Department News Spring 2013
Undergraduate Recognitions
Kelly Ann Pawlak, who works with Ziyad Muslimani, was awarded funding to present a paper at the NSF sponsorred "The Eighth IMACS International Conference on Nonlinear Evolution Equations and Wave Phenomena: Computation and Theory" in Athens, GA, USA, March 25-28, 2013.
FSU Undergraduate Research and Creativity Award: Kelly Ann Pawlak received this award of $4K to support her research project this summer under the direction of Prof. Ziyad Muslimani.
Kenneth G. Boback Award: A Scholarship to an Outstanding Student Majoring in Mathematics: Yaineli Valdes.
Bettye Anne Case Actuarial Science Award: Brian Stein.
Graduate Student Achievements
PhD Fall 2012
Tingting Fang (Pure Mathematics, Major Professor: Mark van Hoeij) Thesis title: Solving Linear Differential Equations in Terms of Hypergeometric Functions by 2-Descent. Employment: Assistant Professor, Salem State University.
Dan Li (Pure Mathematics, Major Professor: Matilde Marcolli and Paolo Aluffi)
Employment: Institute des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, Bures-sur-Yvette, France.
Publications: The algebraic geometry of Harper operators, J. Phys. A: Math. Theor. 44 (2011), 405204
Daniel Robinson (Pure Mathematics, Major Professor: Eric Klassen) Thesis Title: Functional Data Analysis and Partial Shape Matching in the Square Root Velocity Framework, Employment: Amazon.com
PhD Spring 2013 PhDs:
Jonathan Bates (Biomathematics, Major Professor: Washington Mio)
Thesis Title: Spectral methods for morphometry.
Publications:
Bates, J., Pafundi, D., Kanel, P., Liu, X., Mio, W.
From Nano to Macro, 2011
IEEE International Symposium on Biomedical Imaging, pp.1851--1854
Bates, J., Liu, X., Mio, W.
2010 20th International Conference on
Pattern Recognition,
pp.2648--2651.
Bates, J., Wang, Y., Liu, X., Mio, W.
IEEE International Symposium on
Biomedical Imaging: From Nano to Macro, 2009. ISBI '09.
pp.943--946,
Motoi Namihira (Financial Mathematics, Major Professor: David Kopriva) Thesis Title: Probabilistic uncertainty analysis Employment: Southern Company in Atlanta.
Gregory Toole (Biomathematics, Major Professor: Monica Hurda) Employment: Assistant Professor in Mathematics at Polk State College in Winter Haven, FL
Linda (Crystal) Wells (Pure Mathematics, Major Professor: Eric Klassen) Thesis Title: Shape Analysis of Curves in Higher Dimensions. Employment: Florida Gateway College, Associate Professor.
PhD Summer 2013:
Arij Daou (Biomathematics, Major Professor: Richard Bertram)
Thesis title: From Songs to Ion Channels and Mathematical Modeling.
Employment: Postdoc at University of Chicago, Neuroscience Department.
Publications:
Arij Daou, Matthew Ross, Frank Johnson, Richard Hyson, Richard Bertram (2013), Electrophysiological Characterization and Computational Models of HVC Neurons of the Zebra Finch, Journal of Neurophysiology (to appear)
Arij Daou, Frank Johnson, Wei Wu, Richard Bertram (2012), A Computational Tool for Automated Large-Scale Analysis and Measurement of Birdsong Syntax, Journal of Neuroscience Methods, vol. 210, pp. 147-160
Xinyu Zhang, Arij Daou, Tuan Truong, Richard Bertram, Michael Roper (2011), Synchronization of Mouse Islets of Langerhans by Glucose Waveforms, American Journal of Physiology, 301: E742-E747
Jian Geng (Financial Mathematics, Major Professor: Michael Navon)
Thesis title: Calibration of local volatility models and proper orthogonal decomposition
(POD) reduced order modeling for stochastic volatility models.
Employment: Wells-Fargo, Charlotte, NC.
Publications: Joint paper with M. Navon to appear in the
Journal of Quantitative Finance.
Wanwan Huang (Financial Mathematics, Giray Okten) Thesis Title: Stochastic Modeling of Financial Derivatives. Employtment: Tenure track assistant professor, Roosevelt University.
Xia Liao (Pure Mathematics, Major Professor: Paolo Aluffi) Thesis title: "Chern classes of sheaves of logarithmic vector
fields for free divisors", Employment: Kaiserslautern University of Technology, Visiting Scholar.
