Seven workshops and three distinguished lectures are planned for spring, as well as two summer schools

The Brin Mathematics Research Center (Brin MRC) entered its second year with two very successful summer schools. First, we held a two-week school on Partial Hyperbolicity following the spring Partial Hyperbolicity workshop. This summer school was organized by Dima Dolgopyat, Federico Rodriguez Hertz (Penn State) and Amie Wilkinson (University of Chicago). The second summer school was a one-week school on Fluid Dynamics organized by Huy Nguyen and Hussain Ibdah. Each summer school had close to 40 participants that were chosen from over 100 applicants. 

The fall semester welcomed participants in four workshops. The first Fall workshop was on “Polylogarithms, Cluster Algebras, and Scattering Amplitudes.” This workshop was organized by Christian Zickert, two of his former students Dani Kaufman (now at Copenhagen University) and Zack Greenberg (Heidelberg University), and Hebert Gangl (Durham University/MPIM Bohn). This workshop explored the many exciting recent developments in the field including the proof of Zagier's conjecture (expressing the regulator in terms of classical polylogarithms) in weight 4 by Goncharov and Rudenko (2018) following a depth reduction formula by Gangl (2016), the general depth reduction (to half the weight) by Rudenko (2020, formerly a conjecture of Goncharov), the precise formulation of cluster polylogarithms and depth reduction in weight 6 by Matveiakin and Rudenko (2022), a cluster formulation of the second motivic Chern class by Goncharov and Kislinskyi (2021), and the iterated integral expressions for Grassmannian and Aomoto polylogarithms by Charlton, Gangl and Radchenko (2019).

The second fall workshop on “Low Complexity Dynamical Systems” was organized by Darren Creutz (U.S. Naval Academy), Adam Kanigowski, and Rodrigo Treviño. This workshop focused on the study of two major conjectures that relate forms of low complexity: the S-adic conjecture, which asserts that there is an explicit relationship between (sub)linear word complexity and a substitutive structure, and the Pisot conjecture, which asserts that in the context of substitution systems, discrete spectrum is equivalent, roughly, to a specific form of algebraic substitutive structure (and presumably these are also implied, in some sense, by a word complexity property). 

“Statistical Inference on Networks and High-Dimensional Data” was the topic of the third fall workshop. Organized by Vince Lyzinski, Avanti Athreya (Johns Hopkins), and Minh Tang (NC State University), this workshop was held in honor of Carey Priebe’s 60th birthday. Topics discussed spanned classical statistical inference, such as testing and estimation, and modern machine learning, such as neural networks, information retrieval, and prediction.

The final fall conference on the “Mathematics of Malaria Transmission Dynamics” was organized by Lauren Childs (Virginia Tech), Abba Gumel, and Jemal Mohammed-Awel (Morgan State University). Some of the topics of this workshop included a genomic-epidemiology modeling framework for the population abundance of the malaria vector, formulating and fitting models for malaria spread that incorporate climate change and insecticide resistance, modeling impacts of climate change on the global distribution of malaria mosquitoes and disease burden, optimal deployment of insecticide-based resources (e.g., long-lasting insecticidal nets, indoor residual spraying, etc.), the emergence and evolution of parasite drug resistance and impact on malaria spread, and quantifying the impacts of immunity and parasite diversity on drug resistance evolution.

In addition to the four workshops, we held two distinguished Brin MRC lectures: the first by Wolfgang Dahmen (University of South Carolina/RWTH Aachen) who delivered a talk on “Predictive Science and Deep Learning.” The second talk on “Recent Progress in Spin Glass Theory” was delivered by Sourav Chatterjee (Stanford). 

We planned a very exciting and busy schedule for the upcoming spring semester. We will hold seven workshops, including a March workshop on “Recent Advances in Time Series Analysis” in celebration of the career of Benjamin Kedem. Three visitors will deliver Distinguished Brin MRC Lectures: Jens Marklof (University of Bristol), Svetlana Jitomirskaya (UC Irvine) and Nigel Hitchin (University of Oxford). 

We will also host a young investigators meeting in Dynamics, a mid-Atlantic meeting in mathematical biology, and a meeting of the Mathematics Department Chairs from the Big 10 universities. 

Looking forward, we advertised two summer schools for Summer 2024: a summer school on “Mixing Fluids Across Planetary Scales” organized by our colleagues from the Departments of Astronomy, Atmospheric and Oceanic Science, and Geology, and a summer school on “PDE and Randomness.”

I said it before, and I will say it again—we could not have hoped for a better start for the Brin Mathematics Research Center.

Written by: Doron Levy, Director of the Brin Mathematics Research Center

Read more about the members of our community who have been honored recently for their outstanding contributions to the university and the field of mathematics.

