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• USC Undergraduates Bring Home Datafest 2013 Prize

  

  Nine talented USC undergraduates competed in Datafest 2013 -- a 48 hour around the clock statistics competition held annually at UCLA's IPAM -- led by Mathematics faculty Prof. Jay Bartroff and sponsored by the Mathematics Department, and brought home one of only 3 prizes, for "Best Data Visualization." The field included 110 undergraduates from Cal State Long Beach, Pomona College, UCLA, and UC Riverside in addition to the USC team, composed of Anthony Colombo, Bo Wen Lin, Ashley Luo, Reagan Rose, Yawei Suo, Daniel Wang, Zhixia Zhang, and Biexi Zhong. Congratulations!

• Congratulations to the graduate students recognized by the 2013 Graduate Student Prizes!

  

   

  This year's recipients are

  • Edward and Dolores Blum Graduate Research Prize: Triet Pham
  • Dennis R. Estes Graduate Research Prize: Yin Tian
  • Theodore E. Harris Graduate Research Prize: Umit Islak
  • Dennis R. Estes Graduate Teaching Prize: Selenne García-Torres
  • Theodore Edward Harris Graduate Teaching Prize: Kasia Williams
  • CAMS Prize for Excellence in Research: Sushmita Allam

  Congratulations to all of them!

  Picture (left to right): F. Bonahon, T. Pham, K. Williams, S. García-Torres, Umit Islak, K. Alexander.

   

• Mohammed Ziane receives 2012 Algerian Scholar award.

  This award is  given to an Algerian scientist who produced scientific, educational, or intellectual work in any field of natural sciences and humanities, and who honored  the  country of Algeria in international events.

  See:
  https://www.facebook.com/notes/almanahidj-institute/algerian-scholar-award/492376244162070
  http://www.veecos.net/portal/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id=259&Itemid=357
  
  

• Solomon Golomb, Member of the CAMS Board, receives the US National Medal of Sciences.

  
  
  

  Solomon Golomb, USC University Professor, Andrew and Erna Viterbi Professor of Communications and Professor of Mathematics was awarded the National Medal of Science in 2013. This is the highest honor bestowed by the US government on scientists, engineers and inventors.

• Congratulations to Professors Aravind Asok and Aaron Lauda who both won NSF CAREER Awards

  
  
  

  Professor Aravind Asok has been selected to receive a National Science Foundation CAREER award based upon his proposal, entitled "Vector bundles, rational points and homotopy theory". Professor Aaron Lauda's award is based upon his proposal, entitled "Interactions between knot homology and representation theory". The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program is a Foundation-wide activity that offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.

• New AAAS Fellows include two mathematicians from USC

  
  
  

  The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) announced the list of the new AAAS Fellows that will be inducted at the annual meeting of the association on February 6, 2013. The individuals so recognized include Professors Susan Friedlander and Susan Montgomery. Great fellowship year for the two Susans of the department! (See below).

• Bob Guralnick to give plenary address at the JMM

  
  
  

  Professor Robert Guralnick will give a plenary address at the Joint Mathematical Meetings, to be held in San Diego on January 9-12, 2013. This is the annual convening of the american and international mathematical community, organized by the main US mathematical associations. Guralnick will give one of only 16 plenary addresses, and his selection is a great recognition of the quality of his work. To give some perspective, the 2012 edition of the JMM attracted over 7000 participants from the US and abroad.

  Since honors never come alone, Bob Guralnick is also beginning a term on the Editorial Board of the very prestigious journal Annals of Mathematics.

• Seven USC mathematicians honored as AMS Fellows (and more!)

  
  
  

  The inaugural list of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society includes 7 mathematicians from USC. These are: Francis Bonahon, Eric Friedlander, Susan Friedlander, Solomon Golomb, Robert Guralnick, Ko Honda, Susan Montgomery (pictured above, except Guralnick and Honda who are on sabbatical leave). The American Mathematical Society recently instituted the AMS Fellows program to "create an enlarged class of mathematicians recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the profession." For the first year of the program, the initial list of Fellows consists of 1139 members worldwide who have already been recognized by prestigious awards of the american or international mathematical community. In subsequent years, the total number of Fellows is expected to grow to about 1500, corresponding to 5% of the membership of the AMS. More information about the AMS Fellows program can be found at:

  http://www.ams.org/profession/ams-fellows/ams-fellows

   

  The Department is also proud to report that, in addition, Susan Friedlander elected as Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and Alexander Tartakovski as Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. SIAM membership approved the SIAM Fellows Program in 2008 to designate as Fellows of the Society certain members who have made outstanding contributions to fields served by SIAM. This year Susan Friedlander joined Michael Waterman as a SIAM Fellow.

   

• New Faculty.

  Several new faculty have joined the Department in 2012:

  • Assistant Professors
    • Sami Assaf arrived from a Moore Instructorship at MIT, followed by one year at Berkeley Quantitative. She specializes in algebraic combinatorics and combinatorial representation theory.
    • Sabin Cautis came from Columbia University, where he was a Ritt Assistant Professor. He works in representation theory, algebraic geometry, and applications of these fields to topology.
  • Assistant Professors NTT
    • Quentin Berger recently received his PhD from the University of Lyon, France, and specializes in probability.
    • Weiwei Hu came from Virginia Tech, where she just received her PhD in Applied Mathematics
    • David Rose (Busemann Assistant Professor) just received his PhD from Duke University, and works in topology, representation theory and categorification.
    • Leila Setayeshgar received her PhD from Brown University, and works in stochastic differential equations
  • Lecturers
    • David Crombecque came back to USC after receiving his PhD here in 2006
    • Leonardo Kosloff arrived from Florida Atlantic University, where he just finished his PhD
    • Joel Nibert just received his PhD from USC
    • Neelesh Tiruviluamala moved to USC from across town, after receiving his PhD from UCLA

  Some of last year's Assistant Professors have left to go on with their career:

  • Qingtao Chen is now at the International Center for Theoretical Physics in Trieste, Italy
  • Chinmaya Gupta moved to the University of Houston
  • Miodrag Iovanov is an Assistant Professor at the University of Iowa

  We wish them the best for their future endeavors.

• Congratulations to our new PhDs!

  
  The Department of Mathematics is very pleased to congratulate the graduate students who received their PhD in 2012. This includes:

  • Rebecca Courter, Instructor at Pasadena City College
  • Stephen DeSalvo, Assistant Adjunct Professor at UCLA
  • Guillaume Dreyer, Notre Dame Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame
  • Jie Du, Quantitative Analyst at Guggenheim Partners
  • Ko (Milton) Fu
  • Subhankar Gosh, Staff Scientist, Statistical Analysis System (SAS)
  • Yang Huang, Visiting Scientist, Max Planck Institute Bonn, Germany
  • Ning Ling
  • Michael Moers, Risk Analyst, Deutsche Bank, Frankfurt, Germany
  • Joel Nibert, Lecturer at USC
  • Andrei Pavelescu, Visiting Assistant Professor, Oklahoma State University
  • Kaligotla Sivaditya, Financial Software Developer, Bloomberg LP, New York

   

• More news from recent PhD students.

  • Vlad Vicol (PhD 2010) is moving to Princeton University as an Assistant Professor
  • Nathan Glatt-Holtz (PhD 2008) is begining a tenure-track Assistant Professor appointment at Virginia Tech
  • Mihaela Ignatova (PhD 2011) just moved to Stanford as a Postdoctoral Fellow
  • Julien Roger and Vlad Vicol (both PhD 2010) are the Principal investigators of recently awarded NSF grants