Publications: "Chern classes of logarithmic vector fields", J. of Singularities, and "Stable birational equivalence and geometric Chevalley-Warning" to appear in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.
Dongxu Wang (Pure Mathematics, Major Professor: Wolfgang Heil) Title: 3-manifolds of S^1 category 3.
Graduate Student Research and Awards:
Two graduate students from the polytechnic university of Madrid visiting Professor David Kopriva this summer to study spectral element methods. One student is part of the EU ANADE project (http://www.anade-itn.eu).
Matt Jemison was awarded a SIAM travel grant in order to give a presentation on The Moment of Fluid Interface Reconstruction with Filaments: Increasing Sub-Gridcell Resolution" in the minisymposium Microscopic to Macroscopic Fluid-Structure Interactions, at the SIAM annual meeting in July, 2013.
Vijay Kunwar received a student travel award for 2013 SIAM Conference in Applied Algebraic Geometry (AG13), to be held August 1-4, 2013 at Colorado State University in Fort Collins, Colorado where he will give a talk on ``Computing Hypergeometric Solutions of Second Order Differential Equations with Five Singularities"
Dwight B. Goodner Mathematics Fellowship, for teaching excellence: Gregory Ivan Dungan, and Yuanting Lu.
Distinguished Teaching Assistant Recognition for Spring 2013: Ibukun Amusan, Arij Daou, John Geng, Ahmed Derar Islim, Dane Mayhook, Tony Wills, Celes Woodruff, and Qiuping Xu
Financial Math Festival Poster Competition Winners:
- 1st place: Nguyet Nguyen
- 2nd place: Pierre Garreau
- 3rd place: Stan Lewkow
Yunyi Shen received a Dissertation Research Grant from the Florida State University Graduate School.
Bettina Zoeller Richmond Award for service to the department: Mehmet Aktas, and Pierre Garreau.
Faculty Honors, Awards, Invitations, and Service
Paolo Aluffi received an FSU COFRS summer grant for a project entitled "Potts models, graph hypersurfaces, and Chern class identities in string theory". He is giving an invited talk at a conference on motivic invariants and singularities at Notre Dame in June, 2013.
Richard Bertram and Mike Roper (FSU Chemistry) have been awarded a 4-year grant ($1,320,497 total) from the National Institutes of Health for "Microfluidic Devices for Determining Dynamics of Islets of Langerhans". Richard Bertram chairs a symposium on Insulin Pulsatility Matters at the 2013 Endocrine society Meeting in San Francisco in June, 2013.
Bettye Anne Case is giving an invited talk for the AWM Careers Session, at the annual SIAM in San Diego July 8, 2013. Title: "Your Career Trajectory".
Nick Cogan is giving a keynote presentation at BIOMATH 2013 with a talk entitled: Pattern Formation of the Causative Agent of Pierce's Disease within Microfluidic Chambers, in Sofia Bulgaria June 16-21, 2013 http://www.biomath.bg/2013/index.php.
Sergio Fenley received a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Fou ndation with a project entitled "Foliations and flows in 3-manifolds". The award amount is $35K over 5 years. He gave invited talks at the ILDT - Intelligence of Low Dynamical Systems at RIMS (Research Institute of Mathematical Sciences) in Kyoto, Japan, and at Nara Women's University, Nara, Japan in May, 2013.
Eriko Hironaka, Washington Mio and Kate Petersen co-organized the FSU Topology Week and FSU-UF Topology Meeting in February 2013.
Eriko Hironaka is co-organizing a meeting at the Mittag-Leffler Institute in Sweden, July 1-5, 2013 with R. Kellerhals (U. of Fribourg). The title of the conference is Growth and Mahler Measure in Geometry and Topology. She is giving invited talks at the "Fables Geometriques" Seminar at the University of Geneva on June 24, 2013, and at the Joint International Meeting of the AMS and Romanian Mathemaitcal Society, on June 27-30, 2013 in Alba Iulia, Romania.
Mark van Hoeij received an NSF grant for work on "Linear Differential Equations with a Convergent Integer Series Solution" Grant period: Sept 2013 - Aug 2016, $480 K. He is a tutorial speaker at ISSAC'2013, June 26-29 in Boston, and an invited speaker at "Sage Days: Algorithms in Arithmetic Geometry", July 22-26, in Leiden, the Netherlands. He is also giving invited lectures at the minisymposium "Symbolic computation and Special functions" at the 2013 SIAM Annual Meeting, July 8-12 in San Diego, and in the minisymposium "Symbolic Combinatorics" at SIAM AG13, August 1-4, Fort Collins.
