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  Women and Mathematics at CMUThe Department of Mathematical Sciences will host the WAM@CMU on Saturday, April 14, 2018. WAM@CMU is a one-day conference for undergraduate women in mathematics. One of the primary goals is to establish a network of undergraduates, graduate students, faculty, and alumnae of the CMU Department of Mathematical Sciences. The conference is inspired and partially supported by the Institute for Advanced Study Women and Mathematics program, and the core of the conference is a mini-course on partial differential equations and mathematical finance given by Dr. Kim Weston.
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  Irene Fonseca named Kavčić-Moura University Professor of MathematicsFonseca is one of four professors from across the CMU campus who have been appointed to the new Kavčić-Moura Professorships. These positions honor inventors José Moura and Aleksandar Kavčić, who developed and patented systems and methods that fundamentally increased the accuracy with which hard disk drive circuits read data from high speed magnetic disks.
  
  Fonseca has been a faculty member since 1987 and is the director of our Center for Nonlinear Analysis. Fonseca is one of the world's leading researchers in the field of applied analysis and some of her work addresses problems from materials and imaging sciences.
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• Irene Fonseca named to Abel CommitteeThe Abel Prize recognizes outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics. The prize is meant to recognize contributions of extraordinary depth and influence. Such work may have resolved fundamental problems, created powerful new techniques, introduced unifying principles, or opened up major new fields of research. The Abel Prize and the Fields Medal are considered the most prestigious awards in mathematics.
  
  The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters awards the Abel Prize based on a recommendation from the Abel committee, which consists of five outstanding research scientists in the field of mathematics. Irene Fonseca, Kavčić-Moura University Professor of Mathematics, will serve a two year term on this committee, playing a role in the selection of the Abel Prize recipients in 2018 and 2019.
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• Ian Tice awarded NSF CAREER grantIan Tice, an assistant professor of Mathematical Sciences, received an NSF CAREER Award . The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research.
  
  Professor Tice works in the areas of partial differential equations and fluid mechanics. The broad goal of his research is to develop the mathematical theory of PDEs in order to study physical phenomena. The phenomena treated by his research include moving interfaces between two fluids, the dynamics of collapsing stars, and the motion of vortices in the Ginzburg-Landau model of superconductivity. Professor Tice is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon's Center for Nonlinear Analysis.
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• Sebastien Vasey Receives Guy C. Berry Graduate Student Research AwardThe Guy Berry Award recognizes excellence in research by Mellon College of Science graduate students. Sebastien is the first student in the Department of Mathematical Sciences to receive the Guy Berry award, which was established in 2005.
  
  Sebastien works in model theory, focusing on classification theory for abstract elementary classes and Shelah’s Categoricity Conjecture. He produced more than 20 papers during his career as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon. Sebastien will be going to the Department of Mathematics at Harvard University as a Benjamin Peirce Fellow in the Fall of 2017.
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  CMU wins Putnam Competition!The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is an annual contest for college students established in 1938 in memory of its namesake. This contest is administered by the Mathematical Association of America. Over 4000 undergraduate students from nearly 600 institutions in North America took part in the exam in 2016. Carnegie Mellon's team, which consisted of Josh Brakensiek, Thomas Swayze, and Sam Zbarsky won the competition. All 3 members of the CMU team placed in the top five of all competitors, thus earning the distinction of Putnam Fellows. Furthermore, 44 CMU students placed in the top 500.
  
  This is the first Putnam victory for Carnegie Mellon and our sixth top 5 performance in a row.
  
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  Hayden Schaeffer awarded AFOSR young investigator grantThe Air Force Office of Scientific Research has awarded assistant professor Hayden Schaeffer research funding through the Air Force's Young Investigator Research Program (YIP). The YIP is open to recent Ph.D. recipients who show exceptional ability and promise. The objective of this program is to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance early career development of outstanding young investigators, and increase opportunities for the young investigators to recognize the Air Force mission and the related challenges in science and engineering.
  
  Professor Schaeffer is a computational analyst with interests in PDE, imaging science, and machine learning. Some of his recent work utilizes ideas from compressive sensing to develop data-driven methods for the numerical solution of PDE. While his focus is on improving computations for evolution equations, this research direction has the potential to produce methods for learning the underlying PDE models themselves.
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  2016 Simons Fellows in MathematicsThe Simons Fellows in Mathematics Program provides funds to faculty for research leaves from classroom teaching and administrative obligations as such leaves can increase creativity and provide intellectual stimulation. Mathematical sciences faculty Gautam Iyer and Bob Pego were named 2016 Simons Fellows in Mathematics. Professor Iyer works on problems related to mathematical fluid dynamics and mixing using both deterministic and probabilistic techniques, and Professor Pego studies nonlinear dynamics in PDE, especially coherent structures and nonlinear waves. They are among 37 mathematicians named Simons Fellows in Mathematics in 2016. They join Alan Frieze among the ranks of Simons Fellows on the CMU mathematics faculty. Frieze was awarded a Simons Fellowship in Mathematics in 2015.
  
