We welcomed six new faculty members and five Novikov postdocs to the Math family this fall!

Faculty:

Lei Chen (Assistant Professor). Lei received a B.S. from Peking University and a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago (2018) under the supervision of Benson Farb. She was then a Noether Instructor at CalTech. Lei works in the area of low dimensional topology and geometric group theory.  She made major contributions in the areas of group actions on manifolds and homomorphisms between transformation and mapping class groups. Her work is also related to complex geometry and topological dynamics.

Dan Cristofaro-Gardiner (Assistant Professor). Dan received his A.B. degree from Harvard (2007) and Ph.D. from Berkeley (2013). He then worked as an assistant professor at UC Santa Cruz and was a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. Dan works in symplectic topology/geometry/dynamics. He is a leader in the field of “quantitative symplectic geometry,” an area that focuses on questions about symplectic embedding of symplectic manifolds with boundary, and Reeb dynamics on the boundaries of symplectic manifolds. He has contributed in substantial ways to a variety of hard problems. Most recently, together with Humiliere and Seyfaddini, he posted on the arXiv a surprising proof of the simplicity conjecture showing that the group of compactly supported area-preserving homeomorphisms of the two-disc is not simple.

Bassam Fayad (Professor, Brin Chair). Bassam received his Ph.D. from the École Polytechnique (2000) and a Habilitation from the University of Paris 13 (2006). Recently, he worked as a Directeur de Recherche 1ère class at the CNRS. Bassam is a distinguished mathematician, working in the area of dynamical systems. He is mostly known for his work on the Kolmogorov-Arnold-Moser (KAM) theory. Bassam’s work is centered on Hamiltonian dynamics and on smooth ergodic theory. He has important results in many other areas including rigidity theory, number theory and mathematical physics. Bassam made substantial contributions to the KAM theory of analytic systems by proving stability results and obtaining optimal bounds for the stability time. Among other areas, he obtained significant results in the study of positive entropy systems and to zero entropy systems. Throughout his career, Bassam has received many distinctions and honors, including an invited lecture at the 2018 International Congress of Mathematics in Rio de Janeiro. Bassam joins our department as the Michael and Eugenia Brin Distinguished Chair of Mathematics.

Yu Gu (Associate Professor). Yu received a B.S. in mathematics and physics from Tsinghua, an M.S. from Brown and a Ph.D. from Columbia under the direction of Guillaume Bal. He then spent three years as a Szegö Assistant Professor at Stanford before moving to Carnegie Mellon University as an assistant professor (2017). Yu works in the area of mathematical and asymptotic analysis of random dynamics and random partial differential equations. He made fundamental contributions to the theory of homogenization and provided the first results on random fluctuations in high dimensions. Recently, he obtained breakthrough results in the study of a Hamilton-Jacobi type equation driven by a spacetime white noise, the so-called KPZ equation. Last year, Yu received a National Science Foundation CAREER Award.

Huy Nguyen (Assistant Professor). Huy received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris-Sud 11 (with Nicolas Burg, 2016). Then, he was a postdoc in Princeton and a Tamarkin Assistant Professor at Brown. Huy works in the area of analysis, somewhere between pure analysis, harmonic analysis, and PDEs.  Huy made substantial contributions to many problems including the proof of modulation instability of Stokes waves, optimal Strichartz estimate for water waves, and the global well-posedness for the one-phase Muskat problem (a free boundary problem in a porous medium that describes two flows separated by a free boundary).

Christian Rosendal (Professor). Christian received a Ph.D. from the University of Paris 6 under the direction of Alain Louveau. He then worked at CalTech, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and more recently at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In the past two years, he has been working as a program director at the National Science Foundation. Christian works in the area of mathematical logic. His research belongs to four interconnected topics: rigidity of Polish groups, geometry of topological groups, descriptive set theory, and the geometry of Banach spaces. In 2020, he was named Fellow of the AMS.

Novikov Postdocs:

James Hanson. A student of Uri Andrews at Wisconsin. James works in continuous logic and applications of logic to topology and analysis. He also has a background in theoretical physics. His mentor is Chris Laskowski.

Xiaoqi Huang. A student of Chris Sogge at Johns Hopkins. Xiaoqi works in harmonic and geometric analysis and partial differential equations. His mentor is Manos Grillakis.

Hussain Ibdah. A student of Edriss Titi at Texas A&M. Hussain is interested in theoretically analyzing nonlinear, nonlocal PDEs, in particular, those of fluid mechanics and transport-diffusion systems. His mentor is Eitan Tadmor.

Rigoberto Zelada. A student of Vitaly Bergelson at Ohio State. Rigoberto works in ergodic theory. His mentor is Adam Kanigowski.

Lutian Zhao. A student of Sheldon Katz at Illinois. Lutian works in enumerative algerbraic geometry with applications to mathematical physics. His mentor is Amin Gholampour.

Memorial service honored Manjit Bhatia (1936-2020) and the free tutoring program he launched for math students at UMD.

On November 13, 2021, the Bhatia family hosted a memorial service in the James A. Yorke Rotunda of Kirwan Hall at the University of Maryland to celebrate the life and work of Adjunct Professor of Mathematics Manjit Bhatia, who passed away last year at the age of 84. More than a decade ago, Manjit helped launch the department’s advanced mathematics tutoring program. Now known as the Help Sessions program, it helped countless math students take on the biggest challenges in their studies and achieve academic success. 

