Award established thanks to the generous support of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Ivo Babuška and his wife Renata.

The Ivo and Renata Babuška Endowed Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics was recently established at the University of Maryland thanks to the generous support of Distinguished University Professor Emeritus Ivo Babuška and his late wife Renata. The merit-based award recognizes outstanding Ph.D. student dissertations in the field of computational mathematics in the Department of Mathematics.

Babuška was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1926. He and Renata and their two young children immigrated to the United States in 1968. Babuška was a professor in UMD’s Department of Mathematics and Institute for Physical Science and Technology from 1968 until his retirement in 1994. He and Renata then moved to Austin, Texas. After Renata passed away in 2020, Babuška moved near his son's family in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

UMD played an important role in Babuška's successful career. With his colleagues, especially Professors Bruce Kellogg, John Osborn and Bert Hubbard, Babuška established the foundations of his scientific contributions in the field of computational mathematics, specifically numerical methods for solving partial differential equations. The proofs of the Babuška-Lax-Milgram Theorem and the inf-sup theorem, which became known as the Babuška-Brezzi condition, were two of his contributions while at UMD. These theorems became the foundation of the convergence of the finite element method of solving the partial differential equations. During his career, Babuška published more than 350 papers, books and book chapters. His work has been cited more than 65,000 times. He also received numerous honors and awards. 

In 1970, Babuška founded the Finite Element Circus and served as the "ringmaster" while he was at UMD. The Circus is an annual, informal regional meeting held at different East Coast universities. The meeting allows researchers to share new results and works in progress related to finite elements. An innovative aspect of the Circus is that presentations are scheduled at random to encourage discussions among young and established researchers. The 50th Circus was held virtually in 2020. 

The Ivo and Renata Babuška Endowed Student Award for Graduate Research in Mathematics was created to encourage the next generation of engineers and scientists in computational mathematics at UMD. The inaugural Babuška Award winner will be announced this month. 

Sophomore math major Marie Brodsky finds a different way to teach children math.

Marie Brodsky found her passion for mathematics by going in circles—math circles. Originating in Eastern Europe, math circles spread to the United States in the 1990s, where they found Brodsky in 2006. From the age of 4, Brodsky participated in these extracurricular math learning experiences and her love for problem-solving grew from there. 

By the time Brodsky was 11 years old, she was leading a math circle of her own—teaching younger children foundational math and problem-solving skills through something she calls “recreational math.”

“I still can’t believe that all these parents allowed this little girl with pigtails and polka-dot clothing to teach their kids,” the sophomore math major at the University of Maryland recalled with a laugh. “But I think they recognized that their kids would have a lot more fun learning from someone just slightly older than them rather than a serious adult.”

Brodsky came to UMD as a Banneker/Key Scholar in the Honors College’s Advanced Cybersecurity Experience for Students (ACES) program—and she was looking for an opportunity to continue teaching when she found the Student Initiated Courses (STICs) program. 

STICs help students design, develop and teach their own courses under the guidance of faculty advisors. This year, Brodsky is the executive director of the program, and this fall she taught MATH299Y: Teaching Math to a Young Audience. The course curriculum is inspired by Brodsky’s experience tutoring through her platform Conversations in Math during the pandemic, when she taught math virtually to dozens of children around the world. 

“I took a lot of notes on what worked well and how to explain certain resources I’d found on all those topics,” Brodsky said. “To put together the curriculum for MATH299Y, I went through my lesson notes, picked out the topics I thought were most interesting and put them in logical order for the semester.”

MATH299Y makes connections between seemingly disparate mathematical concepts and introduces topics typically not covered in elementary school curricula—helping college students take advanced topics and simplify them to understand their core ideas. Brodsky anticipates that students will come away with a stronger foundation in math and greater confidence in their abilities to break down these concepts for a young audience.

“I want my students to feel why math can be exciting,” Brodsky said. “Then, when they go on to teach, they remember that these connections between concepts are exciting and see how they can frame them in a more interesting way.”

In each class, Brodsky diagrams problems on the blackboard and guides her students to solutions. She poses math problems geared toward children ages 4, 8 and 12 and asks her students how they would break them down for younger audiences. Brodsky frequently asks, “But why?” to help the students dig deeper into these core mathematical concepts.

For example—a frog is jumping back and forth over a stream. It jumped 101 times. Which side did it end up on? 

“It’s not obvious. What’s your first reaction?” Brodsky said to her class. “In the end, it’s equivalent to having done one jump. If you are teaching 4-year-olds, I would totally act this out by having students jump back and forth in the classroom.”

“I think Marie has done an excellent job understanding what skill sets the various age groups have and how her examples apply or don't apply to those various age groups,” said Mathematics Principal Lecturer Justin Wyss-Gallifent, Brodsky’s faculty advisor for MATH299Y. “In teaching, knowing how to structure the material is probably more than half the battle. In Marie’s case, she is not just teaching problems but also understanding how those age groups would approach the problems.”

Wyss-Gallifent explained that learning to break down problems for others and developing public speaking skills are just some of the benefits of teaching a STIC. Additionally, undergraduate students connect with content differently when another undergrad is teaching the course.