  
• Putnam Mathematical CompetitionOver 4000 undergraduate students from nearly 600 institutions in North America took part in the exam in 2015. Carnegie Mellon's team, which consisted of Josh Brakensiek, Linus Hamilton, and Thomas Swayze placed second. This was the fifth top 5 performance in a row for CMU. Furthermore, 41 CMU students placed among the top 470.
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  Wes Pegden named Sloan Research FellowWes Pegden, an assistant professor of Mathematical Sciences, was named a 2016 Sloan Research Fellow. These fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.
  
  Professor Pegden's research is in the area of combinatorics.
  He works on combinatorial games, random structures, and random instances of computational problems. Pegden and his coauthors are developing a remarkable account of the scaling limit of the Abelian Sandpile Process and have developed new perspectives on the hardness of geometric cases of the Traveling Salesman Problem. Professor Pegden is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon's interdisciplinary PhD program in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization.
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  Boris Bukh awarded NSF CAREER grantBoris Bukh, an assistant professor of Mathematical Sciences, received an   NSF CAREER Award . The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research. Professor Bukh was also named a   2015 Sloan Research Fellow.   These fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise.
  
  Professor Bukh's research connects combinatorics and geometry with other areas of mathematics. He studies the appearance of rigid geometric structures as answers (or conjectured answers) to classical combinatorial problems, the problem of approximation of large geometric point sets, and geometric incidence problems. His work on these problems draws on tools from - and makes connections with - logic, number theory, and algebraic topology. Professor Bukh is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon's interdisciplinary PhD program in  Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization.
  
  
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  Bob Pego named AMS FellowThe Fellows of the American Mathematical Society program recognizes mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication, and utilization of mathematics. Bob Pego was recently named an AMS Fellow for contributions to partial differential equations and applied mathematics. His research concerns dynamical behavior in nonlinear partial differential equations that model a wide range of phenoma including incompressible fluid flow, water waves, and coagulation dynamics. Professor Pego joins CMU Department of Mathematical Sciences faculty Irene Fonseca, Alan Frieze and David Kinderlehrer among the ranks of AMS Fellows.
  
  
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  Master of Science in Computational Finance ranked #1QuantNet, a leading online resource for the fields of financial engineering and quantitative finance, has recognized the Master in Computational Finance (MSCF) program at Carnegie Mellon University as #1 in its 2015 ranking of financial engineering programs. This is the third #1 ranking in a row for MSCF.
  
  "Quantitative finance offers students with superior math skills an opportunity to work in an intellectually challenging environment, using their skills in an industry on which the economic health of our nation depends," said Steve Shreve, University Professor of Mathematical Sciences and one of the founders of the CMU MSCF program. "Recognizing this, Carnegie Mellon created the first professional degree in quantitative finance more than 20 years ago, and we have invested substantial resources toward the goal of making ours the best quantitative finance degree in the world. It is gratifying to see that even though scores of similar programs have since been created at many other elite universities, our number one standing continues."
  
  The Department of Mathematical Sciences plays a critical role in the inter-disciplinary MSCF program, teaching a third of the curriculum and providing leadership in policy matters. The Department is deeply invested in the applications of mathematics to finance. The Department is home to the Bachelor's program in Computational Finance and graduates a steady stream of Ph.D. students whose research treats mathematical problems arising in finance.
  
  
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  Alumnus John NashThe Department of Mathematical Sciences extends its deepest sympathies to the family of alumnus John F. Nash, Jr., who died along with his wife in a car accident on Saturday, May 23. John Nash's death came less than a week after he received the 2015 Abel Prize.
  
  The Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters awarded the Abel Prize for 2015 to John F. Nash, Jr. and Louis Nirenberg “for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis.” While the Fields medal is considered the highest honor in mathematics, the Fields medal is restricted to mathematicians under the age of 40. The Abel prize, considered the equivalent of a Noble Prize, is the most important prize honoring contributions to mathematics over the course of a career.
  
  John Nash received bachelor and masters degrees in mathematics from Carnegie Tech in 1948. He went on to complete his Ph.D. at Princeton and to make seminal contributions in a number of areas. Nash was awarded the Nobel prize in economics in 1994 for his work on non-cooperative games. The work on game theory is distinct from the work on partial differential equations and geometric analysis that was recognized by the Abel prize.
  
  
• Putnam Mathematical CompetitionCMU team places 5th on the 2014 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. This is the fourth top 5 Putnam performance in a row for CMU. Furthermore 55 CMU students placed in the top 507.
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  Po-Shen Loh wins NSF CAREER AwardPo-Shen Loh, an assistant professor of Mathematical Sciences, received an NSF CAREER Award. The Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program offers the National Science Foundation's most prestigious awards in support of junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations.
  
  Professor Loh's research lies at the intersection of combinatorics and probability theory. He uses randomness as a component in the construction of discrete mathematical objects and also introduces randomness as a proof technique to solve problems about purely deterministic systems. Some of Professor Loh's work is motivated by problems from computer science. He is affiliated with Carnegie Mellon's interdisciplinary PhD program in Algorithms, Combinatorics and Optimization and has developed an innovative problem-solving seminar series for undergraduate students, inspired by the annual Putnam exam.
  
  

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