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Faculty Honors
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Hales receives Moore Prize
The R.E. Moore Prize for Applications of Interval Analysis was awarded
to Thomas C. Hales for the use of interval arithmetic in his solution of
the Kepler conjecture. The prize was awarded in Fukuoka Japan on
October 7, 2004 by the Editorial Board of the journal "Reliable Computing."
The prize is awarded once every two years for the best dissertation or
paper in applications of interval analysis.
The prize is named in honor of Ramon Moore, who was one of the first to
publicize the underlying principles of interval arithmetic in their
modern form.
Further details about the Moore Prize are available
here.
Further details about Hales's solution of the Kepler conjecture are
available on Hales' website, and here. For an expository account of the solution see this earlier MathZine article.
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Ermentrout appointed University Professor of Computational Biology
In October Bard Ermentrout gave his inaugural lecture as University
Professor of Computational Biology. Titled `The Visions of Shamans:
Dynamic Instabilities in Neuroscience', it was an exhilarating trip!
Starting from the questions, `How does an animal switch gaits?', `What
determines stripes or spots?' and `What do geometric signs in
Paleolithic art mean?', Bard explained the underlying neurological
phenomena in terms of the mathematics of dynamic instabilities.
More >>
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Conferences
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AMS
Fall 2004 Section Meeting
November 6-7th the Math Department hosted the Fall 2004 AMS
Sectional Meeting. Dehua Wang was the primary local organizer.
240 people made presentations in the main program and in 15 Special
Sessions in subjects ranging from `Trends in Operator Theory and
Banach Spaces' and `Modularity of Galois Representations and Serre's
Conjecture' to `Mathematical Biology' and `Multiscale Algorithms in
Computational Fluid Dynamics'.
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New Faculty
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Assistant
Professor:
Piotr Hajlasz
Piotr Hajlasz received his Ph.D. from the Warsaw University in 1994.
Before coming to Pittsburgh he was a professor at the Warsaw University.
He was also a long term visitor at International Center for Theoretical
Physics in Trieste, Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in the Sciences
in Leipzig and the University of Michigan.
His research interests cover various areas in geometric analysis. He is
especially interested in the theory of Sobolev spaces with
applications to analysis on metric spaces, geometry and topology,
calculus of variations and nonlinear elliptic partial differential
equations. His current research concerns the theory of Sobolev mappings
between manifolds with connections to the topology of manifolds.
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Assistant Professor:
David Swigon
David Swigon received his Mgr. degree (equivalent of M.S.) from Charles
University in Prague and a Ph. D. degree from Rutgers University in
1999. He has a background in applied mathematics (ODEs, PDEs, dynamical
systems, stochastic dynamics), continuum mechanics, biophysics, and
molecular biology. Before coming to Pittsburgh he worked as a Research
Associate at the Department of Chemistry at Rutgers. His research is in
the area of mathematical biology, where he uses mathematical principles
and computational tools to advance the understanding of the relation
between protein and DNA structure, gene regulation, and the dynamics of
genetic and signaling networks; of particular interest are cases in which
elastic properties of DNA and proteins play a significant biological
role.
David's recent and current projects include the analysis of expression of
lactose metabolizing enzymes in E. coli, determination of the structure
and deformability of protein-induced loops in DNA, and calculation of
complexes of proteins and DNA that occur during transcription initiation
for a special class of E. coli genes activated by the protein CAP. He is
also working on theoretical issues in genetic network analysis, such as
the relation between network topology and its dynamical behavior or the
influence of noise on asymptotic dynamics of the network.
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Undergraduate
News |
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Pitt
Math Club
The Pitt Math Club is a relatively new club whose members love Math. So
far this year we have had a social and organizational meeting, a Halloween social
complete with spectacular costumes and a Meeting which
centered on the Clay Math Institute Millennium Problems.
At this meeting
each of the 7 problems was briefly described and comments were made by the
audience. We hope to follow this up with a student seminar on other
famous problems to deepen our understanding of research Mathematics.
Projects for next term include
becoming recognized as an `official' university student Organization
help with the Careers in Math fair to be held in the student employment
center on Jan 11 at 3:30
attend the pi Mu epsilon conference at Youngstown St Univ (Feb)
Interested students are more than welcome to attend our meetings and
contribute ideas for future meetings.
-Tom Metzger, Lindsay
Custer, Megan Heilenman, Stephanie Lorusso &Melissa Mazzanti.
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Picture Perfect |
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Card
Shuffling
Card
shuffling
is
a
fascinating
branch
of
mathematics
combining
probability
theory,
Markov
chains,
dynamical
systems,
Lie
theory,
symmetric
functions
and
random
matrix
theory.
Read on as Pitt math professor Jason Fulman uncovers the secrets of shuffling - for a start, how many times must a
riffle
shuffle
be
repeated
for
a
deck
of
cards
to
be
well mixed?
More >>
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