News 2008

NIST Releases Preview of Online Mathematics Reference

Visual representation of a Hankel function for complex variables, courtesy of NIST.

The National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) has released a five-chapter preview of the online Digital Library of Mathematical Functions (DLMF). The full DLMF is designed to be a modern successor to the 1964 Handbook of Mathematical Functions. The preview is a fully functional beta-level release of 5 of the 36 chapters. The DLMF is designed to be the definitive reference work on the functions of applied mathematics that occur very frequently in mathematical modeling of physical phenomena, providing precise definitions, alternate representations, illustrations of how the functions behave, and relationships between functions. The DLMF also provides various visual aids, including interactive Web-based tools for rotating and zooming in on three-dimensional representations. The complete DLMF, with 31 additional chapters providing information on mathematical functions (from Airy to Zeta), is expected to be released in early 2009. [Item posted 6/26/08]

Bierstone Appointed Next Fields Institute Director

Edward Bierstone (University of Toronto) has been appointed Director of the Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, beginning July 2009. Bierstone, who received his Ph.D. from Brandeis University, has made important contributions in the areas of singularity theory, analytic geometry and differential analysis. "The wide scope of Ed's interests in mathematical sciences places him in a superb position to direct Fields," says Board of Directors Chair John Gardner. "We look forward to working more with him." The Fields Institute, located in Toronto, attracts over 1,000 visitors annually to collaborate on leading-edge research programs in the mathematical sciences. A press release issued by the Institute has more information. (Photo of Ed Bierstone courtesy of the Fields Institute.) [Item posted 6/25/08]

Karp Wins 2008 Kyoto Prize

Richard M. Karp (University of California, Berkeley) has won the Inamori Foundation's 2008 Kyoto Prize for "his fundamental contributions to the development of the theory of computational complexity." Karp established the theory of NP-completeness in the 1970s and has developed many algorithms, including the Edmonds-Karp algorithm, which is used to compute the maximum flow in a network. He received his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Harvard University in 1959. Karp was awarded the AMS Delbert Ray Fulkerson Prize in 1979 and the National Medal of Science in 1996. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The prize, worth almost US$500,000, will be awarded in November. More information on Karp and the prize is at the Inamori Foundation website. (Photo courtesy of the Inamori Foundation.) [Item posted 6/24/08]

Puzzles Based on Sporadic Simple Groups

Igor Kriz (University of Michigan at Ann Arbor) and Paul Siegel (Pennsylvania State University) describe some mathematical puzzles that they've created in the article "Simple Groups at Play" in the July issue of Scientific American. According to the article, Kriz and Siegel felt the need to go beyond Rubik's Cube, which gives puzzle-solvers an intuition into group theory, and provide puzzlers some insight into sporadic simple groups. The puzzles can be played online at the Scientific American website. More on math-related articles appearing in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television is in Math in the Media. (M24 puzzle image courtesy of Igor Kriz.) [Item posted 6/23/08]

First MRC Conference in Snowbird

The inaugural Mathematics Research Communities (MRC) summer conference, Teichmüller Theory and Low-Dimensional Topology, concludes today at the Snowbird Resort in Utah. The week-long conference, organized by Francis Bonahon (University of Southern California), Howard Masur (University of Illinois at Chicago), Abigail Thompson (University of California, Davis) and Genevieve Walsh (Tufts University), drew 39 early-career mathematicians. The MRC summer conferences are funded by the National Science Foundation, for an initial period of three years. Each conference is the first event in a program that will include special sessions at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, a longitudinal study, and a continuation of the connections and collaborations via an electronic network. Read more about the Society's MRC program in "Building a Research Career: Mathematics Research Communities," by Allyn Jackson (Notices of the AMS, February 2008, p. 247). The next two conferences are "Scientific Computing and Advanced Computation" and "Computational Algebra and Convexity," June 21–27, 2008. [Item posted 6/20/08]

