Awarded to students upon the completion of their dissertation work. The Ivo and Renata Babuška Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics is an award for an outstanding Ph.D. student dissertation in the field of computational mathematics in the Department of Mathematics. The award was established by our former colleague, Ivo Babuška, who made foundational scientific contributions in the field of computational mathematics, specifically, numerical methods for solving partial differential equations. Math/AMSC/Stat faculty may nominate students that defended their dissertation after September of the current academic school year. A nomination packet includes a copy of the dissertation and a 1-2 pages nomination letter written by the thesis advisor.

• 2023

Lucas Bouck: Liquid Crystal Variational Problems: Modeling, Numerical Analysis, and Computation
Advisor: Ricardo Nochetto

• 2022

Christopher Dock: U(R) Phase Retrieval, Local Normalizing Flows, and Higher Order Fourier Transforms
Advisor: Radu Balan

• 2021

Shuo Yang: Numerical analysis and computation of nonlinear variational problems in materials science
Advisor: Ricardo Nochetto

The Monroe Martin Talks & Seymour Goldberg Talks make-up a speaking competition. Speakers give 15-minute talks in which they communicate a mathematical idea or method to the general mathematical community. The talks should be aimed at the level of a general mathematical audience (i.e. an audience with some mathematical background, but not consisting of experts in the speaker's field) and should convey an idea worth sharing. Speakers can feel free to discuss their own research, but there is no requirement to do so. The talks will be judged on their content and presentation by a panel of past winners. 

2024

Presentation Competition

• Revati Jadhav- Visualizing Complex Analysis
• Brandon Kolstoe- The Scattering Transform: Both a Model and a Tool
• Soyoung Park- Why Vaccinating Males Matters in HPV and HPV-Related Cancers
• Luis Suarez- Automatic Continuity in Metric Structures

2023

Presentation Competition

• Max Auer- When do rare events occur?
• Ethan Dudley- Anomalous Dissipation in Turbulence
• Connor Lockhart- Dividing Lines in Model Theory
• Michael Rozowski- Gradient Flow Interpretations of the Heat Equation

2022

Presentation Competition

• Nakyung (Rachel) Lee- Can we foliate three dimensional manifolds with two dimensional leaves?
• Eliot Lehrer- Intro to Modular Forms
• Stavros Papathanasiou- A stochastic approach to PDEs of parabolic type
• Efstratios Tsoukanis- The Weisfeiler-Lehman Isomorphism Test

2021

Presentation Competition

• Josue Avila Artavia- First case of Fermat's last theorem for regular primes
• Liam Fowl- Witches' Brew: Targeted Data Poisoning via Gradient Alignment
• Nicholas Paskal- How to escape from a well: a tutorial
• Shin Eui Song- One of five fundamental operations of mathematics: modular forms

2020

Presentation Competition

• Zachary Greenberg- Cayley Graphs of Triangles
• Dani Kaufman- ADE Correspondences
• Tahseen Rabbani- Error-Correcting Codes: From Mars to International Trade Court
• Arghya Sadhukhan- Is e^{\pi*\sqrt 163} Even or Odd? 

2019

Presentation Competition

• Patrick Daniels- Tannakian Duality for Permutation Representations
• Danul Gunatilleka- 0-1
• Jenny Rustad- Billiards, Translation Surfaces, and Teichmuller Flow
• Sam Bloom- Elliptic curves, Cryptography, and Lang-Trotter Questions

2018

Presentation Competition:

• Ariella Kirsch - Fibonacci Coding
• Jeremiah Emidith - Equiangular Lines and Graph Theory
• Phillip Wertheimer - Markov Chain Monte Carlo in Cryptography
• Alexander Ester - How to solve the Traveling Salesman Problem by Hand

 2017

Presentation Competition:

• Sean Ballentine - Locally Recoverable Codes
• Ran Cui - Spectral Analysis of NBA Data
• Micah Goldblum - Baribier's Theorem: A Theorem in Geometric Probability
• Pratima Hebbar - Exponential Limit of a Discrete, Scaled Branching Process

