Prior to UMD, he was a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

From the time the École Polytechnique in France named his Ph.D. dissertation the best in the year 2000, University of Maryland Mathematics Professor Bassam Fayad built a reputation as a world expert in the theory of dynamical systems.

Fayad has traveled across continents to collaborate on research with colleagues in Brazil, Italy, Sweden, China and the U.S. In 2018, he was invited to lecture at the International Congress of Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro. Until recently, he was a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

Now, he has taken another prestigious position here at UMD. Fayad has been named the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed Chair in Mathematics. Established in 2015, the Brin Chair is “chosen strictly on the basis of demonstrated exceptional mathematical ability, achievement, potential, and leadership in mathematical research and education, in a vital field at the heart of mathematics.”

Known for his work in Hamiltonian dynamics, Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theory, Liouville phenomenon and homogeneous dynamics, Fayad sees great potential in holding the Brin Chair. 

“In terms of possibilities to engage in far-reaching activities, Maryland is on a very remarkable upward slope,” he said.

He’s especially excited about funding that will be available through the recently established Brin Mathematics Research Center. 

“In dynamical systems, one of the strongest groups in the world is concentrated here at Maryland,” Fayad said. “We can host workshops. We can invite specialists in all areas of dynamics from around the world to give lectures or crash courses. We can invite colleagues and collaborators as well as their students. If you add our colleagues from Penn State and the University of Chicago and Northwestern and New York, we can function as a hub, because all these places are quite near and people interact a lot.”

It was the late Penn State mathematician Anatole Katok—who Michael Brin also studied under—who drew Fayad to his first experience in the U.S. After serving on Fayad’s Ph.D. jury, Katok extended an offer to Fayad for a one-year post-doc at Penn State. Following the post-doc, Fayad returned to Paris, where he lived since he was a teenager—moving there from Lebanon with his elder brother to prepare for the entrance exam for École Polytechnique. 

“This happened in the summer of a very hard last year of war in Lebanon,” Fayad said. “My father calculated that schools would not open, and he was right. Two days before classes were supposed to open, my brother’s school in France agreed to enroll me. I was in crisis and started crying for a whole week. I was young and not prepared and not convinced. The plan was that I would become an architect in Lebanon like my father. The story ended up with both of us at Polytechnique.”

Mathematics was also an unplanned path for Fayad. 

“I said I will do Polytechnique, and then I will do architecture,” he said. “And then I will go back to Lebanon. But math was also fun and that’s what I ended up doing.”

Fayad’s research today ranges from abstract ergodic theory to topics intimately connected to real-world mathematical physics, such as Hamiltonian dynamics and their applications to the N-body problem.

“The research field of dynamical systems has this advantage of being very close to physics,” Fayad said. “Part of our job, for example, is to look at the planetary system and study all the possibilities. Will this system behave in a tame way with all planets gravitating on ellipses around the sun, while their satellites do the same around them? Under which conditions will it behave in a completely different manner and maybe in a chaotic way? For example, can a planet escape? Can we lose the moon?”

When Fayad received the offer to join UMD, the pandemic had just started.

“Businesses were shutting down everywhere and the world seemed to be collapsing,” he said. “And on my side, it was all working well. I was signing a contract for a new life. However, the pandemic did delay everything by a couple of years.”

Fayad finally arrived on campus at the beginning of 2022. He’ll continue to travel to France to work with some of his Ph.D. students there, while he works on attracting students to his research group at Maryland. 

“The department is also very active in the process of hiring high-quality professors in all disciplines in mathematics. And we have a lot of projects,” he added. “You feel good to embrace this new adventure, where you know that people are putting in hope and energy and means to do things for our field that I think will make a difference.”

Written by Ellen Ternes

Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics Eitan Tadmor received the 2022 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics and was invited to deliver the 2022 Gibbs Lecture at the joint math meeting of the American Mathematical Society.

