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

• Changguang Dong (PhD 2018, Penn State).  Studies dynamics, including the density of iterates of infinite sets.  His mentors are Giovanni Forni and Adam Kanigowski
• Xuemiao Chen is a geometer, a student of Song Sun from SUNY Stony Brook. He works on Yang-Mills connections, sheaves on complex manifolds, and the Harder-Narasimhan-Seshadri filtration. His mentor is Richard Wentworth.
• Yijing Wu is a student of Luis Caffarelli at the University of Texas in PDE theory. Her undergraduate degree is from Shanghai Jiao Tong University, China. Her research is about regularity properties of non-local elliptic operators and free boundary problems related to the calculus of variations. Her mentor is Antoine Mellet.
• Agnieszka Zelerowicz is a student of Yakov Pesin at Penn State, working on dynamical systems and the thermodynamic formalism. Her undergraduate degree is from Białystok, Poland. Her mentor is Dima Dolgopyat.

### Former Brin Postdoctoral Fellows

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.