 2016

Presentation Competition:

• Summer (Xia) Hu - Using Stat 100 to Design Your Own Google Translator
• Richard Rast - Model Theory and Polynomials
• Jenny Rustad - Topological Dynamics and Van der Waerden's Theorem
• Alexey Stepanov - Emergence of Patterns in Non-Euclidean Plates: Flowers, Leaves, and Plastic Bags

 2015

Presentation Competition:

• Matt Begue - Analysis meets Graphs
• Jean-Philippe Burelle - Farey Arithmetic and Geometry
• Alex Cloninger - Invariant Subspace Perturbation or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Eigenvectors
• Mickey Salins - Using Random Functions to Model Deterministic Phenomena

 2014

Presentation Competition:

• Travis Andrews - Stumbling on Conjectures: Why You Should(n't) Google Things
• Tyler Drombosky - Fast Boundary Methods with applications in geophysics
• Tim Mercure - How Can the Continuum Hypothesis Possibly be Independent? A Dialogue.
• Zsolt Pajor-Gyulai - On Brownian local time

2013

Presentation Competition:

• Michael Kreisel - An Introduction to Noncommutative Topology
• Scott Schmieding - The Structure of Aperiodic Tilings
• David Shaw - Incremental Subspace Learning for Unsupervised Domain Adaptation Using Manifold Optimization
• Srimathy Srinivasan - Algebraic Geometry in Blu-Ray?

Written Competition:

• Alex Cloninger - The Work of Cand’es, Romberg, and Tao in Compressive Sensing

Poster Competition:

• Carolina Franco
• Karl Schmitt

2012

Presentation Competition:

• Madhura Joglekar - A Case of Ever-increasing Toplogical Entropy
• Anne Jorstad - Geodesics for Robust Face Recognition
• Dave Karpuk -Solutions to Equations over Finite Fields
• Guillame Marcais - Jellyfish: A Fast, Lock-free Approach for Efficient Parallel Counting of Occurrences of k-mers

Written Competition:

• Dave Shaw - Regularization Techniques for Analyzing Data on a Manifold

2011

Presentation Competition:

• Edward Clifford -Shifted increasing tableaux
• Will Herring - Applications of operations research models to operating room scheduling
• Cecilia Gonzalez Tokman - Finite state Markov chains and metastable systems

Written Competition:

• James Tanis – E=mc^2

2010

Presentation Competition:

• Ryan Hoban
• Matthew Hoffman
• Russell Halper
• Konstantinos Spiliopoulos

Written Competition:

• Fei Xue
• Bijan Afsari
• Anastasia Voulgaraki

2009

Presentation Competition:

• Enrico Au-Yeung - What is the largest disc that can be covered by a random walk in N steps?
• Fei Xue - Convergence of iterative solvers in inexact Rayleigh Quotient Iteration
• Karl R. B. Schmitt - Chaotic Communication: Crystal Clear and Private
• Carter Price - Graph Theory Applications in Kidney Paired Donation

Written Competition:

• Ben Lauser - Origin of the Radar Ambiguity Function
• Domingo Ruiz - Quaternions and Double Rotations
• Konstantinos Spiliopoulos - On the Reflection of a Particle of Small Mass in a Random Force Field

Poster Competition:

• Ritaja Sur - Analysis of Eye/Arm Movement Data
• J. Scott Olsson - Combining Speech Retrieval Results with Generalized Additive Models
• Nate Strawn - A Direct Method for Designing FUNTF's

2008

Presentation Competition:

• Bin Cheng - On the Long Time Regularity of the Shallow Water Equations
• Fernando Galaz Garcia - Almost Nonpositive Curvature: Decreasing the Diameter Without Increasing the Curvature
• J. Scott Olsson - Searching Spoken Documents: Speech Retrieval Systems
• Chris Shaw - What Are the Strongest Weakly o-Minimal Structures?

