Professor Emeritus and Distinguished University Professor James Yorke was awarded an honorary doctorate at Universidad Rey Juan Carlos in Madrid, Spain, on February 3, 2014.   Nice interviews with Jim and descriptions of Yorke's work have appeared in the Spanish press and on Spanish TV.  Congratulations!

Congratulations to Nadine Jansen, winner of a prestigious Barry Goldwater Scholarship. Nadine of North Carolina A&T University was one of 14 participants in the Department’s 2012 Summer Program In Research And Learning.   Nadine and three other students researched the counting of restricted paths in an integer lattice in the plane. The research was conducted under the direction of Leon Woodson.

The Summer Program In Research And Learning (SPIRAL) is an ongoing collaboration of the Mathematics Department at the University of Maryland and several Historically Black Colleges and Universities with financial support from the National Science Foundation and the National Security Agency. SPIRAL has been an annual event since it began under the direction of the late Dan Rudolph in the summer of 2003.

The conference is dedicated to Mark Freidlin on occasion of his birthday and is devoted to recent progress in probability and partial differential equations. It will take place at the University of Maryland, College Park,  May 20 - 24, 2013. Visit the conference web site for more information.

We are sad to note the death of Professor Emeritus Frank Olver, who passed away on April 23, 2013 at the age of 88. Frank was an expert on numerical analysis and special functions, and editor of the NIST Digital Library of Mathematical Functions, a great mathematical resource. His book on Asymptotics and Special Functions is still considered a mathematical classic. Frank retired from the University of Maryland in 1992, but continued to work on mathematics until his death. He received the Gold Medal of the US Department of Commerce in 2011.

Maryland sophomore Stephen Randall, a double major in mathematics and physics, is one of three University of Maryland students to win Barry Goldwater scholarships this year. The Barry Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program was established by Congress in 1986 to honor Senator Barry M. Goldwater and to provide a continuing source of highly qualified scientists, mathematicians, and engineers.