# News 2014

• November, 2014

### Irina Mitrea and Igor Rivin elected Fellows of the American Mathematical Society

Professor Irina Mitrea, for contributions to partial differential equations and related fields as well as outreach to women and under-represented minorites at all educational levels, and Professor Igor Rivin, for contributions to geometry and related fields, pure and applied, were elected to the 2015 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. The Fellows of the American Mathematical Society program recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics. The program was initiated with the inaugural class of 2013.

• November, 2014

### Mid-Atlantic Numerical Analysis Day 2014

On November 7 the Department of Mathematics hosted its fourth annual Mid-Atlantic Numerical Analysis Day. These conferences are aimed at graduate and postdoctoral researchers from the region, who present short talks and participate in the poster session. The keynote talk was Social Dynamics: Modeling, Analysis and Numerical Simulation, by Eitan Tadmor, Center for Scientific Computation and Mathematical Modeling and Department of Mathematics, University of Maryland, College Park. The event was organized by Benjamin Seibold and Daniel Szyld.

• November, 2014

### Irina Mitrea and Elena Ya Vishik win CST Distinguished Faculty Awards

Professor Irina Mitrea won the College of Science and Technology Dean's Distinguised Excellence in Mentoring Award, and Assistant Professor (Instructional) Elena Ya Vishik won the CST Dean's Distinguished Teaching Award.

The awards were presented at the CST Distinguished Faculty Awards Dinner, November 2.

• September, 2014

### Emil Grosswald Lectures 2014: Amie Wilkinson

Amie Wilkinson, Professor, University of Chicago, delivered the 2014 Emil Grosswald Lectures, September 2-4. The series was titled, The Ergodic Hypothesis and Beyond.

• September, 2014

Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold is PI on a new NSF research grant, Cyber-Physical Systems: Synergy: Collaborative Research: Control of Vehicular Traffic Flow via Low Density Autonomous Vehicles. From the abstract: "This project develops new models, computational methods, software tools, and engineering solutions to employ autonomous vehicles to detect and mitigate traffic events that adversely affect fuel consumption and congestion. The approach is to combine the data measured by autonomous vehicles in the traffic flow, as well as other traffic data, with appropriate macroscopic traffic models to detect and predict congestion trends and events. Based on this information, the loop is closed by carefully following prescribed velocity controllers that are demonstrated to reduce congestion." The award amount (to Temple) is $240,000 and begins January 1, 2015. Dr. Seibold's research on this project is in mutlidisciplinary collaboration with Jonathan Sprinkle (U. Arizona, Electrical and Computer Engineering), Daniel Work (Civil and Environmental Engineering, U. Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Benedetto Piccoli (Mathematical Sciences and Center for Computational and Integrative Biology, Rutgers University, Camden). • September, 2014 ### Daniel Szyld awarded new NSF grant Professor Daniel Szyld has been awarded a new three-year NSF research grant, Multiple preconditioners for saddle-point and other problems. From the abstract: "There are many problems in science and engineering where one deals with two completely different phenomena, but these two phenomena influence one another (or one influences the other). One example of this situation is fluid flow along two different kinds of media. One flow is free, as in water in a river, and the other is constrained by some porous media, as the fluid seeping through below the river bed. When one tries to describe these physical phenomena, one needs to use very different equations for each of the two, in addition to taking into account what happens in their interphase. In this project, the PI shall study the solution of systems of equations of the kind just described. The PI shall combine solution techniques developed for each of the two phenomena, so that the resulting combination gives us an efficient computational tool." The award amount is$150,000.