Written Competition:

• Juliana Belding - Curves, Cryptography and Primes of the Form x^2 + Dy^2
• Matthew Hoffman - Ocean Instabilities Captured by Breeding
• Hunter Johnson- VC-dimension and Model Theory
• Emily King - The Geometry of Wavelets: Fractal Tilings and Group Representations

 2007

Presentation Competition:

• David Bourne
• Susan Schmoyer
• David McClendon
• Miguel Pauletti

Written Competition:

• Fernando Galaz-Garcia
• Chensong Zhang
• Jane Holsapple Long
• Damon Gulczynski, Jeffrey Heath & Carter Price

2006

• Gregory Bard
• John Harlim
• Suzanne Sindi
• Yupei Xiong

2005

• Chris Danforth
• J.T. Halbert
• Cory Hauck
• Brandy Rapatski

2004

• Robert Day
• Daniel Dunlavy
• William Ott
• Blake Pelzer

2003

• Karen Ball
• Alfred Dolich
• Scott Laprise
• Jae-Hong Pyo

2002

• Stephen Devlin
• Takashi Nishikawa
• DJ Patil
• Yvonne Shashoua

Congratulations to the students who recived awards. Here are our students who won awards for the spring 2024 semester.

2024 Graduate Awards Video

Graduate Student Teaching Awards

James C. Alexander Prize for Graduate Research

Patrick and Marguerite Sung Fellowship in Mathematics

Ralph P. Pass III

Mark E. Lachtman Graduate Student Award

Ruth Davis Fellowship for Mathematics and Physics

Monroe H. Martin Graduate Research Fellowship

Spotlight on Graduate Research Awards

Hauptman Fellowship

Babuska Award

Student Travel Requests

There are two Math Department funds for graduate students traveling to conferences: Yorke Graduate Support Fund and Joel Cohen Travel Fund. Each fund can only be used once a year. The Yorke Graduate Student Support Fund covers expenses for up to 800 dollars.  The two funds cannot be combined.

Both funds are available to students giving a talk or presenting a poster, or is available to students who have some additional funding from other sources (advisor, conference organizers, etc.). 

The printing of posters can be covered by the department as a separate expense.

How To Receive Funds for Travel: 

1. Students must be presenting at the conference in order to receive a travel award. This award is given as a reimbursement.

2. Students planning to travel to conferences should receive written approval from the Associate Chair for Graduate Studies for approval. Please email Leonid Koralov at  with the details of the trip and request for travel funds. The Associate Chair will highly recommend the student also apply for the University Goldhaber Fund which provides matching funds. For example, if the department can provide 500 dollars, the Goldhaber fund would match an additional 500 dollars for your trip.

3. Once you have the written approval, create the request on Concur before you travel. The graduate office staff or the business office staff can help you navigate Concur. If the request is not received in Concur before your travel, you will not be reimbursed.

 For any questions regarding travel awards, please contact the Graduate Office.

The Monroe Martin Talks is a competition: speakers give 15-minute talks in which they communicate a mathematical idea or method to the general mathematical community. The talks should be aimed at the level of a general mathematical audience (i.e. an audience with some mathematical background, but not consisting of experts in the speaker's field) and should convey an idea worth sharing. Speakers can feel free to discuss their own research, but there is no requirement to do so. The talks will be judged on their content and presentation by a panel of past winners.

• 2023-24

Revati Jadhav

Brandon Kolstoe

• 2022-23

Max Auer

Ethan Dudley

• 2021-22

Stavros Papathanasiou

Efstratios Tsoukanis

• 2020-21

Jingcheng Lu

Shuo Yang

• 2018-19

Brandon Alexander

Kyle Liss

• 2017-2018

Samuel Punshon-Smith

• 2015-2016

Suddhasattwa Das

• 2013-2014

Alexey Stepanov

• 2011-2012

Kanna Nakamura