Future Directions for DOE Applied Math

An independent panel has released a report on possible future directions for the U.S. Department of Energy program in applied math. The report is based on the work of a committee chaired by David Brown.  Committee members included John Bell, Donald Estep, William Gropp, Bruce Hendrickson, Sallie Keller-McNulty, David Keyes, J. Tinsley Oden, Linda Petzold, and Margaret Wright. The web page, hosted by SIAM, links to the report and allows readers to submit comments. (Image: Flow pattern produced by cylindrical shock wave, Bill Henshaw, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.) [Item posted 6/17/08]

US 2008 IMO Team

The six members of the U.S. team who will compete in the 2008 International Mathematical Olympiad are:

• Paul Christiano, The Harker School, Saratoga, CA
• Shaunak Kishore, Unionville-Chaddsford High School, West Chester, PA
• Evan O'Dorney, Berkeley Math Circle, Danville, CA
• Colin Sandon, Essex High School, Essex Junction, VT
• Krishanu Sankar, Horace Mann High School, Hastings-on-Hudson, NY and
• Alex Zhai, University Laboratory High School, Urbana, IL.

Five of the team members are graduating seniors; Evan O'Dorney will be a tenth grader this fall. Of the five seniors, four will attend the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and one, Alex Zhai, will attend Harvard University. The IMO takes place in Madrid, Spain July 10-22. More information about the U.S. team members and more about the 2008 IMO is online. [Item posed 6/17/08]

2008 Menger Awards

The 2008 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) was held May 11-16 in Atlanta, GA. Student finalists qualified by winning local, regional, and state fairs in the U.S. or national science fairs abroad. ISEF, federal agencies and professional and educational organizations, including the AMS, participated by giving special awards. Prizes awarded by the AMS included cash, certificates, books, and tote bags. For the AMS, judges reviewed all of the individual and team projects in mathematics and interviewed each student under consideration for a Karl Menger Memorial Award. The 2008 Menger Award winners are as follows:

Pictured in the photo, left to right: Menger Prize Committee Chair David Scott of the University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA, Alex Chen, Shravani Mikkilineni, Alexander Churchill, Matthew Wage, Paul Kominers, David Rosengarten, and Eric Larson.

First Award of US$1,000 to Alexander Lee Churchill, 18, Lincoln East High School, Lincoln, NE, for "Restrictions and Generalizations on Comma-Free Codes." Second Award of US$500 to Shravani Mikkilineni, 17, Detroit Country Day School, Beverly Hills, MI, for "Continued Fractions and Orbits of a Linear Fractional Transformation" and to David Alex Rosengarten, 18, John L. Miller Great Neck North High School, Great Neck, NY, for "Rotation Curves in Five Dimensions." Third Award of US$250 to Eric Kerner Larson, 16, South Eugene High School, Eugene, OR, for "The DNA Inequality in Non-Convex Regions," Alex Hao Chen, 17, York High School, Yorktown, VA, for "On the Reducible Quintic Complete Base Polynomials," Paul Myer Kominers, 17, Walt Whitman High School, Bethesda, MD, for "Chip-Firing Analysis of Stabilization Behaviors, Hitting Times, and Candy-Passing Games," and Matthew Michael Wage, 18, Appleton East High School, Appleton, WI, for "On Lehmer-Type Questions for Special Classes of Arithmetic Functions."

Honorable Mention Awards to Swara Satya Kopparty, 17, Terre Haute South Vigo High School, Terre Haute, IN, for "Frequency Sequences: Structure and Properties," Sana Raoof, 17, Jericho High School, Jericho, NY, for "Computation of the Alexander-Conway Polynomial on the Chord Diagrams of Singular Knots," Nurlan Taiganov, 16, High School, Ekibastuz, Pavlodar, Kazakhstan, for "Problem of Ramsey Theory," Artem A. Timoshenko, 16, Murmansk Polytechnic Lyceum, Murmansk, Russia, for "Analogue of the Popoviciu's Inequality," and Sarah Lee Sellers, 17, Hedgesville High School, Hedgesville, WV, for "Eisenstein Prime Magic Square." [Item posted 6/13/08]

