By the Numb3rs Spring 2015

Graduate

Graduate Student Mini-Conference

To wrap up the academic year, the officers of the Graduate Student Seminar and the SIAM Student Chapter organized the Graduate Student Mini-Conference. 

Four graduate students discussed their recent work, including: Scott Zimmerman on geodesics in the Heisenberg group; Jake Mirra on his work towards a counterexample to Gromov's conjecture; Jon Holland on negative-dimensional tensors, intuitionistic logic, and their possible relations to physics; and Ian Martiny on a lower bound for a non-trivial cycle length for the 3n+1 problem.

Leo Rebholz, Associate Professor of Mathematical Sciences at Clemson University and a Pitt mathematics (advised by Bill Layton) & Bettis Lab alum, was invited as a guest speaker to talk about preparing for the job search in both industry and academia.
Slides of the presentations will be made available to view on the math department website. We thank all of the speakers and the many people in attendance, both students and professors, for making this an exciting and successful conference.
- Jason Pina

Prospective Student Open House

The Department of Mathematics Graduate program offered their first Open House for prospective graduate students.  The one day event was held on Friday, March 20, 2015.  There were eleven (11) students in attendance and they travelled from across the country to attend. On the night of arrival they were hosted by our GSO representatives (Victor DeCaria, William Rau, Michael Lindsey, Jeremy Harris, Matt Wheeler, Jason Pina, Youngmin Park, Glenn Young and Torrey Gallagher). The program started on Friday morning with breakfast, followed by a presentation of the graduate director, David Swigon. Then various research areas were introduced by representatives from mathematics faculty (Analysis and PDE by Chris Lennard, Applied analysis by Dehua Wang, Math biology by Jon Rubin, Math finance by Song Yao, Scientific computing by Michael Neilan, Algebra by Tom Hales, Topology by Paul Gartside) who were later joined by other faculty and many current graduate students to answer any questions in lively informal discussions. After lunch, the prospective students had an opportunity to tour the campus, lunch with current students, experience a graduate classroom, attend a math seminar, participate in the department’s weekly “Tea” and attend the departmental colloquium. All visitors and participants have expressed their delight and satisfaction with the event and its flawless organization by Pat Markham, Carol Miller, and Melissa Weidman.

- David Swigon