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HUB 214
AGENDA
- Call to Order
- Chair's Remarks
- Announcements
- Consent Agenda
- Discussion of voting method for remaining AAP hiring
- Committee Reports
- Undergraduate - Thomas
- Report from the GSR
- New Business
- Executive Session
- Adjournment
MINUTES
The regular meeting of the faculty of the Department of Mathematics was held in HUB 214 at 11am PST, February 3, 2026. Max Lieblich, Chair, presided over the meeting. Zawad Chowdhury was the recording secretary.
- Good News
- Thomas Rothvoss received Trevisan Prize
- Soham Ghosh was a finalist for the Jane Street Graduate fellowship
- Many students who are graduating have received great job offers
- Offers have gone out to 19 admitted graduate students, about 20 more on waitlist. Target number is 10, but might end up with fewer or more.
- 3 AAP offers went out.
- Confident one will be accepted, less sure about the other two
- Further offers to be sent out after replies on Feb 9th.
- Comments from the Chair
- Seems like electronic votes after the meeting do not contradict public access, will be applied to some faculty voting items.
- Merit Materials are due on Feb 19/20
- Personnel committee asking for CV, Narrative Statement, 3 sentence paragraph. See email for more details.
- Faculty also need collegial evaluations, as required by 3 year cycle.
- No reminders sent this year, but click on your file to check when it is required.
- The collegial peer evaluation can be more powerful than student evaluations. So we should perhaps do it not on an ad hoc basis.
- Executive committee is planning to start a program to award research stipends during the summer
- Plan is to award 4k per student, selected based on merit
- Hoping to award 10-15 this summer
- Jane street awarded 20k for this summer and next, 5 stipends coming out of that
- Long term plan might involve dipping into connections with other quant firms, can’t say more about summers beyond 2027
- Hope is for 10-15 stipends, plus 13 instructor jobs, plus first year TAs and grants to cover a good number of grad students.
- Different from an RA, but functionally / logistically same as hourly summer RA
- Faculty with grants can use the same mechanism to award stipends to students, at any amount (not just 4k).
- Announcements – None
- Consent Agenda – None
- AAP Hiring
- There is a 3 way tie between people ranked 4-6, which must be broken before further offers are made.
- After some discussion on voting systems, it was decided to redo approval voting online to break ties.
- Got flak from the dean’s office for a faculty member referring to this as a postdoc position. Because there is a specific union contract involved, we need to be very careful about how we write or talk about these things.
- 126 and 224 content committee
- Headed by Jonah and Chris Burdzy.
- Have a plan for curricular changes, currently being communicated with many stakeholders and approved by faculty vote. Final implementation will continue until Spring 2027.
- Goal of the committee: “124 and 125 are novels, 126 is an anthology of 5 classes”; can we reduct this to 4 classes?
- Three proposed changes
- Move all differentiation content to 126 and all integration content to 224
- Add Lagrange multipliers
- Revise Taylor Series section, reducing emphasis on error bounds
- We are solely responsible for approving it. But we are also communicating to other departments and UW Tacoma/Bothell to reduce bad blood
- Original plan was to vote after input from other departments, but must submit changes by Feb 17th so voting now.
- Can rediscuss after input from other departments
- Concerns were raised about Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering relying on multivariable integration content. Seems to currently be being met by 224 requirement in those majors.
- 12x Logistics committee
- Headed by Andy and Natalie
- Proposing (for faculty vote) that instructor names become public on time schedule
- Names were hidden in the past when we had many smaller sections of classes like 207 and 208, with more grad instructors. Final instructors wouldn’t be settled until few weeks before quarter, and did not want to release preliminary lists
- We are the only department that hides names, makes us look bad to students and other departments
- Would redistribute emails about classes to those actually teaching
- More from this committee, coming in the pipeline:
- Changes to TA Training, to be discussed by GPC
- Piloting Standards based grading in 120 and 124 this spring (already greenlit by UPC)
- Plans to restructure quiz sections
- To solve problems of shrinking grad student pool, variance in quality of instruction, variance in attendance based on grading scheme.
- UPC approved idea: larger quiz section with many UTAs and TAs, students do coordinated group work.
- Implementation being finalized.
- GSR Report
- Current topics happening only this quarter, with pizza! Please let us know if you would like to talk at one of the few open spots.
- Incoming grad students this year will not have a visit day
- However, there will be panels to talk with grad students, and opportunities to meet with a grad student one-on-one
- If you are meeting with a prospective student, please encourage them to talk to grad students using one of those channels
- Grad students will also direct prospectives to faculty based on their research interests.
- New Business – none
- Executive Session – started at 12:02, ended at 12:06.