IMU Releases Citation Statistics Report

Citation Statistics is a report from the International Mathematical Union (IMU), in cooperation with the International Council for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS), that analyzes the use of citation-based statistics to assess research. Read the press release. [Item posted 6/11/08]

Arnold and Faddeev Win Shaw Prize

Vladimir Arnold, Chief Scientist of the Steklov Mathematical Institute in Moscow, and Ludwig Faddeev, Director of the Euler International Mathematical Institute, Petersburg Department of the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, St. Petersburg, will share the US$1,000,000 2008 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences "for their widespread and influential contributions to mathematical physics." Arnold, together with Andrei Kolmogorov and Jurgen Moser, has made fundamental contributions to the study of stability in dynamical systems. Faddeev has made many important contributions to quantum physics, including work in which he and Boris Popov showed how to quantize non-Abelian gauge theories. The Shaw Prize is an international award to honor individuals who are active in their field and who have achieved distinguished and significant advances. Previous recipients of the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences are Robert Langlands and Richard Taylor (2007), David Mumford and Wen-Tsun Wu (2006), Andrew Wiles (2005), and Shiing-Shen Chern (2004). Further information and complete citations for Arnold and Faddeev are available on the Shaw Prize web site. [Item posted 6/10/08]

McCarthy Named AWM Executive Director

The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) has named Maeve Lewis McCarthy as its executive director. McCarthy is a native of Ireland who received her B.Sc. in mathematical physics and her M.Sc. in mathematical sciences from the National University of Ireland, Galway. After moving to Houston to attend Rice University, McCarthy earned an M.A. and Ph.D. in computational and applied mathematics at Rice. Following a year at the University of South Florida, McCarthy joined the department at Murray State University, where she has just been promoted to professor. She will continue to work from Murray, while serving as AWM executive director. She says, "I hope I can be as good for AWM as AWM has been for me." Read more about McCarthy at the AWM website. (Photo courtesy of Maeve Lewis McCarthy.) [Item posted 6/10/08]

Math Project Wins Intel Young Scientist Awards

Sana Raoof, 17, of Jericho High School in Jericho, NY, is among three recipients of the 2008 Intel Young Scientist Award, for her mathematics project, Computation of the Alexander-Conway Polynomial on the Chord Diagrams of Singular Knots. She received a US$50,000 scholarship from the Intel Foundation as part of the award during the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF) held in Atlanta May 11-16. "Raoof's research provided new insight into how a better understanding of mathematical knot theory could help resolve classic biochemical problems. Specifically, her work focused on the Alexander-Conway polynomial invariant for chord diagrams to help prove how to classify molecules on a structural basis." (Intel Foundation press release.) She will attend Harvard University this fall. Raoof also received the Intel ISEF Best of Category-Mathematics Award of $5,000 and an Intel Centrino Duo Mobile technology-based notebook computer, and a First Award of $3,000. A $1,000 grant will be given to her school and the Intel ISEF Affiliated Fair she represented. See all the award winners in mathematics. (Photo: Intel Corporation.) [Item posted 5/27/08]

National Academy of Sciences Elects New Members

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) has announced the election of 72 new members and 18 foreign associates. Those elected in the mathematical sciences are:

• Emily A. Carter, Princeton University
• Helmut Hofer, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University
• Peter Wilcox Jones, Yale University
• Frank T. Leighton, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Thomas M. Liggett, University of California, Los Angeles
• Nathan Seiberg, Institute for Advanced Study
• Terence C. Tao, University of California, Los Angeles

Established in 1863, the NAS is an honorific society of distinguished scholars engaged in scientific and engineering research, dedicated to the furtherance of science and technology and to their use for the general welfare. An NAS press release has a list of all those elected. [Item posted 4/29/08]

American Academy of Arts & Sciences Elects New Fellows

The American Academy of Arts & Sciences has announced its 2008 election of new Fellows. The 190 new Fellows include the following people from the mathematical sciences:

• Alexander A. Beilinson, University of Chicago
• Ruzena Bajcsy, University of California, Berkeley
• Emily Ann Carter, Princeton University
• Sun-Yung Alice Chang, Princeton University
• Tobias Colding, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Vladimir Drinfeld, University of Chicago
• David Gottlieb, Brown University
• John M. Guckenheimer, Cornell University
• Richard H. Herman, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• David Kazhdan, Hebrew University/Harvard University
• John Tinsley Oden, University of Texas at Austin
• James Harris Simons, Renaissance Technologies
• Charles Simonyi, Intentional Software Corporation

The induction ceremony for this year's class, which also includes U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Paul Stevens and guitarist B.B. King, will take place October 11 at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The Academy of Arts & Sciences is an independent policy research center founded in 1780. The full list of the new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members is in an Academy news release. [Item posted 4/29/08]

Donaldson Wins 2008 Nemmers Prize

Photo: Imperial College London

Simon Donaldson, Royal Society Research Professor at Imperial College London, has been awarded the 2008 Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics for his "groundbreaking work in four-dimensional topology, symplectic geometry and gauge theory, and for his remarkable use of ideas from physics to advance pure mathematics." The prize carries with it a US$150,000 stipend. John Franks, AMS treasurer and chair of the mathematics department at Northwestern University, said that Donaldson's work "has provided the seminal steps for the work of others in the study of four-manifolds." Donaldson has also received the Fields Medal (1986), the Royal Society's Royal Medal (1992), the Crafoord Prize (1992), and the King Faisal Prize (2006). Paul R. Milgrom will receive this year's Nemmer Prize in Economics. First awarded in 1994, the Nemmers Prizes recognize "work of lasting significance" and are made possible by a bequest to Northwestern University by brothers Erwin E. and Frederic E. Nemmers. A Northwestern University press release has more information on the Nemmers Prizes and the winners. [Item posted 4/23/08]

Mathematical Sciences in the FY 2009 Budget

"Mathematical Sciences in the FY 2009 Budget," by Samuel M. Rankin, III, director of the AMS office in Washington D.C., analyzes the federal support for mathematical sciences research in 2009.

Highlights of the report:

• Federal support for the mathematical sciences is slated to grow from an estimated $477 million in FY 2008 to an estimated $528 million in FY 2009, an increase of 10.7 percent.
• The National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) budget would increase by 16.0 percent to $245.70 million.
• The aggregate funding for the mathematical sciences in the Department of Defense (DOD) agencies Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR), Army Research Office (ARO), Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), National Security Agency (NSA), and Office of Naval Research (ONR) would increase by 9.5 percent.
• Aggregate funding for the mathematical sciences in the Department of Energy (DOE) would increase by 9.4 percent to $95.3 million.

[Item posted 4/23/08]

Tao Receives 2008 NSF Waterman Award

Photo: UCLA

Terence Tao, a professor of mathematics at the University of California at Los Angeles, will receive the 2008 Alan T. Waterman Award from the National Science Foundation. The award carries a US$500,000 grant for a three-year period. Tao's work has had a tremendous impact across several mathematical areas. In addition to receiving a Fields Medal in 2006, and a MacArthur "genius grant" that same year, he was a co-recipient of the 2002 AMS Bôcher Prize and the 2005 AMS Conant Prize. The annual Waterman Award recognizes an outstanding young researcher in any field of science or engineering supported by the NSF. Tao will receive the award at a black tie dinner program at the U.S. Department of State on May 6. The NSF has posted a news release about the award. [Item posted 4/10/08]

Inaugural Conant Lecture by Jeffrey Weeks at WPI Is Online

Photo of Jeffrey Weeks, courtesy of WPI.

The first Levi L. Conant Lecture, "The Shape of Space," sponsored by Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI), is now online. The lecture is given by 2007 Levi L. Conant Prize winner Jeffrey Weeks and takes viewers on a tour of several possible shapes of space. Weeks received the Conant Prize for his article, "The Poincaré Dodecahedral Space and the Mystery of the Missing Fluctuations," which was published in the June/July 2004 issue of Notices of the AMS. Beginning with Weeks, subsequent Conant Prize winners will be invited to give a lecture at WPI. Conant was head of WPI's mathematics department from 1908 until his death in 1916, and served as the Institute's interim president from 1911 to 1913. [Item posted 4/2/08]

Thompson and Tits Win 2008 Abel Prize

Photo: Thompson (left, © University of Florida) and Tits (right, Jean-François Dars/CNRS Images).