“I have been mentored by and collaborated with many mathematicians who played an indispensable role in my career,” Tadmor said. “I feel blessed to be part of a worldwide network of mathematicians, which is like a home away from home for me.”

These honors recognized Tadmor’s original, broad and fundamental contributions to applied and computational mathematics, including conservation laws, kinetics, image processing and social dynamics. 

The signature of Tadmor’s work is the interplay between analytical theories and computational algorithms for such equations. His many outstanding contributions include the development of high-resolution central schemes; entropy conservative/stable schemes; and the spectral viscosity method for nonlinear conservation laws. He collaborated in groundbreaking work on the regularization of conservation laws and their relation to kinetic formulation. He introduced novel ideas of multi-scale hierarchical decompositions of images with applications to problems in critical regularity spaces.

Currently, Tadmor is leading a research program in collective dynamics, with a series of novel contributions which include adaptive alignment; topologically based and multi-species dynamics; and development of a general paradigm for emergent behavior away from thermal equilibrium.

“My work in mathematics and applications has given me great joy. As a language spoken in different scientific disciplines, mathematics is constantly engaged with new developments in a variety of fields of science and technology,” Tadmor said. “The synergy between mathematics and applications requires the development of new ‘dialects’ in applied and computational mathematics. I am always fascinated by the creative tension between imagination and rigor needed to develop these dialects and their use in solving concrete problems.”

Tadmor received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1978 and began his career as a Bateman Research Instructor at Caltech (1980-82) before joining the faculties of Tel Aviv University (1983-1995) and UCLA (1995-2002). In 2002, he was recruited by the University of Maryland to lead the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, where he served as director from 2002 to 2016. In 2016-17, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies (ITS) at ETH-Zürich.

Tadmor was a founding co-director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA (1999-2001) and the principal investigator of both an NSF Focus Research Group (2008-12) and the NSF Kinetic Research Network (Ki-Net) at the University of Maryland (2012-20). He gave an invited lecture at the ICM (Beijing, 2002); the SIAM invited address at the JMM (Baltimore, 2014); the 2016 Leçons Jacques-Louis Lions (Paris); a Nachdiplom Lecture series at ETH (Zürich, 2017); and a plenary address at the ICIAM (Valencia, 2019). He is the recipient of the 2015 SIAM-ETH Peter Henrici Prize and is a fellow of the AMS and SIAM.

The Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics is awarded every three years by the AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense. The 2022 prize was presented to Tadmor in January during the Joint Prize Session at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle.

With his selection as Gibbs lecturer, Tadmor joined three former Gibbs lecturers from UMD: Johannes Burgers (1963), Elliott Montroll (1987) and Michael Fisher (1992). The AMS Council established the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship in 1923. Gibbs (1839-1903), a mathematical physicist, was one of the greatest scientists America has ever produced. These lectures aim to enable the public and the academic community to become aware of the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking and to modern civilization.

This article includes content provided by the American Mathematical Society.

Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

Joan Jian-Jian Ren is elected as a Fellow of the IMS (Institute of Mathematical Statistics)

Antonio De Rosa receives the Career Award from the NSF 

Rodrigo Trevino receives the Career Award from the NSF

Partha Lahiri recieves the Jerzy Neyman Medal

Lei Chen recieves the Sloan Fellowship 

Eitan Tadmor recieves the 2022 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics

Eitan Tadmor named the 2022 Gibbs Lecturer

Eitan Tadmor named a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

Alumni

Bianca Viray,( UMD 2005), has been awarded the AMS Joan and Joseph Birman Fellowship for Women Scholars for the 2022–2023 academic year.

Graduate Students

Shuo Yang has been awarded the Babuška Endowed Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics.

