Homecoming 2018
On Thursday, October 4, 2018, the Department of Mathematics hosted our first Homecoming Alumni Career Panel. The goal of this event was to give current students an opportunity to hear from a group of Pitt mathematics alumni who have achieved success across a diverse range of career paths and to ask them for advice about careers and life after graduation. We were very pleased to welcome as our panelists:
· Shelly Culbertson ('99) (Mathematics and Political Science) – Culbertson is a senior policy researcher at the RAND Corporation with a research focus including refugees, education, workforce development, international development, and the Middle East.
· Nicole Dunn ('16) (Actuarial Mathematics) - Dunn is an actuarial specialist at Nationwide Financial who chartered the Pittsburgh chapter of Gamma Iota Sigma, the risk management and insurance fraternity, while at Pitt.
· Douglas Landsittel ('92) (Applied Math) - Landsittel went on to receive his PhD in Biostatistics from the Pitt Graduate School of Public Health in 1997 and is now a professor of Biomedical Informatics, Biostatistics, and Clinical and Translational Science at Pitt.
· Jonathan J. Rubin ('12) (Mathematical Biology) - Rubin works for Grant Street Group in downtown Pittsburgh as a software developer lead.
Panelists generously shared the backstories of their diverse career paths, thoughts about some key skills they picked up studying mathematics at Pitt that serve them well professionally (current students take note: creativity in problem solving, rigor and precision, and communication), reflections about their daily activities in their current jobs and the aspects they find most rewarding, and responses to a range of audience questions on other professional development topics. The students in attendance left with valuable insights about the world of work and excitement about the varied future directions available to them. We hope to have the chance to hear from many more alumni in future panels!
Thomas C. Hales 60th Birthday Conference
During June 18-22, 2018, the University of Pittsburgh hosted an international mathematical conference titled From the Fundamental Lemma, to Discrete Geometry, to Formal Verification. The conference was organized around the themes from the mathematical work of Thomas C. Hales on the occasion of his 60th birthday. We received financial support from the National Science Foundation, the University of Pittsburgh Mathematics Research Center the Institute for Mathematics, and the University of Minnesota. More than 80 participants from across North America, Europe, and Asia attended the event and included a mix of graduate and undergraduate students, postdocs, along with more senior members of the mathematical community.
The conference featured 23 talks on discrete geometry, automorphic forms, motivic integration, and formal verification. The program included a number of survey and overview talks accessible to wide audiences, such as Andrew Appel's lecture on graph coloring and machine proofs in computer science, Sharon Glotzer's lecture on the material (nano)science of packing congruent regular tetrahedra, Tobias Nipkow's lecture on verified analysis of algorithms, and Josef Urban's lecture on automation and artificial intelligence for reasoning and formalization. Among other interesting presentations, Henry Cohn reported on his proof (with A. Kumar, S. Miller, D. Radchenko, and M. Viazovska) of the universal optimality theorem for sphere packing in dimensions 8 and 24, and applications to lattices and automorphic forms, and Mark Goresky lectured on his work (with Y.-S. Tai ) on counting mod p points of hyperbolic manifolds.
More details about the program (including slides of most lectures) can be found at http://www.mathematics.pitt.edu/hales60.
XVII International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems:Theory, Numerics, Applications
The Kenneth P. Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences of the University of Pittsburgh and the Department of Mathematics were two of the sponsors for the XVII International Conference on Hyperbolic Problems: Theory, Numerics, Applications, which was held at Penn State University, June 25-29, 2018. The conference was organized jointly by the University of Pittsburgh and Penn State University. Dr. Marta Lewicka and Dr. Dehua Wang were the organizers from Pitt. The conference attracted about 250 participants from around the world and was very successful.