John Griggs Thompson, Graduate Research Professor, University of Florida, and Jacques Tits, Professor Emeritus, Collège de France, have been awarded the 2008 Abel Prize "for their profound achievements in algebra and in particular for shaping modern group theory." In the prize citation, the Abel Committee writes that "Thompson revolutionized the theory of finite groups by proving extraordinarily deep theorems that laid the foundation for the complete classification of finite simple groups, one of the greatest achievements of twentieth century mathematics." In 1963, Thompson and Walter Feit proved that all nonabelian finite simple groups were of even order, work for which they both won the Frank Nelson Cole Prize in Algebra from the AMS in 1965. Thompson also won a Fields Medal in 1970. In the Abel citation for Tits, the committee writes that "Tits created a new and highly influential vision of groups as geometric objects. He introduced what is now known as a Tits building, which encodes in geometric terms the algebraic structure of linear groups." The committee noted the link between the two winners' work: "Tits’s geometric approach was essential in the study and realization of the sporadic groups, including the Monster." Tits received the Grand Prix of the French Academy of Sciences in 1976, and the Wolf Prize in Mathematics in 1993. The Abel Prize is awarded by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters for outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics. The prize amount is 6,000,000 Norwegian kroner (over US$1,000,000). Thompson and Tits will receive their prize in a ceremony in Oslo on May 20, 2008. See the Abel Prize website for more information about the laureates, their work, and the prize.

The work of Thompson and Tits is one of the outstanding accomplishments of modern mathematics. The American Mathematical Society extends its warm congratulations to them on their award of the 2008 Abel Prize. --- James Glimm, AMS President

I send my heartiest congratulations to two giants of modern mathematics, John Thompson and Jacques Tits. One cannot imagine two more deserving recipients of the Abel Prize. Their contributions have provided the direction for much of recent research in algebra. As President-elect of the American Mathematical Society, I note with special satisfaction that the award to John Thompson highlights the dedication to excellence in U.S. mathematics, in this instance at the University of Florida. This is a great day for mathematics. Congratulations again to Thompson and Tits.
--- George Andrews, AMS President-elect

Articles of related interest include: "What is a Building?" by Kenneth Brown (Notices of the AMS, November 2002) and "What is The Monster?" by Richard Borcherds (Notices of the AMS, October 2002). [Item posted 3/27/08]

2007 Putnam Results

Below are the team and individual winners of the 68th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, held last December 1. The mathematics department of the first-place team, Harvard University, receives US$25,000, and each Harvard team member receives $1000. Team winners, in order, with team members in alphabetical order, are:

• Harvard University (Zachary Abel, Tiankai Liu, and Alison B. Miller)
• Princeton University (Andrei Negut, Aaron C. Pixton, and Andrei B. Ungureanu)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Hansheng Diao, Eric C. Price, and Yufei Zhao)
• Stanford University (Serin Hong, Nathan K. Pflueger, and Kian Chuan Tan)
• Duke University (Tirasan Khandhawit, Peng Shi, and Lingren Zhang)

The Putnam Fellows, the top six individual scorers, each receive $2500. They are, in alphabetical order:

• Jason C. Bland (California Institute of Technology)
• Brian R. Lawrence (California Institute of Technology)
• Aaron C. Pixton (Princeton University)
• Qingchun Ren (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Xuancheng Shao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Arnav Tripathy (Harvard University)

Alison B. Miller, of the first-place Harvard team, is the winner of the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which is awarded to a woman whose performance on the exam is "particularly meritorious," and has a cash award of $1000. This is the third time she has won the prize. The Putnam Competition is for North American undergraduates and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America. More than 3700 students from more than 500 colleges participated in the competition. Problems, solutions, and results from the 2007 exam and from previous exams, are online. [Item posted 3/19/08]

