Undergraduate News and Awards This spring, we celebrated Pi Day (3/14) with a gathering of students. We had 35 attendees, and we talked about upcoming classes. Most importantly, we ate pizza. In April, Chris Shanku followed up his visit to the PIC Math class with an introductory training on Microsoft’s Power BI software for over 20 UGA undergraduates. Chris is a former UGA Math Major and was excited to share his Microsoft experience with current UGA students. Thirty-five math majors graduated this spring, and several more this summer. We had a Graduation Ceremony for math majors in the Coverdell Building on May 13. Many of our students have spent the summer doing Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs (NC State, UGA, Alabama, ...) and internships (Chick-fil-A, Amick Farms, Zurich North America, ...). Our Directed Reading Program continues to provide the opportunity for an undergraduate student to work with either a graduate student or faculty mentor on advanced or specialized topics. In April, we held the first presentation day since Fall of 2019 for the DRP program. Graduate student Tyler Genao moderated the program, which was attended by a sizeable audience of math undergrads, graduate students, faculty and other math enthusiasts. Undergraduate DRP students who presented their work: Azeez Hussain (mentor: Daniel Hartman): "The Hausdorff Dimension and Fractal Geometry"; Aadarsh Vavilikolanu (mentor: Haiyang Wang): "Two Topics in Elementary Number Theory"; Summer Haag (mentor: Tyler Genao): "From Dots to Donuts: an Elliptic Curves DRP"; Taejun Park (mentor: Dr. Seulip Lee): "Finite Difference Method for Partial Differential Equations"; Andrew Tran and Jordan Arogeti (mentor: Dr. Jimmy Dillies): "Graph Enumeration and Quantum Field Theory"; DRP students who submitted a write-up: Cooper Clickner (mentor: Paco Adajar): "A Proof of Quadratic Reciprocity Using Zolotarev's Lemma". Finally, congratulations to Max Schneider, the recipient of our annual Strahan award to an outstanding junior mathematics major. Max is a Math/CS double major with a strong interest in music. Graduate News and Awards Neil Lyall, our Graduate Coordinator, shared the following news about our graduate program. The graduate student awards ceremony was held on Thursday April 21, 2022, to celebrate the accomplishments of our graduate students and acknowledge their significant contributions to our department. This year, the David Galewski Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award went to Sarah Blackwell both in recognition of the consistently high quality of her teaching and her extensive service and outreach accomplishments. This year’s recipients of the University Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award were Emily Crawford Das, David Galban, Geunyoung Kim, Nolan Schock, and Terrin Warren. The William Armor Wills Memorial Scholarship Award went jointly to Nolan Schock and Arvind Suresh. Nolan successfully defended his PhD in algebraic geometry under the mentorship of Professor Valery Alexeev earlier this Spring. His work, part of which has already been accepted for publication in the European Journal of Mathematics, is at the forefront of modern algebraic geometry and may eventually have important applications in mathematical physics. Arvind successfully defended his PhD in number theory and arithmetic geometry under the mentorship of Professor Dino Lorenzini earlier this Spring. He has been very productive and this award recognizes his important contributions to the classical subject of rational points on algebraic curves. Many other graduate students made significant contributions to our program and were recognized at the awards ceremony: Alex Newman and Freddy Saia for serving as ombudspersons; Alex Newman for leading GRSC 7770; Sarah Blackwell, Daniel Hartman, Andy Jenkins, Han Lou, Alex Newman, Freddy Saia, Jack Wagner, and Peter Woolfitt for organizing introductory workshops for our incoming graduate students during orientation last Fall; Komal Agrawal, Emily Crawford Das, Zack Garza, Tyler Genao, Devashi Gulati, Daniel Hartman, Dustin Kasser, and Skylar Zhang for serving as peer mentors to our new first year students; Zack Garza and Arvind Suresh for running the Graduate Student Seminar; and finally Han Lou and Devashi Gulati for heading up the student chapters of the AWM and AMS respectively. Three of our students participated in MSRI Summer Graduate Schools in 2022: Daniel Hartman - Geometric Flows (Crete, Greece) Han Lou - Séminaire de Mathématiques Supérieures 2022: Floer Homotopy Theory (Vancouver) Jack Wagner - New Directions in Representation Theory (Hawaii)