“Bhatia was a very caring person who loved to help people,” said Mathematics Professor Lawrence Washington. “For several years, he volunteered his time to help students in gateway upper-level courses. Quite often, one-on-one help can remove roadblocks and clear up misconceptions and the students loved his help.”

“A born teacher”

Anyone who met Manjit quickly realized one thing: he was crazy about math. And no matter where he was, whether on campus, at home or just about anywhere else, Manjit never stopped teaching.

“He was passionate about math and he was passionate about learning. We would go on trips and he would start talking to taxi drivers and then advising them, talking about mathematics,” explained Kiran Bhatia, his wife of 53 years. “I would say to him sometimes, ‘Let us just be on vacation now,’ but he was just a born teacher. He would give all of his attention to trying to educate himself or the people around him.”

Born in New Delhi, India, Manjit earned Ph.D.s in computer science and physics, but he especially appreciated the challenges of mathematics. And though he spent years as a computer science professor at Bowie State University, Manjit was also committed to helping young people learn math, especially his son Pravir Bhatia (B.S. ’93, mathematics; B.S. ’93, physics), whose education started early—very early.

“We spent at least an hour a day from when I was 2 years old till high school,” Pravir recalled. “My father gave me all the tools to succeed in mathematics and I was doing calculus by ninth grade. He wouldn’t let you get away without knowing stuff.”

Pravir, who now runs part of a quantitative trading strategy for one of the world’s top hedge funds at D.E. Shaw Group, understood even that that there was more to those nightly math sessions than just solving problems.

“I think the important thing was how much he loved it,” Pravir said. “I remember when I was doing it, I mean I wasn’t great at it, I was good, but just the smile on his face when I absorbed a concept kept me going. He was a crazy fun person to learn from.”

“Everybody’s teacher”

Manjit taught college students. He taught kids in the neighborhood. He even taught mathematics to relatives’ children when he went home to India for visits. Yet he never seemed to run out of passion or energy for the task.

“He was everybody’s teacher,” Pravir said. “I have friends who knew that when they came over and spent the night, they were going to get drilled on their math. Many years later, they would tell me how tough and intimidating those sessions were, but also how good they were from a learning perspective.”

By 2008, Manjit retired from Bowie State University, but he still wanted to teach. So, he came to College Park and offered his help. 

“My memory is that after he retired from Bowie, he contacted the department and offered to provide free tutoring,” Washington said. “The department gave him an office and he got started.”

Manjit was off and running—almost. Before he started one-on-one tutoring with students, he wanted to make sure he was prepared.

“He would actually go attend classes so he could help students taking those courses,” Kiran explained.

That’s how Manjit met Mathematics Professor Denny Gulick.

“Before he would tutor, he audited my MATH410 class on advanced calculus, and that is where I got to know him,” Gulick explained. “He thought that having tutoring sessions available could help students taking that class—the most rigorous undergraduate math class—which all math majors must take and pass. He was anxious to help students and after he felt that he was prepared well enough, that is when he started the Help Sessions. Toward the end of his time at UMD, he took and fell in love with MATH406: Introduction to Number Theory. Then, he taught it a few times himself.”

Solving problems “at all hours”

Even when he was in his 70’s and 80’s, Manjit never missed a chance to help solve a problem. 

“He got emails all the time from students trying to solve problems,” Kiran explained. “Sometimes they came at 1 o’clock or 2 o’clock in the morning and he would start working on them at 4 a.m. By 2019, when you could find answers on the internet, there were still people emailing him at all hours asking him to help them solve problems, and he did. He was the person who got up at 5 in the morning to do problem sets till he was 83 years old.”

Manjit’s passion for mathematics and teaching touched many lives, on campus and beyond—more than even his wife realized.

“One of our friends’ kids—he’s grown now—came to my husband’s funeral service and he said to me, ‘Oh, he taught me so much,’” Kiran recalled. “And I said, ‘When? You never took a class from him.’ And he said, ‘No, but when he came to our house, he would always come to see me and give me something to do like a math puzzle or a mathematics problem to solve.’ I didn’t even know that. He would just engage people wherever he went.”

A gift for the future

In 2015, a few years before Manjit passed away, he and his wife created the Help Sessions Endowed Fund, making a gift to the Department of Mathematics to help keep his free tutoring program alive. 

“We discussed it, and he said if something happened to him, he wanted the program to continue,” Kiran said.

Pravir hopes his father’s passion for mathematics and his commitment to helping students succeed will be remembered for years to come. And with continued support for the Help Sessions Endowed Fund, Pravir believes the free tutoring work that was so important to his dad will keep making a difference.

“I’ve put money in, my friends and my company put money in, too, and I hope others will as well,” Pravir said, “because that’s all my father ever wanted, to keep this going.” 

He wanted to provide help and support for any mathematics student who needs it—now and for years to come.

“Despite wearing a turban, my father was never much into ritual or gatherings—so in a way hosting an event for him with friends, family and colleagues is a bit ironic,” Pravir reflected. “It never would have occurred under his watch. Maybe, when my father is looking down from far above, he’ll be happy that people got together and did this in the Math rotunda—his true temple.”

Written by Leslie Miller

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.