From current students to world-renowned alumni, mathematicians from five continents filled the house for a three-day 80th birthday celebration and conference.
In the world of mathematics, Professor John Benedetto is by all accounts a family man. The depth of his devotion and the impact of his parenting was on full display this past September, as 175 mathematicians gathered to celebrate Benedetto’s 80th birthday. In the tradition of academics who trace their lineage through their Ph.D. advisors, many of the participants proudly self-identified as Benedetto’s children, grandchildren, nieces and nephews. In his 54-year tenure at UMD, Benedetto has advised 58 Ph.D. students who, according to the Mathematics Genealogy Project, have gone on to mentor another 92 Ph.D.-carrying mathematicians.
Walk into the office of University of Maryland Mathematics Professor Jacob Bedrossian on any given day, and the heavy tome laying open on his desk is as likely to be about advanced physics as differential equations. That’s because applying differential equations the way he wants to requires a hefty dose of physics. It also requires engineering, stochastics, dynamical systems and more.
Bedrossian studies stability and mixing in fluids and plasmas. Much of his recent research focuses on turbulence, an important but poorly understood physical phenomenon that plays a crucial role in everything from ocean currents and weather patterns to bridge construction and vehicle fuel efficiency.
“We can make predictions about turbulence,” he said, “but there are no real rigorous mathematics to describe what it is and why it happens.”
Read more: Jacob Bedrossian: Taking on Physics with Rigorous Mathematics
Mathematics Professor Carlos Berenstein passed away on August 24, 2019. Berenstein is survived by his wife Elsa, his daughter Nadia and his son Ariel.
Born in Argentina, Berenstein received his Licenciado en Matematicas in 1966 from the University of Buenos Aires. He was an Instructor at the University of Buenos Aires 1964 to 1965, and a Research Fellow at CNICT (Buenos Aires) in 1966. Berenstein received a Sloan Foundation Graduate Fellowship from 1967 to 1970, and in 1969 and 1970, respectively, he was awarded his M.S. and Ph.D. degrees from New York University. He received the Founder's Day Award of New York University in 1971.
Faculty
Former Brin Postdoctoral Fellow Huanchen Bao will receive the 2020 Chevalley Prize in Lie Theory, along with Weiqiang Wang, for their fundamental contributions to the theory of quantum symmetric pairs.
Professor Jacob Bedrossian will receive the inaugural Peter Lax Award at the HYP 2020 meeting. The award is given to a young researcher (10 years within the Ph.D.) and honors Lax’s seminal contributions, which laid the foundations of modern theory and computation in the area of hyperbolic conservation laws. Jacob also received the SIAM Activity Group Prize on Analysis of Partial Differential Equations along with Nader Masmoudi of NYU.
Novikov Postdoctoral Fellow Jakob Hultgren was named outstanding professor/instructor by a 2019 Maryland Women's Soccer student-athlete.
Read more: Math Faculty Members, Alumni, and Students Receive Awards
Girls Talk Math at the University of Maryland runs largely on passion. Sarah Cassie Burnett, with assistance from Cara Peters, founded this summer program for high school girls two years ago to broaden participation and mentoring in the field of mathematics. Burnett and Peters are Ph.D. students in the university’s Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation program.
The Maryland site was modeled after the program at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC). Then graduate students Francesca Bernardi and Katrina Morgan established it there in 2015, to build a curriculum that addressed issues of persistence, equity, and representation.
Sophomore year is when many college students begin to feel confident about campus life and the classes they’re taking. Tanay Wakhare was confident enough to start teaching one.
During Wakhare’s freshman year, he heard then-student Ishaan Parikh (B.S. ’19, computer science) talk about his efforts to launch the university’s Student Initiated Courses (STICs) program and wanted to learn more about the program, which allows students to design and teach for-credit courses with a faculty member’s guidance.
Read more: Senior Tanay Wakhare is Both the Student and the Teacher
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