Luke (Andrew) Evans -Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award Graduate School 

Melanka Saroad Wedige, Jordan Hirsh, Jackson Hopper - Ralph P Pass III Award

Lucas Bouck, Xuze Zhang - Mark E. Lachtman Award 

Arghya Sadhukhan and Yuxiang Ji -Patrick & Marguerite Sung Fellowship in Mathematics

Yifan Yang, Shuo Yan, Xiaoyu Zhou, Vasanth Pidaparthy, Melanka Saroad Wedige, Jackson Hopper, Shenghao Li, Zhiming Li, Chengze Duan, Soumojit Das, Ying Li, Eric Oden - Hauptman Summer Fellowship

Sze-Hong Kwong, Shin Eui Song, Keith Mills, Vlasios Mastrantonis -Hauptman Summer Research Award

Zhirui Li ,Prakhar Gupta, Max Springer, Jian-Long (John) Liu, Revati Jadhav, Mengting Chao, David Russell, HaeYun Seo - Aziz/Osborn Gold Medal in Teaching Excellence

Stavros Papathanasiou, Efstratios  Tsoukanis - Monroe Martin Spotlight Award

Nakyung Lee, Elliott Lehrer - Seymour Goldberg Spotlight Award

Undergraduate Students

Max Springer, Naveen Raman , and Steven Jin - National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowships

George Li is named the 2022 Goldwater Scholar

UMD Putnam Team was ranked 20th out of 427 institutions this year.

Steven Jin -The Department of Mathematics Outstanding Senior Award 

Leopold Bertholet- Higginbotham Award

Ruijie Frank  Zheng -Milton Abramowitz Award

Matthew Schneider and Daniel Levy - Daniel Sweet Undergraduate Research Fellowships

John Brownfield - Strauss Scholarship 

David Fang - Dan Shanks Award

Elliot Kienzle - The John and Sabrina Kontner Endowed Scholarship

 Nicholas  Baranello, Daniel Levy, Jiatong Lian, Hugh McLaurin, Reynald  Oliveria, Raymond Schleien, Matthew Schneider, Uma Tikekar, Karthik Sellakumaran Latha - Strauss Teaching Assistantships

University of Maryland Assistant Professor of Mathematics Lei Chen received a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. This two-year, $75,000 fellowship is awarded annually to early-career researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field. 

“We are very proud to see three of our faculty members recognized in the same year,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences (CMNS). “Lei [Chen], Alicia [Kollár] and Pratyush [Tiwary] have very bright futures ahead of them and we appreciate the Sloan Foundation recognizing their potential and supporting them now during their early careers.”

Chen, who arrived at UMD in 2021, will use the fellowship to further her research on problems that connect group theory, geometric topology and dynamics.

The field of topology generally aims to classify different kinds of geometric objects called manifolds. For example, mathematicians see a ball and a cube as the same manifolds because they can be continuously reshaped to each other, but a ball and a donut are two different manifolds because they cannot. Chen focuses her research on the symmetry of manifolds. She and her collaborators have successfully classified all the relationships between the total symmetry of all manifolds.

“I am very excited and honored to receive this award and funding,” Chen said. “I will use this funding to travel and invite people to UMD to expand my research. Also, big thanks to UMD and all my letter writers for supporting me and sharing their mathematical world with me!”

This semester, Chen is working at Brown University’s Institute for Computational and Experimental Research in Mathematics as a semester participant for a special program on “braids.” Chen joined UMD following a postdoc position as Noether Instructor at Caltech. She earned her Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Chicago in 2018 and her bachelor’s degree in mathematics from China’s Peking University in 2013.

Awarded this year to 118 of the brightest young scientists across the U.S. and Canada, the Sloan Research Fellowships are one of the most competitive and prestigious awards available to early-career researchers. They are also often seen as a marker of the quality of an institution’s science faculty and proof of an institution’s success in attracting the most promising junior researchers to its ranks. 

“Today's Sloan Research Fellows represent the scientific leaders of tomorrow,” said Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. “As formidable young scholars, they are already shaping the research agenda within their respective fields—and their trailblazing won't end here.”

