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.
• David Gao (mentor: Srivatsav Kunnawalkam Elayavalli) — PhD from UCSD. His research is in operator algebras, particularly von Neumann algebras, group actions, and rigidity and approximation phenomena.
• Sudeshna Bhattacharjee (mentor: Ron Peled) — PhD from the Indian Institute of Science (IISc). Her research is in probability theory, with emphasis on models in the KPZ universality class, including last passage percolation, interacting particle systems, random matrices, directed landscape, and related stochastic growth models.

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 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.

Congratulations to Distinguished University Professor Eitan Tadmor, who has been awarded the 2015 Peter Henrici Prize.  This is a joint award of SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and ETH Zurich.   It is given every 4 years "for original contributions to applied analysis and numerical analysis and/or for exposition appropriate for applied mathematics and scientific computing."  The award comes with a certificate and a cash prize of $5,000.  More details may be found here.

Assistant Professor Jacob Bedrossian has been awarded a prestigious 2015 Sloan Research Fellowship.  The size of the award is $50,000 over a two-year period, in support of the Fellow's research.  Congratulations, Jacob! Another winner this year in mathematics is alumnus Andrew Snowden, who was an undergraduate honors math major at Maryland, graduating in 2004. And still another winner (in Computational & Evolutionary Molecular Biology) is alumnus Cole Trapnell from the University of Washington,  who got joint BS degrees in CS and mathematics from Maryland in 2005 before going on to a PhD at Maryland in computer science.

William "Brit" Kirwan joined the Mathematics Department at the University of Maryland just over 50 years ago. On March 10th there will be a one day golden anniversary conference.

More information about the conference can be found on the CMNS website.

Speakers will include Peter Duren, University of Michigan, Charles Fefferman, Princeton University, Mark Green, UCLA, Edward Saff, Vanderbilt, Uri Treisman, UT Austin, and Larry Zalcman, Bar Ilan (and formerly from Maryland).

Two more UMd math faculty have been elected Fellows of the American Mathematical Society: Professor John Benedetto and Professor Emeritus Karsten Grove.  You can read the prize citations here.