Faculty

• Doron Levy elected 2024 Class Fellows of AMS
• ​​Abba Gumel - 2023 Arthur Beaumont Distinguished Service Award (CAIMS)
• Abba Gumel was elected as a Fellow of Unesco’s World Academy of Sciences (TWAS)
• Partha Lahiri appointed as the President-Elect of the International Association of Survey Statisticians
• Chris Laskowski named Distinguished Scholar-Teacher

Student

• Perrin Ruth and Elliot Kienzle receive the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship
• Deven Bowman receives the 2023 Goldwater Scholar Award

AMSC Ph.D. student Alice Oveson is creating a mathematical model that mimics how people decide whether to adhere to public health interventions.

Growing up, Alice Oveson was always fascinated by numbers and the certainty they provided. 

“Math was special because it’s based on logic and reasoning,” she explained. “I loved how black and white it was, how you could look at things in the world and express them in a mathematical, concrete way.” 

But she wasn’t totally convinced that it was her calling—not until one of her high school teachers gave her a little push in the right direction with a backhanded compliment.  

“I was always a little scared of this teacher because he was strict, both about the dress code and about math,” Oveson said. “Funny enough, he told me that even though I wasn’t his smartest student, I worked the hardest. According to him, that meant that I had the potential to embark on a career in math.” 

True to her teacher’s prediction, Oveson is now making waves as a Ph.D. student in the Applied Mathematics & Statistics, and Scientific Computation (AMSC) program at the University of Maryland. 

Under the guidance of Mathematics Professor Abba Gumel and Physics Professor Michelle Girvan, Oveson studies behavioral epidemiology, an up-and-coming field that seeks to understand how human behavior impacts the spread of disease. 

“Behavioral epidemiology combines a bunch of other subjects, from sociology to statistics,” explained Oveson, who said she chose to apply to the AMSC program due to its commitment to interdisciplinary research. “It helps us see how people’s decisions and actions can shape the progression of an epidemic.”

According to Gumel, Oveson’s work addresses a new and growing problem in public health: how people react to infectious disease in light of the spread of disinformation and increasing mistrust towards public health practitioners tasked with implementing control and mitigation measures. Oveson hopes to realistically incorporate these trends into mathematical models simulating disease transmission and control efforts.

“Alice exudes an amazing level of scientific curiosity,” said Gumel, who also holds the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed E-Nnovate Chair in Mathematics and joint appointments in the Department of Biology and Institute for Physical Science and Technology. “Formulating a mathematical model that reasonably mimics how humans choose to make decisions on their adherence to public health interventions is a remarkably challenging undertaking. She is determined to use mathematics, together with data analytics and computation, to solve some of the most pressing grand challenges of our time.”

Inspired by Gumel’s work in epidemiology and her own interest in human behavior, Oveson works on mathematically defining concepts like opinion dynamics—how individual opinions form and evolve over time—and applying that mathematical definition to simulation models of how epidemics grow or wane. To accomplish this, she considers three variables that impact the formation of an opinion: an individual’s own experiences, the opinions of others in the individual’s social network and current circumstances happening around the individual. Using these variables, Oveson can predict possible outcomes of a pandemic.  

“Our opinions shape how we act, and they also change a lot over time, especially when the topic of our opinion is fairly new,” she explained. “For example, the first few months of COVID-19 were crucial to how we ended up reacting to the pandemic. It was during that time that we cemented our opinions on COVID-19, whether it was worthy of concern and whether we should wear masks. Opinion shifts over time influenced how COVID-19 spread.” 

Oveson hopes that her work can one day help public health officials and medical workers fight pandemics by pinpointing when and where their control efforts would be most effective. 

“Knowing how a person feels about wearing a mask versus if they actually wear a mask during a pandemic can tell us if things like whether mask mandates or social pressures work in curbing disease,” she said. “Math can help us understand people and how to help them and even save lives.”

Making math more accessible

Oveson’s belief in how math can help people extends well outside the ivory tower of academia. This philosophy is why she also loves teaching math and is committed to making the subject more accessible to anyone.

“There’s math in so many things we do in life,” she said. “Math has the ability to lift people up, whether it’s giving you better job prospects or just raising your self-esteem when you’ve figured out something difficult.”

Even as a student herself, Oveson has taught a wide variety of students across many institutions. Some were high schoolers looking for a tutor; others were young undergraduates taking introductory calculus courses. More recently, she was part of a UMD Department of Mathematics initiative that allowed her to bring her teaching abilities to a correctional facility in Washington, D.C. 

There, she and several other volunteers from the department offered lessons to incarcerated individuals looking to build a better understanding of math concepts that could be helpful in their day-to-day lives.

“The inmates were exceptionally enthusiastic and willing to learn, more so than almost anybody else I’ve ever taught,” she said. “For them, math was something to look forward to.” 

Oveson’s experience working with incarcerated students reaffirmed her passion for math. Now, she hopes to continue her math outreach to the greater community through teaching, curricula planning and behavioral epidemiology work.

“My research is really fulfilling and so are my teaching efforts,” Oveson added. “Looking back, it’s because I was lucky to meet the right teacher at the right time at every step of my education. I hope to do the same for new generations of students.” 

Written by Georgia Jiang