Breakthrough in the Study of L-functions

On March 12, a new mathematical object was revealed during a lecture at the American Institute of Mathematics (AIM). Two researchers from the University of Bristol exhibited the first example of a generic automorphic cusp form for the general linear group of 3 by 3 matrices and its corresponding degree 3 L-function. These L-functions encode deep underlying connections between many different areas of mathematics. The Riemann zeta function, which is an L-function, is at the heart of the Riemann Hypothesis (RH), one of the outstanding open problems in mathematics. RH should be true for every L-function, not just the Riemann zeta function, and during the workshop researchers made preliminary checks that the new L-function satisfies RH. The new L-function was found by Andrew Booker and his student Ce Bian and has generated excitement among number theorists. "The numerical calculation done by Booker and Bian is quite striking," said Peter Sarnak of Princeton University and the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. "I had no idea that it would be feasible. This kind of number-theoretic computation does not just involve using some faster available codes and then number crunch. Rather it demands a deep mastery of the underlying mathematics and then invention of fast techniques and algorithms." Read more about the result on the AIM website. [Item posted 3/14/08]

2008 Intel Science Talent Search Awards

Two projects involving mathematics finished in the top 10 in the national Intel Science Talent Search. Katherine Rose Banks of Brooklyn, NY finished in fourth place and won a US$25,000 scholarship for her proof of a conjecture that a convex lattice polygon with nine vertices cannot have exactly eight or nine interior lattice points. Banks, a student at Stuyvesant High School, hopes to teach math following her studies at MIT or Cornell University. Philip Mocz of Mililani, HI finished eighth and won a $20,000 scholarship for developing a novel statistical algorithm that he used to discover previously unidentified patterns in the distribution of nearby stars. Mocz, a former contestant in Who Wants to Be a Mathematician, plans to study astronomy, physics, and math in college. The top prize in the competition, a $100,000 scholarship, was won by Shivani Sud of Durham, NC for her research project on colon cancer. The Intel Science Talent Search is owned and administered by the Society for Science & the Public (formerly Science Service) and is sponsored by Intel. Former awardees include six Nobel Prize winners and two Fields Medalists. [Item posted 3/14/08]

Katherine Rose Banks

Philip Mocz

Jim Simons Makes $60-million Gift to Launch New Stony Brook Center

(left to right) Stony Brook President Shirley Strum Kenny, Governor Spitzer, Stony Brook Council member Richard Nasti, Marilyn and Jim Simons. Photo: Sam Levitan/Stony Brook University.

Jim Simons, the prominent financier and mathematician, and his wife Marilyn, who is president of the Simons Foundation, have announced that the Foundation is donating US$60 million to Stony Brook University. The gift will be used to construct and then endow the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics on Stony Brook's main campus on Long Island. In addition to funding the building's construction, the gift will be used to recruit and retain faculty, provide training and support for graduate students, support research programs, secure visiting scholars---up to 30 at a time---and sponsor workshops and conferences, among other initiatives. The gift was announced at a press conference on February 27, at which New York State Governor Eliot Spitzer presented the keynote speech. This is the largest gift ever presented to any of the 64 institutions in the State University of New York system. Further details are available in a news release on the Stony Brook University web site. [Item posted 2/28/08]

AMS Epsilon Fund Makes 2008 Awards

The AMS has chosen eight summer mathematics programs to receive Epsilon grants for 2008: All Girls/All Math, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, Gwendolyn Hines, director; Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (HCSSiM), Hampshire College, Amherst, MA, David C. Kelly, director; MathPath, University of Vermont, Burlington, George R. Thomas and Stephen Maurer, directors; Michigan Math and Science Scholars Summer Program, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Stephen Debacker and Patrick Nelson, directors; PROMYS, Boston University, Boston, MA, Glenn Stevens, director; PROTaSM (Puerto Rico Opportunities for Talented Students in Mathematics, University of Puerto Rico, Mayaguez, Luis F. Caceres, director; Ross Mathematics Program, The Ohio State University, Columbus, OH, Daniel B. Shaprio, director; and Texas State University Honors Summer Math Camp, Texas State University, San Marcos, Max Warshauer, director. [Item posted 2/28/08]