• August, 2014

Associate Professor David Futer has been awarded a new three-year NSF research grant, Connections in low-dimensional topology. From the abstract: "This project seeks to build and strengthen connections among the following perspectives in low-dimensional topology: combinatorial topology, hyperbolic geometry, quantum invariants, and group theory. This goal splits into several sub-projects. The first sub-project is to build explicit combinatorial models for hyperbolic 3-manifolds based on the combinatorial data of a fibration over the circle. The second sub-project is to use quantum invariants such as the Jones and colored Jones polynomials to gain information about the boundary slopes of knots, fibration data, and hyperbolic volume. The third sub-project is to use ideas from 3-dimensional triangulations to build metric models for hyperbolic groups." The award amount is $155,000. • August, 2014 ### Yury Grabovsky awarded new NSF grant Professor Yury Grabovsky has been awarded a new three-year NSF research grant, Linear and non-linear elasticity: Study of exact relations and instabilities. From the abstract: "This project revolves around two central themes: stability and heterogeneity of materials and structures, examining them from different perspectives. The heterogeneity can be artificial, or man-made, as in composite materials, or it can be created spontaneously by nature as in shape memory alloys or in some of the buckling patterns of cylindrical shells. In the former case the dependence of the macroscopic properties of materials on their microstructure is the subject of this study, where the goal is to uncover all instances where exact formulas can be established between the properties of constituent materials and the composite, regardless of the microstructure. Undergraduate research is an essential part of this project. In the latter case the creation of microstructure is caused by instabilities that are explained by the principle of minimum energy. Mathematically rigorous determination of whether it is possible to lower the energy of a configuration is an important question, especially when the configuration is already heterogeneous. Another important example of instability is buckling of cylindrical shells. These structures are especially interesting because theoretically predicted buckling compression can be up to five times higher than the experimentally observed one due to high sensitivity to initial imperfections. A newly developed theory of buckling, of which the investigator is a coauthor, shows promise in giving a new explanation of extreme sensitivity of the buckling load to imperfections." • July, 2014 ### Brian Rider awarded new NSF grant Professor Brian Rider has been awarded a new three-year NSF research grant, Limit laws arising in random matrix theory. From the abstract: "The proposed research builds in part on the PI's recent work on the general beta extensions of the Tracy-Widom and related distributions. These extensions have the advantage of embedding the more familiar triple(s) of limit laws (tied to the orthogonal, unitary and symplectic symmetry classes) into a one-parameter family of distributions defined via random differential operators. The first goal is to extend universality results for these distributions using the random operator approach. A second goal is to establish non-communative versions of certain Brownian functional identities (for instance, the Dufresne identities) of current interest given their role in the KPZ universality class. The final project is to prove universal local limit theorems for a class of solvable logarithmic gas ensembles of multiple charges which interpolate among the classical orthogonal, unitary, and symplectic ensembles." The award amount is$210,000.

• July, 2014

### Martin Lorenz awarded NSA grant

Professor Martin Lorenz has been awarded a \$40,000 NSA research grant, Noncommutative and commutative invariant theory, for 2014-2015.

• July, 2014

### Dong Zhou awarded Ph.D.

Dong Zhou was awarded his Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University on August 29, 2014. His thesis was titled, High-order numerical methods for pressure Poisson equation reformulations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation, and his thesis advisor was Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold. Dr. Zhou will continue his research at Temple, as a Postdoctoral Assistant Professor, working with Dr. Seibold and also with Professor R. Ruben Rosales (MIT).

• July, 2014

### Jessica Hamm awarded Ph.D.

Jessica Hamm was awarded her Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University on August 29, 2014. Her thesis was titled, Multiplicative Invariants of Root Lattices, and her thesis advisor was Professor Martin Lorenz. Dr. Hamm is now a tenure-track assistant professor at Winthrop University.

• May, 2014

### Getnet Gidelew awarded Ph.D.

Gitnet Gidelew was awarded his Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University on May 14, 2014. His thesis was titled, Harmonic Analysis on Combinatorial Graphs, and his thesis advisor was Dr. Isaac Pesenson. Dr. Gidelew is now a tenure-track assistant professor at Richard Bland College of William and Mary.

• May, 2014

### Stephen Shank awarded Ph.D.

Stephen Shank was awarded his Ph.D. in mathematics from Temple University on May 14, 2014. His thesis was titled, Low-rank solution methods for large-scale linear matrix equations, and his thesis advisor was Professor Daniel Szyld. Dr. Shank has accepted a postdoctoral appointment at M.I.T.

• May, 2014

### Temple graduate Michael Campanell awarded Lawrence Fellowhip

Dr. Michael Campanell, a 2010 graduate of Temple University double majoring in mathematics and physics, has been awarded a prestigious Lawrence Fellowship to support postdoctoral research at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. Campanell was one of two awardees selected from a pool of 163 applicants. After completing his undergraduate studies at Temple, Campanell entered the Ph.D. program in physics at Princeton University, specializing in fusion research. He was a awarded his Ph.D. in 2014.

• January, 2014

### Irina Mitrea awarded Von Neumann Fellowship

Professor Irina Mitrea has been awarded a Von Neumann Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey, for the 2014-2015 academic year.