A Brin MRC Distinguished Lecture delivered by Ofer Zeitouni will also take place in the fall.

A message from Doron Levy, Brin Mathematics Research Center Director and Department of Mathematics Chair

The Brin Mathematics Research Center (Brin MRC) was established in 2022 through a generous gift from Michael and Eugenia Brin and the Sergey Brin Family Foundation. We plan to begin hosting activities in the Brin MRC in Fall 2022. The center is located on the fourth floor of the Computer Science Instructional Center, which is within a short walk from Kirwan Hall, in space that we are in the process of renovating.

Since the Center was announced, we formed an advisory board composed of five professors from the Department of Mathematics: Sandra Cerrai, Dima Dologpyat, Dio Margetis, Bill Goldman and Richard Wentworth. We also identified an exciting lineup of activities for the center’s first year, including 9 workshops and conferences and 2 summer schools:

• Workshop on low-dimensional topology and homeomorphism (organized by three of our new faculty members: Lei Chen, Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner and Boyu Zhang)
• Two workshops organized together with UMD’s Brain and Behavior Institute
• Workshop on rare events (organized by Maria Cameron and Pratyush Tiwary)
• Two workshops on probability and stochastic partial differential equations (organized by Lenya Ryzhik from Stanford, Sandra Cerrai, Dima Dolgopyan, Yu Go and Leonid Koralov)
• Two workshops on partial hyperbolicity (organized by Amie Wilkinson from the University of Chicago, Frederico Rodriguez Hertz from Penn State and Dima Dolgopyat)
• Two summer schools are planned for summer 2023: one on partial hyperbolicity and a second school on fluid dynamics (organized by Huy Nguyen and Hussain Ibdah) 

The Brin MRC will provide many opportunities for short-term and long-term visitors who are interested in interacting with faculty members at the University of Maryland and in experiencing the metropolitan Washington, D.C. area. A Brin MRC Distinguished Lecture will be delivered in Fall 2022 by Ofer Zeitouni.

This is only the beginning and it is all very exciting. We will share updates on the Brin MRC in the math department’s biannual newsletters. However, we invite you to visit the Brin MRC website and follow us on Twitter to get more up-to-date information. If you have questions about Brin MRC activities, please email .

Prior to UMD, he was a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

From the time the École Polytechnique in France named his Ph.D. dissertation the best in the year 2000, University of Maryland Mathematics Professor Bassam Fayad built a reputation as a world expert in the theory of dynamical systems.

Fayad has traveled across continents to collaborate on research with colleagues in Brazil, Italy, Sweden, China and the U.S. In 2018, he was invited to lecture at the International Congress of Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro. Until recently, he was a research director at the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) in Paris.

Now, he has taken another prestigious position here at UMD. Fayad has been named the Michael and Eugenia Brin Endowed Chair in Mathematics. Established in 2015, the Brin Chair is “chosen strictly on the basis of demonstrated exceptional mathematical ability, achievement, potential, and leadership in mathematical research and education, in a vital field at the heart of mathematics.”

Known for his work in Hamiltonian dynamics, Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theory, Liouville phenomenon and homogeneous dynamics, Fayad sees great potential in holding the Brin Chair. 

“In terms of possibilities to engage in far-reaching activities, Maryland is on a very remarkable upward slope,” he said.

He’s especially excited about funding that will be available through the recently established Brin Mathematics Research Center. 

“In dynamical systems, one of the strongest groups in the world is concentrated here at Maryland,” Fayad said. “We can host workshops. We can invite specialists in all areas of dynamics from around the world to give lectures or crash courses. We can invite colleagues and collaborators as well as their students. If you add our colleagues from Penn State and the University of Chicago and Northwestern and New York, we can function as a hub, because all these places are quite near and people interact a lot.”

It was the late Penn State mathematician Anatole Katok—who Michael Brin also studied under—who drew Fayad to his first experience in the U.S. After serving on Fayad’s Ph.D. jury, Katok extended an offer to Fayad for a one-year post-doc at Penn State. Following the post-doc, Fayad returned to Paris, where he lived since he was a teenager—moving there from Lebanon with his elder brother to prepare for the entrance exam for École Polytechnique. 

“This happened in the summer of a very hard last year of war in Lebanon,” Fayad said. “My father calculated that schools would not open, and he was right. Two days before classes were supposed to open, my brother’s school in France agreed to enroll me. I was in crisis and started crying for a whole week. I was young and not prepared and not convinced. The plan was that I would become an architect in Lebanon like my father. The story ended up with both of us at Polytechnique.”

Mathematics was also an unplanned path for Fayad. 

