New center hosted three workshops in the fall that brought mathematicians from all over the world to campus and has five more workshops planned for the spring.

The Brin Mathematics Research Center–launched just one year ago–has already hosted three successful workshops that brought mathematicians from all over the world to the University of Maryland’s College Park campus.

The first Brin MRC workshop, held in September, on “Low-Dimensional Topology and Homeomorphism Groups” was organized by Lei Chen, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner and Boyu Zhang. Our probabilists, Sandra Cerria, Dima Dolgopyat, Yu Gu, and Leonid Koralov, organized a workshop on “Modern Topics in Probability.” This was an opportunity to celebrate Mark Freidlin and his many fundamental contributions to the study of various aspects of the theory of random perturbations of dynamical systems. A follow-up meeting on “Stochastic Partial Differential Equations and Related Topics” was organized by Sandra Cerrai, Yu Gu and Shalin Parekh. This conference brought to Maryland many junior investigators in stochastic PDEs.

We also held our first Brin MRC Distinguished Lecture with Ofer Zeitouni (Weizmann Institute & New York University). In addition, the center hosted several visitors, including Anima Nagar (India), Yuichi Goto (Japan), Stefano Luzzatto (Italy), Francoise Pene (France) and Nordine Mir (Qatar). The Brin MRC visitors program is expected to expand over the next several years to showcase the mathematics done at UMD and to increase the collaborative opportunities between UMD faculty and students and the international mathematical community.

In spring 2023, the Brin MRC will host five workshops on rare events, branching processes, disease dynamics, partial hyperbolicy and numerical PDEs. These workshops will be followed by two summer schools for graduate students and junior mathematicians: one on partial hyperbolicity and one on fluid dynamics. 

The Brin MRC advisory board is currently screening the applications for activities in the Academic Year 2023-24. Those workshops, special lectures and summer schools will be announced soon.

For more information on Brin MRC workshops and activities, visit brinmrc.umd.edu.

Pictures of Events

https://brinmrc.umd.edu/aboutus/photogallery.html

Poster Gallery

https://brinmrc.umd.edu/aboutus/postergallery.html

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

• Abba Gumel and Larry Washington elected as Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS), Class of 2023
• Dmitry Dolgopyat named Distinguished University Professor
• Konstantina Trivisa elected as a Fellow of the Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM), class of 2023
• Haizhao Yang received the Young Investigator Award from the Office of Naval Research (ONR)
• Tristan Buckmaster received an NSF CAREER Award
• Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner received an NSF CAREER Award

Alumni

• Shelby Wilson (Phd 2012, AMSC) elected as an AWM Fellow, class of 2023
• Kimberly Sellers (MS 1998) elected as an AWM Fellow, class of 2023

Undergraduate Students

2022 Interdisciplinary Competition in Modeling (ICM) Results

Congratulations to Radu Balan and to the UMD Math Modeling teams. The teams participated in the 2022 Interdisciplinary Competition in Modeling (ICM). This year 12100 teams participated in the ICM competition. The results of our two teams are:

1. Team 2228337 (Sally Zhao, Naveen Raman, Clarissa Xia) has been awarded a Honorable Mention for Problem F. 

This result puts the team in the 3%-30% range, out of 2964 teams worldwide who submitted solutions to problem F.

1. Team 2228338 (Adam Levav, Abdulrahman Alenazi, Joey Kim) has been awarded Successful Participant designation for problem E. 

This result places the team in the 30%-96% range, out of 8181 international teams who submitted solutions to problem E.

The intense eight-week program for undergraduates will be held again in summer 2023 and 2024.

The University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics hosted an intense eight-week summer program for students interested in modern topics in pure and applied mathematics in summer 2022. 

Eleven undergraduates, who attend universities across the country, and two high school students from nearby Montgomery Blair High School worked on two research projects:

• Mathematical modeling in material science with the emphasis on classical and quantum mechanics, led by Mathematics Professor Dionisios Margetis
• Machine learning methods for the study of rare events in stochastic systems, led by Mathematics Associate Professor Maria Cameron

“The projects stem from hot research areas where a lot of exploration is yet to be done,” said Cameron, who is also the program director. “This enables the undergraduates to exploit their creativity and advance their knowledge in the corresponding fields.”

Helping Cameron with the program is Mathematics Professor Wojciech Czaja, who serves as the assistant program director. The program is also supported by funding from the National Science Foundation.

The program began with two weeks of teaching the undergraduates the necessary background, followed by six weeks of research on the projects. The students also attended three weekly seminars: one where the students gave oral updates on their projects, one where professors from UMD and nearby universities gave expository talks on their research, as well as a workshop covering topics such as how to apply for graduate schools and research fellowships, write a paper and give a talk. In addition, the students explored the D.C. area, with trips that included a hike on the Billy Goat Trail at the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal National Historical Park.

The summer concluded with a poster competition where each research group presented a poster on their project and a symposium where each undergraduate participant gave a talk. In addition, each student wrote a report to be converted into a paper in a peer-reviewed journal. 

Following on to their summer experiences, several students gave oral and poster presentations at various conferences in fall 2022, including the Gulf Coast Undergraduate Research Symposium held at Rice University. Additional presentations are planned for the Joint Mathematics Meeting in January 2023. 

Cameron and Czaja look forward to hosting UMD’s summer program again in summer 2023 and 2024. Students will work on the following projects in summer 2023:

• Cluster algebras and polylogarithm relations, led by Mathematics Associate Professor Christian Zickert
• Geometric measure theory in optimal transport, geometric flows and minimal surfaces, led by Mathematics Assistant Professor Antonio de Rosa
• Data-driven methods for the study of rare events in stochastic systems, led by Cameron

“Running the REU program has been a very exciting experience for me,” Cameron reflected. “The framework of the REU gives me a wonderful opportunity to explore new research directions and learn something new that I would not find time for otherwise. The enthusiasm and talent of the REU participants who are largely self-selected from all over the USA is a strong driver for progress and innovations.”

Applications for UMD’s Summer 2023 program will open in early January 2023 at mathprograms.org and will be due February 20, 2023.

UMD’s REU program is supported by the National Science Foundation (Award No. DMS2149913). This article does not necessarily reflect the views of this organization.