Hello everyone! Welcome to the Spring 2023 edition of By the Numb3rs. The themes of my letter this semester are connections and communication. Indeed, as you read the articles in this newsletter, you will see that these themes wind through all of them, as they do in most of the work that we do here in Mathematics at Pitt. On one level, much of mathematics deals with connections, specifically finding relationships between different objects or different representations of the same object.
What you will see in this newsletter is that much of the exciting work we do here also involves other types of connections: bringing people together to discuss the latest research developments and future research directions, as occurs at our Mathematical Research Center workshops, on faculty visits to other institutions, and when students and faculty present their work at conferences including our own MathFest; bringing students and faculty together to work on research projects, such as those completed by our Painter Fellows, and on outreach, such as occurs in our Magical Math program; and bringing Pitt folks together with BIG (business, industry and government) partners either to discuss common research interests in a seminar series, such as our recent activity in Computational Mathematics with the Naval Nuclear Laboratory, or to address applications of mathematics with real-world motivations and impact, as occurs in our BIG Problems course. Of course, all of these connections end up being useful precisely because of the communication that they facilitate. Indeed, although it’s easy to imagine a dichotomy between the computational and quantitative realm versus an expressive and literate one, everyone working in mathematics eventual realizes that this is a false view, and that effective communication is crucial to our field just as it is in others. In this vein, I very much hope that this issue of our newsletter succeeds in communicating to you many of the exciting activities that have happened in the Pitt Department of Mathematics over the last semester, and that you will engage in communication with us to keep us posted on your own developments and enthusiasm for mathematics.
With warm regards,
Jonathan Rubin
Professor and Chair
University of Pittsburgh
Department of Mathematics