We regret to report the passing of Professor Emeritus Maurice Heins, who at one time held a distionguished professorship in complex analysis in our department. Maurice Heins received his PhD in mathematics from Harvard University in 1940.  He was a highly prolific scholar and enjoyed a long and distinguished career in academia.  His research interests were varied but focused primarily on complex and harmonic analysis.  He was the author of close to 100 research papers, published in the most prestigious journals, and three textbooks on complex analysis.  He is especially known for his work on Hardy classes of functions defined on Riemann surfaces and on conformal metrics. 

Professor Heins held academic positions at three major research universities: Brown University, the University of Illinois, and the University of Maryland, where he was recruited to a distinguished chair professorship.  He was invited to visiting positions and to give lectures at the major mathematics research centers in the United States and Europe, including the University of California Berkeley, Imperial College, London and the University of Paris.

Known for his kind and gentle demeanor, Professor Heins was widely sought as a mentor and advisor.  He was the thesis advisor for some nineteen students over the course of his career.  Although he retired from his professorship at the University of Maryland, he continued to pursue his research interests, publishing papers into the 1990s.  He was a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and also the American Mathematical Society.

A longer obituary may be found here.

The Inaugural William E. Kirwan Distinguished Undergraduate Lecture

Feuerbach’s Theorem: A Beautiful Theorem Deserves a Beautiful Proof" by Professor Douglas Hofstadter* on April 23rd, 2015 4:00-5:00pm in Physics 1412. 

Douglas Hofstadter is a College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science at Indiana University, Director of  the Center for Research on Concepts and Cognition, and the author of the Pulitzer Prizewinning book, Gödel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.

Watch the Kirwan Undergraduate Lecture >>
Watch the Colloquium Lecture >>

2015 NSF Graduate Fellowships have been announced. Congratulations to our majors Rafael Setra and Kevin Stubbs.

Rafael Setra, a Mathematics and Electrical Engineering double degree candidate, has been awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship for his planned graduate studies in Electrical Engineering.  Rafael was a 2014 recipient of a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. 

Kevin Stubbs, a Mathematics and Computer Engineering double degree candidate, received honorable mention for consideration for a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship. 

Congratulations to Professor Emeritus Raymond L. Johnson who has been awarded the Presidential Mentorship Award in 2015. Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring (PAESMEM) is America's highest mentoring award. PAESMEM recognizes outstanding efforts of mentors who play a vital role for many science and engineering students and early career scientists, on both a personal and professional level. Mentors play a crucial role for all students but especially for students from underrepresented groups--including minorities, women, and people with disabilities. The National Science Foundation (NSF) administers PAESMEM on behalf of the White House.

Professor Raymond L. Johnson, University of Maryland, receives this honorable award for his guidance to many minority students. His service at the University Math department spans forty years. His contribution to the community began at his home institution and across the nation. He has guided students to complete degrees in mathematics, which has notoriously low retention rates. He was promoted through the ranks at Maryland, surviving long enough to become the first African American to go from Assistant Professor to Chairman of the Math Department (1968 - 1990). He is also the first African American faculty member with the longest tenure at College Park. During his term at the University he has personally mentored 23 students who have received Ph.D. degrees in mathematics. Twenty two of these students are African Americans and eight are females. Beyond his work at UMD, Professor Johnson has been influential at the national level in fostering greater opportunities for African-American students to earn Ph.D.s in mathematics, as part of two National Science Foundation supported mathematical institutes at the University of California, Berkeley and the University of Minnesota and with the Mathematical Association of America.

Professor Raymond L. Johnson is already the recipient of the Distinguished Minority Faculty Award and the Mentor Award for Lifetime Achievement from the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 2007. He was honored by his alma mater - the Association of Rice Alumni and the Association of Rice University Black Alumni (ARUBA) on November 8, 2014, and received special recognition from the City of Houston and the State of Texas.

Honorable Professor Raymond L.Johnson is one of the select group of 14 individuals receiving the Presidential Award this year.

With great sorrow we announce the passing of Professor Emeritus John Horváth on March 12, 2015 at the age of 90.   Horváth was always the "gentleman scholar" of the department, and his distinguished career spanned the whole transition from the early years of analysis in the first half of the 20th century to modern mathematics as we know it today.  He studied under the great masters L. Fejer and F. Riesz at the University of Budapest, completing his Ph.D. there in 1947.  He held positions at CNRS in Paris and at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogota before settling at Maryland in 1957.  You can read some of his reminiscences of the early years of our department here. Horváth served for 15 years as an associate editor of the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications. He officially retired from Maryland in 1994.  However he remained quite active and continued publishing up until very recently.  Horváth published in English, French, German, Hungarian, and Spanish. In 1998, he was elected to the Mathematics Section of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, and he also received an honorary doctoral degree from the Universidad de los Andes in Colombia in 1997.   Among his many works are a textbook Topological Vector Spaces and Distributions (1966, recently reissued with the cover shown below), a nice Introduction to Distribution Theory in the American Mathematical Monthly, 1970, and a two-volume work A panorama of Hungarian mathematics in the twentieth century (cover shown below), which he edited for the Bolyai Mathematical Society in 2006.

Below is a letter sent by the president of the Universidad de los Andes to President Low about Professor Horvath.

This program is funded by the generous gift of Professor Michael Brin in 2005. Professor Brin is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland. The Brin Postdoctoral program supports mathematicians who have recently completed or will soon complete a doctorate in mathematics or a closely related field, and whose work shows remarkable promise in mathematical research. The appointments are for one to three years, with a minimal teaching requirement of up to one course per semester.