“I said I will do Polytechnique, and then I will do architecture,” he said. “And then I will go back to Lebanon. But math was also fun and that’s what I ended up doing.”

Fayad’s research today ranges from abstract ergodic theory to topics intimately connected to real-world mathematical physics, such as Hamiltonian dynamics and their applications to the N-body problem.

“The research field of dynamical systems has this advantage of being very close to physics,” Fayad said. “Part of our job, for example, is to look at the planetary system and study all the possibilities. Will this system behave in a tame way with all planets gravitating on ellipses around the sun, while their satellites do the same around them? Under which conditions will it behave in a completely different manner and maybe in a chaotic way? For example, can a planet escape? Can we lose the moon?”

When Fayad received the offer to join UMD, the pandemic had just started.

“Businesses were shutting down everywhere and the world seemed to be collapsing,” he said. “And on my side, it was all working well. I was signing a contract for a new life. However, the pandemic did delay everything by a couple of years.”

Fayad finally arrived on campus at the beginning of 2022. He’ll continue to travel to France to work with some of his Ph.D. students there, while he works on attracting students to his research group at Maryland. 

“The department is also very active in the process of hiring high-quality professors in all disciplines in mathematics. And we have a lot of projects,” he added. “You feel good to embrace this new adventure, where you know that people are putting in hope and energy and means to do things for our field that I think will make a difference.”

Written by Ellen Ternes

Distinguished University Professor of Mathematics Eitan Tadmor received the 2022 AMS-SIAM Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics and was invited to deliver the 2022 Gibbs Lecture at the joint math meeting of the American Mathematical Society.

“I have been mentored by and collaborated with many mathematicians who played an indispensable role in my career,” Tadmor said. “I feel blessed to be part of a worldwide network of mathematicians, which is like a home away from home for me.”

These honors recognized Tadmor’s original, broad and fundamental contributions to applied and computational mathematics, including conservation laws, kinetics, image processing and social dynamics. 

The signature of Tadmor’s work is the interplay between analytical theories and computational algorithms for such equations. His many outstanding contributions include the development of high-resolution central schemes; entropy conservative/stable schemes; and the spectral viscosity method for nonlinear conservation laws. He collaborated in groundbreaking work on the regularization of conservation laws and their relation to kinetic formulation. He introduced novel ideas of multi-scale hierarchical decompositions of images with applications to problems in critical regularity spaces.

Currently, Tadmor is leading a research program in collective dynamics, with a series of novel contributions which include adaptive alignment; topologically based and multi-species dynamics; and development of a general paradigm for emergent behavior away from thermal equilibrium.

“My work in mathematics and applications has given me great joy. As a language spoken in different scientific disciplines, mathematics is constantly engaged with new developments in a variety of fields of science and technology,” Tadmor said. “The synergy between mathematics and applications requires the development of new ‘dialects’ in applied and computational mathematics. I am always fascinated by the creative tension between imagination and rigor needed to develop these dialects and their use in solving concrete problems.”

Tadmor received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Tel Aviv University in 1978 and began his career as a Bateman Research Instructor at Caltech (1980-82) before joining the faculties of Tel Aviv University (1983-1995) and UCLA (1995-2002). In 2002, he was recruited by the University of Maryland to lead the Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling, where he served as director from 2002 to 2016. In 2016-17, he was a Senior Fellow at the Institute for Theoretical Studies (ITS) at ETH-Zürich.

Tadmor was a founding co-director of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA (1999-2001) and the principal investigator of both an NSF Focus Research Group (2008-12) and the NSF Kinetic Research Network (Ki-Net) at the University of Maryland (2012-20). He gave an invited lecture at the ICM (Beijing, 2002); the SIAM invited address at the JMM (Baltimore, 2014); the 2016 Leçons Jacques-Louis Lions (Paris); a Nachdiplom Lecture series at ETH (Zürich, 2017); and a plenary address at the ICIAM (Valencia, 2019). He is the recipient of the 2015 SIAM-ETH Peter Henrici Prize and is a fellow of the AMS and SIAM.

The Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics is awarded every three years by the AMS and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense. The 2022 prize was presented to Tadmor in January during the Joint Prize Session at the 2022 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Seattle.

With his selection as Gibbs lecturer, Tadmor joined three former Gibbs lecturers from UMD: Johannes Burgers (1963), Elliott Montroll (1987) and Michael Fisher (1992). The AMS Council established the Josiah Willard Gibbs Lectureship in 1923. Gibbs (1839-1903), a mathematical physicist, was one of the greatest scientists America has ever produced. These lectures aim to enable the public and the academic community to become aware of the contribution that mathematics is making to present-day thinking and to modern civilization.

This article includes content provided by the American Mathematical Society.