Department Chair Scott Wolpert will be receiving this year's Kirwan Undergraduate Education Award at the Faculty-Staff Convocation on September 14^th at 3PM in Memorial Chapel.  This is for his work with small-group calculus (ACCEL), for being PI on a large NSF undergraduate scholarship grant, for reorganizing the campus design-your-major program (Individual Studies), cofounding the now Federal Fellows program and for serving on the “four year plans” committee (Student Academic Success Degree Completion Policy).  Scott reports that “I have totally enjoyed working with many folks around the campus.”

The Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award honors annually 4-6 tenured faculty members who combine outstanding scholarship with teaching excellence. Selected by a committee of former DSTs based on dossiers containing curriculum vitae, teaching dossier, statement about how the nominee integrates research and teaching, external letters of support from distinguished scholars outside the university, and letters of support from current or past students. DSTs receive $5,000 to support scholarly and instructional activities; they also deliver a public address and may participate in an Honors seminar.

Aside from his major research contributions, Levermore is being honored for his distinguished advising of many PhDs and his curriculum work (along with Doron Levy and Ron Lipsman) on Math 246.   In Math 246, we have transitioned from a traditional text to an interactive web experience with text, problems, demos and videos.   The web experience is suited to the current generation, and provides student savings of over $150,000 per year.

Date & Time: TBA
Title: "Can We Model Uncertainty?"

Orthogonal Polynomials and Special Functions Summer School (OPSF-S6)
University of Maryland, College Park, MD
July 11-July 15, 2016

This program is for graduate students and post-docs. We expect to be able to fund up a number of students, early career researchers and students from third-world countries.

The OPSF summer schools are organized by the Orthogonal Polynomials, Special Functions and Applications (OPSFA) Steering Committee. The OPSF-S6 program consists of a one-week summer school for graduate students and early career researchers to be held in Summer 2016 on the campus of the University of Maryland. It will focus on orthogonal polynomials and special functions, and feature lectures delivered by top researchers in their fields.

More information can be found at this Summer School homepage here: http://www.norbertwiener.umd.edu/Education/OPSFS6/

Department alumnus Simon Levin, George M. Moffett Professor of Biology in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Princeton University, has been awarded the National Medal of Science for his research in ecological complexity.  He received his Ph.D. from Maryland in 1964 under the direction of Monroe Martin.  An article about him appears in the latest issue of SIAM News. Not that long ago, Levin also received the Tyler Prize for Environmental Achievement.

We regret to announce the passing of Associate Professor Horst Elmar Winkelnkemper on April 10, 2016.  Elmar received his PhD at Princeton in 1971, and spent two years at the Institute for Advanced Study before coming to Maryland in 1973.  During his career he visited IHES in Bures-sur-Yvette, France and the Instituto de Matematicas, UNAM, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and gave an Arbeitstagung talk in Bonn, Germany.  One of his earliest results, which attracted a lot of attention, showed that a simply connected closed manifold in sufficiently high dimension has a decomposition as an "open book" if and only if its signature vanishes. Winkelnkemper's most cited publications are a short proof, joint with Fields Medalist Bill Thurston, that every closed 3-manifold admits a contact structure, and "The graph of a foliation", eventually used by another Fields Medalist, Alain Connes, in defining the C*-algebra of a foliation.  There is a nice mathematical appreciation of Elmar's work by none other than Dennis Sullivan in the AMS Notices, Augest 2016 issue, page 829.

Assistant Professors Maria Cameron and Jacob Bedrossian have been awarded prestigious Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Awards from NSF.  CAREER awards are intended to provide stable 5-year funding for early career scientists with:

Bedrossian's project, Award #1552826, concerns fluid flow at high Reynolds number.  Cameron's project, Award #1554907, concerns computational tools for large stochastic networks.