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Recent News
September 27, 2018
On July 1, Professor John Palmieri began a five-year term as the new chair of the Department of Mathematics. John studied mathematics as an undergraduate at Swarthmore College and received his PhD from MIT in 1991 as a student of former UW faculty member Haynes Miller. John held postdoctoral positions at the Universities of Minnesota and Wisconsin, then returned to MIT for three years as an NSF postdoctoral fellow. After two years at the University of Notre Dame, he moved to UW in 1999. ... Read more
September 24, 2018
The Washington Experimental Math Lab, founded and directed by faculty member Jayadev Athreya, is one of a number of labs across the country that form faculty-student groups to advance mathematics through experimentation, visualization, and public engagement. The October issue of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society has an article co-written by Jayadev that... Read more
September 18, 2018
Former faculty member Branko Grünbaum died on September 14, 2018, in Seattle (obituary). Born in 1929 in what is now Croatia, Branko began his studies at the University of Zagreb. On emigrating to Israel, he continued at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, from which he received his PhD in 1957. Branko came to the... Read more
September 7, 2018
Hailing from Yakima and wearing a well-loved Mariners cap, Dr. Andrew Loveless might seem like your average Washingtonian. However, the principal lecturer in the Department of Mathematics has set himself apart in a field that is notoriously difficult to teach.
In his classes, Loveless utilizes a strategy of gamification that emphasizes student engagement to mitigate math's intimidating reputation as a challenging academic roadblock. "People like solving puzzles," he explains. "If you can make... Read more
July 27, 2018
On July 2, at ISMP in Bordeaux, Thomas Rothvoss was awarded the Fulkerson Prize, for outstanding papers in the area of discrete mathematics. It is only given every three years, and you can see the list of previous winners here.
July 16, 2018
When Dorothy Gilford enrolled at the UW to study mathematics in 1935, the department’s one female professor warned her that mathematics was not a promising career for women. Gilford barreled ahead anyway, and went on to become a wildly successful statistician.
Gloria Hewitt similarly defied the odds decades later, when she earned a PhD in mathematics at the UW—only the seventh African-American woman at any university to earn a mathematics PhD. She became a professor and department chair at... Read more
June 4, 2018
Graduate student Zihui Zhao has been named the recipient of the College of Arts and Sciences Graduate Medal in Natural Sciences. Zihui, a student of Tatiana Toro, studies partial differential equations, geometric measure theory, and harmonic analysis. Zihui has been a Program Associate at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley and will be heading to Princeton next year as a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study. She will then move to the University of... Read more
May 16, 2018
Three promotions will take effect in September 2018: Soumik Pal to Professor, Thomas Rothvoss to Associate Professor, and Jonah Ostroff to Senior Lecturer. Soumik joined the department in 2008, after two years in a postdoctoral position at Cornell. He works in probability theory, including random matrix theory, random graphs and trees, and mathematical finance.
Thomas joined the department in January 2014, after postdoctoral positions at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne and MIT. In... Read more
April 26, 2018
Sara Billey and and her collaborator Tímea Tihanyi from the School of Art, Art History and Design are the 2018 recipients of the UW College of Arts and Sciences’ Bergstrom Award for Art and Science. The award, given annually, is intended to support faculty projects “that enhance the student experience and bridge the intersection between art and science.” Sara and Tímea have collaborated on several projects over the years, and Tímea has collaborated as well... Read more
April 19, 2018
Second-year graduate student Amzi Jeffs was recently awarded a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to study discrete geometry, with Isabella Novik as his mentor. The award provides three years of financial support. Amzi received his BS in 2016 from Harvey Mudd College, where he wrote a senior thesis on Convexity of Neural Codes.