MathSciNet Links to Mathematics Genealogy Project

MathSciNet now offers direct linking to the Mathematics Genealogy Project (MGP) through its "Authors" search tab. The results obtained after doing an author search on this page include a drop-down menu (hover the cursor over the author of interest) that includes a link to the author's MGP page. Here users may find information about that author: name of the university which awarded his or her degree, the year in which the degree was awarded, the complete title of the dissertation, the name(s) of the advisor(s), and for some, a list of the mathematician's students. [Item posted 2/27/08]

Math Professor Wins Grammy

Kevin Short, professor of mathematics at UNH. Credit: Douglas Prince, UNH Photo Services.

Mathematician Kevin Short (University of New Hampshire) used his Chaotic Compression Technology to restore a bootleg wire recording of a Woody Guthrie concert that is the only known recording of the folk singer performing before a live audience. His work earned him and the team of producers and engineers the 2008 Grammy Award for Best Historical Album: "The Live Wire - Woody Guthrie In Performance 1949," Nora Guthrie and Jorge Arévalo Mateus, compilation producers; Jamie Howarth, Steve Rosenthal, Warren Russell-Smith & Dr. Kevin Short, mastering engineers, [Woody Guthrie Publications]. Hear an interview with Short and samples of the recording before and after the restoration on National Public Radio's Talk of the Nation ("And the Grammy Goes to--a Mathematician?", February 22, 2008). [Item posted 2/11/08, updated 2/25/08]

Math and Voting in Newsweek

In the February 4 issue of Newsweek, Sharon Begley's "On Science" column is about mathematics and voting. She quotes voting method experts Don Saari (University of California, Irvine) and Steven Brams (New York University), and gives an example of voting preferences to show how the most common voting method, the plurality method, often fails to reflect voters' wishes. See a more detailed summary of this article (and others involving mathematics) in this month's Math in the Media. The theme of this year's Mathematics Awareness Month (April) is "Mathematics and Voting." Test three methods by voting on ballots listing eight of the Democratic and Republican candidates (not all of whom are still campaigning) at the Mathematics Awareness Month website. [Item posted 2/1/08]

Deligne, Griffiths, and Mumford Share 2008 Wolf Prize

Pierre Deligne and Phillip Griffiths, both of the Institute for Advanced Study, and David Mumford of Brown University, will share the 2008 Wolf Foundation Prize in Mathematics. Deligne was honored "for his work on mixed Hodge theory, the Weil conjectures, the Riemann-Hilbert correspondence, and for his contributions to arithmetic," Griffiths "for his work on variations of Hodge structures; the theory of periods of abelian integrals; and for his contributions to complex differential geometry," and Mumford "for his work on algebraic surfaces; on geometric invariant theory; and for laying the foundations of the modern algebraic theory of moduli of curves and theta functions." The three will share the US$100,000 award. More information about the prize is on the Wolf Foundation website. [Item posted 1/22/08]

Kontsevich and Witten Receive 2008 Crafoord Prize

A press release from the Academy stated that Kontsevich and Witten "have used the methodology of physics to develop a revolutionary new mathematics intended for the study of various types of geometrical objects. Their work is not only of great interest in the discipline of mathematics but may also find applications in totally different areas. Its results are of considerable value for physics and research into the fundamental laws of nature. According to string theory, which is an ambitious attempt to formulate a theory for all the natural forces, the smallest particles of which the Universe is composed are vibrating strings. This theory predicts the existence of additional dimensions and requires very advanced mathematics. The laureates have resolved several important mathematical problems related to string theory and have in this way paved the way for its further development." The Academy has also put on the web a popular article describing their work. [Item posted 1/17/08]

Recent AMS Press Releases

News Archive 2007

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News Archive 2002

News Archive 2001

News Archive Prior to 2001