“It’s definitely different having an undergrad student in a professor role. Marie really knows what she’s doing,” said Shiraz Robinson, a plant biology major and one of Brodsky’s students. “This class has given me a different way to look at numbers and it’s helping me understand math better. You can scale these ideas to very deep ideas that require all your computational power.”

In her role as executive director of the STICs program, Brodsky wants to give the students teaching STICs creative license to teach the topics they’re passionate about while also holding them accountable as teachers.

“We’re planning to do workshops where the facilitators give each other feedback on their course planning, content, syllabus, maybe teach a little bit to each other and get feedback,” Brodsky said. “Most people who are teaching a STIC are really committed to this idea of students teaching courses, so we want to support them and give them even more resources to become even better teachers.”

When it comes to her future career plans, Brodsky is still figuring that out. For now, she’s interested in learning more about education policy and curriculum development. One thing she’s certain of: She wants to make education better.

“I want to help improve the education system,” Brodsky said, “and revamp how teachers get incentivized to teach in better ways, how they decide the material and curriculum, and how to make the experience better on a larger scale.”

Written by Katie Bemb

Musician Sheyda Peyman to release her debut album while conducting research for her doctoral dissertation.

Scales, intervals, patterns, symbols—to Sheyda Peyman, all music is math. Though to some it may seem an unlikely connection, Peyman, a Ph.D. candidate in the Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation program at the University of Maryland, says the link between mathematics and music is undeniable. 

“The arts and sciences all describe the same reality from different perspectives,” Peyman explained. “I’m attracted to the beauty of math and music in a truly philosophical way.”

Peyman, a vocalist, guitarist and pianist who goes by Sheyda Do’a on stage, will release her debut album in 2022. She was inspired to work on the album while an artist in residence at Strathmore, where she forged connections in the D.C. music scene.

“My music has influences from jazz and Latin music, as well as my Albanian culture,” said Peyman, who was raised in Albania. “When I’m writing my music, I don’t really have a formal process—I just get inspired in the moment, the music comes to me and I play it.”

Peyman has learned from experience that her music isn’t quite as meaningful without math in her life. After completing her bachelor’s degree in mathematics at the University of Edinburgh in 2016, Peyman attended Berklee College of Music. She spent a semester studying only music and quickly realized that she missed math—so she quit the program. 

  When she moved to the D.C. area in 2018, Peyman decided it was time to resume her math studies. The University of Maryland Department of Mathematics offered exactly what she was looking for. 

“I’m so happy with where I’m at in my career, in both my music and in my studies at UMD,” Peyman said. “I’ve realized I need both math and music in my life.”

In her first few years at UMD, Peyman took graduate-level courses while also teaching undergraduates—earning the 2020 A. Kadir Aziz-John Osborn Graduate Student Award for her teaching skills. Now, with her qualifying exams behind her, Peyman’s research is ramping up. Her focus is network theory, which Peyman notes is a “hot topic” nowadays. 

“Simply put, a network can be thought of as a set of objects and the interactions between them. The objects can be anything from people to proteins to neurons, and the interactions can be anything from emails sent to connections on social media to synapses between neurons,” Peyman explained. “Though I started at UMD doing a lot of abstract algebra, I found myself leaning more and more toward this kind of applied math. The possibilities are fascinating to me.”

Peyman is preparing to submit a paper on adversarial data contamination, which happens when data is either maliciously or accidentally altered. Consider, for example, a Facebook network of 156 vertices representing 156 people—if two of them are friends on Facebook, then there is an edge connecting the two corresponding vertices. If an adversary hacks one of the 156 accounts in the network and deletes that account’s friendships, how can that information be recovered?

“This adversary could, for example, delete a number of edges from the graph,” Peyman said. “If we have a second network that is related, we can use this information to retrieve at least part of the original network, implementing regularization techniques to help mitigate the effect of an adversary.”  

In a paper written with her advisor, Mathematics Associate Professor Vince Lyzinski, Peyman proposes that network trimming should be simulated to make networks faster, smaller and more efficient—without risking network function or data loss.

With her paper wrapping up, Peyman is embarking on a new project with Lyzinski: programming an algorithm to optimize recommendations based on user inputs.

“Let’s say you’re watching Netflix. On Netflix, you can ‘like’ something you watched, and then the computer algorithm sends you recommendations based on that. Sometimes those recommendations might be wrong because the algorithm is not perfect,” Peyman explained. “We’re trying to see how we can use the information that the user inputs to give a better recommendation.”

Now in the initial exploratory phase of this new project, Peyman spends most of her time reading relevant papers and preparing to write code to apply and test her theories. 

When she’s not deep in her doctoral studies, Peyman performs around the metro D.C. area and prepares for her upcoming album release. Longer term, she plans to continue pursuing her career in music while also working in applied math and programming.

“Similar to how music inspires and moves me, it’s very empowering to see a math problem, try to solve it, and then actually apply it myself to see if the results work,” Peyman said. “I’m really getting to appreciate and pursue these two passions of mine, which is why I love where I’m at right now.”

Written by Katie Bemb