cutting Planes for Mixed Integer Programs, was supervised by Professor Matthias Köppe. After graduation, he spent two years in Switzerland as a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Operations Research in the Department for Mathematics at ETH Zürich.

Ian Agol, a mathematics professor at UC Berkeley, was awarded the 2016 Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics in a ceremony last Sunday. Professor Agol spent the years 1998-2000 at UC Davis as a Visiting Research Assistant Professor, under the mentorship of Joel Hass. The prize was awarded to him "for spectacular contributions to low dimensional topology and geometric group theory, including work on the solutions of the tameness, virtual Haken and virtual fibering conjectures."

Mariel Vazquez, our faculty member who holds a joint appointment between the Mathematics Department and the Department of Microbiology and Molecular Biology, was recently interviewed by Brady Haran for his highly successful educational video series Numberphile. The interview formed the basis for a two-part video titled "The Shape of DNA" and "How DNA unties its own knots". Watch the videos here (Part 1) and here (Part 2).

The Center for Quantum Mathematics and Physics (QMAP) is a new initiative at UC Davis, aimed at fostering a vibrant research environment for addressing foundational questions in modern theoretical and mathematical physics. We welcome this joint Math and Physics venture!

Our graduate student Axel Saenz has won a fellowship from the Kavli Institute for Theoretical Physics (KITP) at the University of Califonia, Santa Barbara. The fellowship will enable him to spend 6 months at the Institute in 2016. His stay at KITP will coincide with the research program "New approaches to non-equilibrium and random systems: KPZ integrability, universality, applications and experiments" that will bring to the Institute many leading researchers in the field. Congratulations Axel!

Our 2011 graduate Tom Denton has published an interesting article in the August 2015 issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society describing his experiences working on mathematics education and research in Kenya in 2012-2013.

Professor Emeritus Arthur Krener has been named the recipient of the 2016 IEEE Control Systems Award. This prestigious award is given each year by the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE), the world's largest association of technical professionals, for outstanding contributions to control systems engineering, science, or technology. Dr. Krener's award citation reads: "For contributions to the analysis, control, and estimation of nonlinear control systems."

Niels Grønbech-Jensen, who holds a joint appointment in the Department of Mathematics and the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, has been appointed the statewide faculty executive director of the California State Summer School for Mathematics and Science (COSMOS) program. For more details see this Dateline article

Rafael Granero, who received his PhD in Mathematics in 2013 from the Autonomous University of Madrid (UAM), has been awarded the Vincent Caselles Prize for his research on partial differential equations and their applications in fluid dynamics. Dr Granero is currently a Krener Assistant Professor working with Professor Steve Shkoller.

The Vincent Caselles Prize is an early career award created at the end of 2014 by the Banco Bilbao Viscaya Argentaria (BBVA) Foundation and the Royal Spanish Mathematical Society. It aims to recognize the work done by researchers under the age of 30 who have defended their PhD theses in Mathematics in Spain within the last three years. The six winners of the 2015 prize were announced on June 11, 2015.

The paper "Phase Retrieval via Matrix Completion" written jointly by our faculty member Thomas Strohmer and his colleagues Candes, Eldar and Voroninski, already achieved substantial recognition when it was published in 2013 in the SIAM Journal on Imaging Sciences and later awarded a 2014 SIAM Outstanding Paper prize. Professor Strohmer's paper is now making waves again after being selected for republication as a highlighted "SIGEST" paper in the current issue of SIAM Review. In a note accompanying the SIGEST presentation, the SIAM Review editors write "This paper is about a novel algorithm for an important problem. It's remarkable that the entire paper is so accessible. Readers who are interested in linear algebra or optimization, in particular, will enjoy this paper." Professor Strohmer and his coauthors will be recognized at an awards event that will take place as part of the 2016 SIAM annual meeting.

The mentor profile of mathematics professor Jesús De Loera and computer science major Corina Putinar, “The Algorithm of Mentorship," is now live at the One UC Davis website.