Monica Hurdal is a plenary speaker at the conference "Conformal Geometry in Mapping, Imaging and Sensing" being held at the Royal Imperial College of London (see http://www3.imperial.ac.uk/ammp/aboutammp/ammpseminar/ammpworkshopjune2013), June 20 and 21. She is organizing the Spring 2014 theme semester on Frontiers in Imaging, Mathematics and the Life Sciences at the Mathematical Biosciences Institute (MBI). See http://www.mbi.osu.edu/2014/scientific2014.html . As part of the theme semester, she is also an organizer of a workshop during the theme semester March 17-21. The workshop is Integrating Modalities and Scales in Life Science Imaging. See http://www.mbi.osu.edu/2014/ws3description.html .
Harsh Jain received a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation with a project entitled "Mathematical Models of Cancer Growth and Treatment". The award amount is $35K over 5 years.
Alec Kercheval, with the help of financial math faculty and department staff, organized the 15th annual Financial Math Festival in March 2013.
David Kopriva gave a Plenary Talk on "Spectral Element Methods in Motion" at HONOM 2013: EUROPEAN WORKSHOP on High Order Nonlinear Numerical Methods for Evolutionary PDEs (HONOM 2013) , March 18-22, 2013; and an invited talk on Discontinuous Galerkin Spectral Element Approximation for Wave Scattering from Moving Objects at the SIAM: Conference on computational Science and engineering, Boston, MA Feb. 25-Mar 1. He also gave Colloquium Talks at Virginia Tech, Caltech, and Brown University.
Mike Mesterton-Gibbons received a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Fou ndation with a project entitled "Game-theoretic models of animal behavior". The award amount is $35K over 5 years.
Washington Mio was awarded an NSF Collaborative Research Grant on "ABI Innovation: Breaking Through the Taxonomic Barrier of Fossil Pollen Identification Using Bioimage Informatics", for the years 2013-2016. The Project total is $1.1M (FSU: $300K). Principal investigators are: Punyasena (PI and lead investigator, UIUC), Fowlkes (PI, UC Irvine), Mio (PI, FSU). He also gave an American Mathematical Society Invited Address, Taming Shapes and Understanding Their Variation, Southeastern Sectional Meeting, Oxford, MS, March 2013.
Craig Nolder is visiting Harbin Institute of Technology May 8-May18, 2013, where he will give a series of lectures. He will also attend and give an invited lecture at the ISAAC conference in Krakow Poland in Aug 5-10, 2013.
Kate Petersen received an FSU COFRS summer grant for a project entitled "Geometric Structures of Knot Complements". She will also participate in the Research in Pairs (RiP) program at Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach (MFO) from June 9 - 22, 2013 with Chris Sinclair (U. of Oregon) on a project entitled `Analytic Properties of Norm Power L-series'.
Jack Quine gave an invited talk on "Mathematical Techniques in Structural Biology", at the workshop: Mathematical Challenges in Biomolecular/Biomedical Imaging and Visualization, at the Mathematical Bioscience Institute, Ohio State Universtiy, Feb. 18-22, 2013.
Xiaoming Wang gave invited lectures at the 2013 International Workshop on Computational and Applied Mathematics, organized by Beijing Computational Science Research Center, May 20-24, 2013, Yellow Mountain, China, and the 2013 International Conference on Mathematical Modeling and Computation} (ICMMC2013), May 16-19, 2013, at Wuhan University, Wuhan, China. He also delivered a colloquium talk at NCSU on April 4th, 2013 and was a co-organizer for the IMA workshop {Stochastic Modeling of the Oceans and Atmosphere, March 11-15, Spring 2013, Minneapolis, MN. He is giving one of the main lecturers of the 2013 Summer School on Applied Mathematics at Beijing University, Beijing, China, July 8- Aug. 2, 2013.
Alumni News
Rana D. Parshad (PhD 2009 with Major Professor Xiaoming Wang) accepted a tenure track offer at Clarkson University in upstate New York starting in Fall 2013. Previous to this appointment, he had postdoctoral positions at Clarkson Universitiy and at King Abdullah University of Science and Technology.