Since the first Sloan Research Fellowships were awarded in 1955, 68 faculty members from UMD have received a Sloan Research Fellowship. A dozen CMNS faculty members have been awarded Sloan Research Fellowships since 2015.

The students’ research interests range from algebraic geometry to number theory and applied mathematics.

Eleven graduate students in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Maryland received 2021-22 Herbert A. Hauptman Endowed Graduate Fellowships. 

The fellowship program was created with an estate gift from Carol Fullerton that honors the memory of her late father, Nobel laureate Herbert A. Hauptman (Ph.D. ’55, mathematics), and launched in 2020 thanks to a gift from Distinguished University Professor Emeritus of Mathematics James A. Yorke (Ph.D. ’66, mathematics). 

The 2021-22 Hauptman Fellows are:

• Priyankur Chaudhuri, algebraic geometry
• Yunjiang Ge, bioinformatics/biostatistics
• Jackson Hopper, representation theory
• Elliott Lehrer, algebraic number theory
• Qihang Li, number theory
• Michael Rawson, harmonic and signal processing
• Arpith Shanbhag, algebraic geometry
• Stephen Sorokanich, applied mathematics
• Tessa Thorsen, applied mathematics
• Gustavo Varela-Alvarenga, statistics
• Xuze Zhang, semiparametric statistics and time series analysis

UMD’s 35 scholarships in the past decade rank second in the nation.

George Li, a sophomore computer science and mathematics double-degree student at the University of Maryland, has been awarded a 2022 scholarship by the Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Foundation, which encourages students to pursue advanced study and research careers in the sciences, engineering and mathematics. 

Li is among 417 Goldwater Scholars, three from UMD, selected from 1,242 nominees nationally. Goldwater Scholars receive one- or two-year scholarships that cover the cost of tuition, fees, books and room and board up to $7,500 per year.

Over the last decade, UMD’s nominations yielded 35 scholarships—the second-most in the nation behind Stanford University. The Goldwater Foundation has honored 76 UMD winners and five honorable mentions since the program’s first award was given in 1989.

“Our Goldwater Scholars are conducting research on the leading edge of their disciplines—engineering new clean energy solutions, using algorithms to optimize the distribution of limited resources in contact tracing or access to vaccines, and designing new gene-based diagnostics and therapies against aggressive cancers. Each of them is on a trajectory to make major research contributions that have societal impact,” said Robert Infantino, associate dean of undergraduate education in the College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. Infantino has led UMD’s Goldwater Scholarship nominating process since 2001.

Li arrived at UMD in fall 2020—when most classes were still being taught online due to the pandemic—but that didn’t stop him from jumping into research his first semester. In fact, the pandemic offered him unique research opportunities. Working with Aravind Srinivasan, Distinguished University Professor of Computer Science at UMD, and collaborators at the University of Virginia, Li developed an algorithm for efficient contact tracing that has been recommended for implementation to the Virginia Department of Health. Li also developed an approximation algorithm to determine where to deploy vaccine distribution sites to improve accessibility to vaccines. 

“George is the first author on two papers accepted in a well-known artificial intelligence conference, AAMAS 2022, on contact tracing and mobile vaccination for diseases like COVID-19,” Srinivasan said. “He came up with new mathematical and algorithmic ideas and very fast software development for these submissions. He has a strong career ahead combining math, computer science and data science."

Li also worked with UMD Assistant Professor of Computer Science Furong Huang on using a powerful algebraic tool called tensor decompositions to develop learning algorithms that make non-discriminatory decisions. This project fueled Li’s interest in deriving practical implications from theoretical models. 

In addition to earning an International Collegiate Programming Contest Regionals Bronze Medal, Li is a member of UMD’s table tennis club and a teaching assistant for CMSC 451: Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms. While at UMD, Li was awarded a President’s Scholarship, Michael Antonov Endowed Scholarship and Edgar Krahn Scholarship.

After graduation, he plans to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, with a focus on theoretical computer science in the areas of learning theory, algorithms and combinatorial optimization, and differential privacy.