Department of Mathematics

Susan Montgomery’s contributions in noncommutative algebra are covered extensively in the Notices of the AMS. The article covers her professional journey along with a discussion of her research accomplishments through the course of her long and decorated career. Click here to read more.

The mathematics department held its open house for incoming Fall 2023 Ph.D. students on Thursday, February 23, 2023.  To view the recording, please click here.

Aaron Lauda secured an $8 million Simons Foundation grant to push the boundaries of knowledge about our universe and open doors to advances now depicted only in science fiction.

Eric Friedlander was the Distinguished Speaker at the Maurice Auslander Distinguished Lectures, Oct 29-30, 2022, at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, Quissett Campus, in Woods Hole, Massachusettts, USA.

The Albert S. Raubenheimer Award is awarded in recognition of outstanding teaching, scholarship and service within the university.

Susan Montgomery gave the Richard Block Distinguished Lecture in Mathematics at UC Riverside on May 25, 2022. Her title was “Orthogonal representations: from groups to Hopf Algebras to tensor categories.’’ Click here for the flyer.

Sixteen graduate students from our department received their PhD in 2021-22. Here is the full list, together with their advisor, the current title, and the first place of employment.

• Harrison Algra (Wang), Data Scientist, Thrackle
• Irmak Balcik (Kamienny), Postdoc, Univ of Texas, Austin
• Peter Kagey (Assaf), Visiting Asst Prof, Harvey Mudd College
• Jinting Liu (Bartroff, Sun), Data Scientist, MobilityWare Inc.
• David Massatt (Kukavica), Mathematician/Numerical Analyst, Aerospace Corporation
• Clemens Oszkinat (Rosen), Actuary, HansMerkur Insurance Company
• Jiyeon Park (Newton), Postdoc, University of Utah
• Austin Pollok (Zhang), Assistant Professor of Clinical Data Science and Operations, USC Marshall School
• Alexander Port (Asok), Data Scientist, Thrackle
• Apoorva Shah (Lototsky), Data Scientist, Neal Analytics
• Maxwell C. Siegel (Kamienny, Haydn)
• Jihoon Sohn (Bonahon)
• Alex Tarter (Goldstein), Statistician, NASS US Dept of Agriculture, National Agricultural Statistics Service
• Christopher Wayne Walker (Goldstein), Senior Engineer, Northrup Gruman
• Lang Wang (Minsker), Data Scientist, MobilityWare Inc.
• Yusheng Wu (Lototsky, Tong)

Harold Williams has received an NSF CAREER Award, “Cluster Algebras in Representation Theory, Geometry, and Physics.” Among the foundation’s most prestigious awards, the CAREER grant will support Williams’ research on representation theory, algebraic geometry, and symplectic geometry, using ideas from the theory of cluster algebras to develop new connections among them and to mathematical physics. It will also support an annual graduate summer school, the Los Angeles Workshop on Representations and Geometry, held on the USC campus.

Aravind Asok gave an invited lecture in the algebraic geometry section at the 2022 International Congress of Mathematicians jointly with Jean Fasel (Universite Joseph Fourier – Grenoble). While the ICM, initially planned for St. Petersburg, was reincarnated as a virtual event due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, several in-person “overlay” events were scheduled. Asok and Fasel spoke at an overlay event in Zurich that included the algebraic geometry and number theory sections.  The talk, entitled “Vector bundles on algebraic varieties,” surveyed recent progress in the theory of vector bundles on algebraic varieties and related questions in algebraic K-theory.

Robert Guralnick was the Rothschild Distinguished Fellow at the Isaac Newton Institute for the program Groups, representations and applications: new perspectives and gave the Rothschild Lecture on July 26, 2022 during the workshop, Simple groups, representations and applications, “which celebrated the great influence of the work of Michael Aschbacher and Robert Guralnick.”

Aaron Lauda will be the director of a large, prestigious Simons Foundation Collaboration Grant in Mathematical and Physical Science entitled “New Structures in low dimension Topology.” This collaboration brings together experts from diverse mathematical backgrounds to advance our understanding of smooth topology in 3 and 4-dimensions. The international team of researchers includes Cris Negron as well as researchers from Caltech, UCLA, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, MIT, and several international universities.

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