Current Brin Postdoctoral Fellows

• Panagiotis Dimakis works on the geometry of moduli spaces, Bogomolny equations, Higgs bundles, and related topics. He was a student at Stanford University with Rafe Mazzeo. His mentor is Richard Wentworth.
• Zengrui Han works in algebraic geometry. He obtained his PhD from Rutgers University and is mentored by Amin Gholampour.
• Hannah Hoganson works in geometry, low-dimensional topology, and geometric group theory. She was a doctoral student of Ken Bromberg (University of Utah). Her mentor is Christian Rosendal (formerly Lei Chen).
• Aditya Kumar works in geometric analysis. He obtained his PhD from Johns Hopkins University and is mentored by Jonathan Rosenberg.

Former Brin Postdoctoral Fellows

• Francisco Arana Herrera works on dynamics on surfaces and Teichmüller theory. He was a student of Alex Wright (University of Michigan) and Steve Kerckhoff (Stanford University). His mentor was Professor Giovanni Forni. He is a winner of the Brin Prize in dynamical systems. Placement: Assistant Professor, Rice University.
• Huanchen Bao studies representation theory of Lie algebras and superalgebras, as well as quantum groups. He obtained his PhD from the University of Virginia. His mentor was Professor Xuhua He (2015–2019). Placement: Assistant Professor, National University of Singapore. He was a co-winner of the 2020 Chevalley Prize for Lie Theory.
• Ke Chen works on numerical analysis and scientific machine learning for partial differential equations. His mentor was Professor Haizhao Yang. Placement: University of Delaware.
• Xuemiao Chen works on Yang–Mills connections, sheaves on complex manifolds, and the Harder–Narasimhan–Seshadri filtration. He was a student of Song Sun (Stony Brook University). His mentor was Richard Wentworth. Placement: Assistant Professor, University of Waterloo.
• Heyrim Cho studies numerical and theoretical methods for stochastic simulations. Her mentor was Professor Doron Levy (2015–2019). Placement: Assistant Professor, UC Riverside.
• Michele Coti Zelati works in partial differential equations and dynamical systems. He obtained his PhD from Indiana University Bloomington. His mentor was Professor Konstantina Trivisa  (2014–2016). Placement: Imperial College London.
• Peter DilleryPeter Dillery works in representation theory and number theory, particularly aspects of the local and global Langlands program. He is a student of Tasho Kaletha (University of Michigan). His mentor was Professor Tom Haines. Placement: University of Bonn.
• Changguang Dong (PhD 2018, Penn State) studies dynamics, including the density of iterates of infinite sets. His mentors were Professor Giovanni Forni and Professor Adam Kanigowski. Placement: Chern Institute of Mathematics, Nankai University.
• Renjie Feng works in random differential geometry and Kähler geometry, and stochastic processes. He obtained his PhD from Northwestern University. His mentor was Professor Richard Wentworth (2013–2015). Placement: Assistant Professor, Peking University.
• Guan Huang works in dynamics. He obtained his PhD from École Polytechnique (France). His mentor was Professor Vadim Kaloshin (2014–2017). Placement: Tsinghua University.
• Yuri Lima (PhD 2011, IMPA, Brazil) works in dynamics. His mentor was Professor Vadim Kaloshin (2013–2015). Placement: Universidade Federal do Ceará (Brazil).
• Michelle Lee (PhD 2012, University of Michigan) worked with mentor Professor Bill Goldman (2013–2014). Placement: Data Scientist, Capital One.
• Swarnava Mukhopadhyay works in algebraic geometry and representation theory. He obtained his PhD from UNC Chapel Hill. His mentor was Professor Patrick Brosnan (2013–2015). Placement: Tata Institute of Fundamental Research (Mumbai).
• Peter Nandori (PhD 2013, Budapest University of Technology and Economics) studies dynamical systems and probability theory. His mentor was Dima Dolgopyat (2015–2018). Placement: Assistant Professor, Yeshiva University.
• Pablo Roldan Gonzalez (PhD 2007, University of Texas at Austin) works in dynamics. His mentor was Professor Vadim Kaloshin (2014–2015). Placement: Assistant Professor, Yeshiva University.
• Agnieszka Zelerowicz works in dynamical systems and thermodynamic formalism. She was a student of Yakov Pesin (Penn State). Her undergraduate degree is from Białystok, Poland. Her mentor was Dima Dolgopyat. Placement: Assistant Professor, UC Riverside.
• Fei Wang(PhD 2017, University of Southern California) works in PDEs. His mentor (2017–2020) was Professor Jacob Bedrossian. Placement: Shanghai Jiao Tong University.
• Matthew Welsch works in number theory using techniques from homogeneous dynamics and automorphic forms. He was a student of Henryk Iwaniec (Rutgers University). His mentor is Professor Bassam Fayad. Placement: Michigan State University.
• Yijing Wu works in PDE theory; she is a student of Luis Caffarelli (University of Texas). Her undergraduate degree is from Shanghai Jiao Tong University. Her research concerns regularity theory for nonlocal elliptic operators and free boundary problems in the calculus of variations. Her mentor was Professor Antoine Mellet. Placement: Senior Data Scientist, Fidelity.
• Wujun Zhang (PhD 2012, University of Minnesota) works in numerical analysis of PDEs. His mentor was Professor Ricardo Nochetto (2012–2015). Placement: Assistant Professor, Rutgers University.