UMD was one of only three U.S. public universities to place in the top 10 at the prestigious international math competition.

A team of undergraduates from the University of Maryland placed ninth out of 568 teams and earned an honorable mention nod in the 2018 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, popularly called “the Putnam.” 

Read more: Terps Placed 9th in Putnam Competition

We welcomed ten new members to the math family this fall!

Stefan Doboszczak - Lecturer
Stefan (Ph.D. ’16, applied mathematics and statistics, and scientific computation) returned to UMD after a postdoc at the Air Force Institute of Technology. 

Vince Lyzinski - Assistant Professor
Vince’s research interests are centered on random graph inference, statistical machine learning, probability, and combinatorics. 

Brian Smithling - Visiting Assistant Professor
Brian is visiting us this year from Johns Hopkins. He studies Shimura varieties and related geometric objects.

Read more: New Faculty Members Arrive

A Q&A with Philip Isett (B.S. ’08, mathematics; B.A. ’08, economics) on the math behind fluid dynamics

The ways in which water meanders through rivers or makes its way through pipes to your kitchen sink is much more complex than you might think. Mathematicians have been trying to model the flow of water and air for centuries in a field known as fluid dynamics, but according to Philip Isett, a new assistant professor of mathematics at Caltech, the problem is incredibly challenging.

"Because fluids are ubiquitous in nature, we really have to grapple with understanding them," he says. "Fluids are hard to describe inherently because they exhibit a very chaotic and erratic kind of motion called turbulence."

Read more: The Mathematics of Flow