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College of Science and Technology
MATHEMATICS UPDATE WINTER 2016
Chair’s Message Greetings! I am happy to share this edition of the Temple mathematics newsletter, which covers the news, research and events during 2015. Our faculty members continue to be recognized and honored for their contributions to mathematical research and to the mathematics community. Our undergraduate and graduate programs continue to grow. New for this year, we hosted both an undergraduate mathematics conference and a graduate student conference in algebra and geometry. We also all survived an extensive remodeling of our home, Wachman Hall. Once again I want to thank colleagues, students and staff for all of their hard work. I wish you all well in the year ahead. Best regards,
New Faculty from MIT and Germany focus on noncommutative algebra and computationbased neuroscience Associate Professor S. Gillian Queisser and Assistant Professor Chelsea Walton joined the Mathematics Department in July 2015. Chelsea Walton: Algebraic approaches to quantum symmetry Chelsea Walton, Selma Lee Bloch Brown (tenure track) Assistant Professor, studies noncommutative algebra, with a special focus on quantum symmetries. Symmetry is a classical notion that arises in biology, architecture, music and many other fields. Classically, symmetries are observed, yet in the quantum setting observability is rather unintuitive and so must be studied indirectly. Walton’s contributions to this field include the study of quantum symmetries (or lack thereof) on commutative domains, Weyl algebras, “Artin-Schelter regular” algebras, and path algebras.
Assistant Professor Chelsea Walton
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Walton also has made contributions in noncommutative algebraic geometry, a field that is especially useful for analyzing noncommutative algebras whose origins lie in physics. In collaboration with Susan J. Sierra, University of Edinburgh, Walton answered a 23-year-old problem of C. Dean and L. W. Small concerning the noetherianity of enveloping algebras of infinitedimensional Lie algebras.
There are many opportunities to contribute to the continued success of the Department of Mathematics. You can support student scholarships, faculty endowment and innovative programs.
Walton, whose research is funded by the National Science Foundation, came to Temple from MIT, where she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow and C.L.E. Moore Instructor. Prior to that she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow at the University of Washington-Seattle. She completed her doctoral work at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and the University of Manchester, UK. She is originally from Detroit, Michigan.
To learn more about how you can impact the department’s future and the future of our graduates, please contact John Walker, associate vice dean, at 215-204-8176 or john.walker@temple.edu
S. Gillian Queisser: Applying mathematics to neuroscience
Ed Letzter Professor and Chair, Department of Mathematics
Associate Professor S. Gillian Queisser’s research interests include numerics and scientific computing, high-performance computing and applications to the life sciences. His primary research goal is to move the frontiers of computationbased neuroscience toward a discipline driven by physical first principles, numerical methods and large scale simulations. continued on page 3