CST Mathematics Update Fall 2014

College of Science and Technology

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Mathematics

Program Updates: Graduate . . . . . . . . . 2 Undergraduate . . . . . .3 K-12 Outreach . . . . . . . . 3 Faculty News . . . . . . . . .4 New Research Grants . .4 Events . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .4

UPDATE

Fall 2014

FACULTY PROFILE MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR Greetings! I am delighted to share the fall 2014 Mathematics Update, covering (mostly) the 2013-2014 academic year. Some highlights: This past year’s PhD graduates have all secured either tenure-track academic or postdoctoral research positions.

Many undergraduates participated in mathematical research with faculty mentors. Our outreach efforts continue to impact K-12 students throughout the Philadelphia area. Department faculty members continue to be recognized for outstanding research.

Many thanks to department colleagues, students and staff for all of their hard work during the past year, and I wish all of you well in 2015.

Best regards,

Ed Letzter

Support Mathematics 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.

To learn more about how you can impact the department’s future and the future of our graduates, contact Andy Davis, Associate Director of Development, at adavis@temple.edu or go to cst.temple.edu.

Professor Irina Mitrea: Crossroads of harmonic analysis, partial differential equations and geometric measure theory Many phenomena in engineering and mathematical physics, such as elasticity, fluid flow, unisotropic plate bending and electromagnetism, can be modeled by means of boundary value problems for a certain elliptic differential operator in a given domain. If the domain in question is smooth, like a sphere, a variety of classical mathematical tools are available for the treatment of such problems.

The situation is radically different, however, if the domain in question has an irregular boundary, which is the prevalent case in real-world applications. Indeed, domains that appear smooth to the naked eye in fact exhibit corners, edges, cracks, and/or microscopic asperities and irregularities of a very intricate nature.

Professor Irina Mitrea’s work, situated at the crossroads of harmonic analysis, partial differential equations (PDE), and geometric measure theory, deals with the development of new mathematical techniques capable of handling elliptic boundary value problems in irregular settings, including domains with isolated singularities, Lipschitz domains and uniformly rectifiable domains. She has recently co-authored two research monographs, Multi-Layer Potentials and Boundary Problems for Higher Order Elliptic Systems in Lipschitz Domains, and Grupoid Metrization Theory with Applications to Analysis on Quasi-Metric Spaces and Functional Analysis, published, respectively, by Springer-Verlag and Birkhauser in 2013.

During the academic year 2014-2015, Mitrea will be a von Neumann Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, where she is completing collaborative work on two new research monographs. One is focused on RiemannHilbert problems in uniformly rectifiable domains; the other monograph deals with boundary problems for the Hodge-Laplacian on regular Semmes-Kenig-Toro subdomains of Riemannian manifolds. She is also working with her current PhD student, Hussein Awala, and with a former PhD student, Katharine Ott, on a research project involving PDE with mixed boundary conditions of both Dirichlet and Neumann type. Mitrea’s current research collaborators also include Emilio Marmolejo-Olea, Jose Maria Martell, Dorina Mitrea, Marius Mitrea, Michael Taylor, Warwick Tucker and Elia Ziade. Mitrea’s professional accomplishments include the 2008 Ruth Michler Memorial Prize from the Association of Women in Mathematics and an invited plenary address at a 2010 American Mathematical Society sectional meeting.

GRADUATE PROGRAM Graduate Student Profile

New PhDs

Workshops and Conferences

Stephen Shank, PHD ’14, MATH

Gitnet Gidelew, May 2014. Gidelew’s thesis, Harmonic Analysis on Combinatorial Graphs, was completed under the direction of Professor Isaac Pesenson. Dr. Gidelew is now tenuretrack assistant professor at Richard Bland College of William and Mary.

Christian Millichap spoke at the 2014 Graduate Student Geometry and Topology Conference, Austin, Texas, and at the 2014 Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, University of Maryland, Baltimore.

Jessica Hamm, August 2014. Her thesis, Multiplicative Invariants of Root Lattices, was completed with thesis advisor Professor Martin Lorenz. Dr. Hamm is now tenure-track assistant professor at Winthrop University.

Eric Stachura gave a presentation at the fall 2013 Southeastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, University of Kentucky, Louisville.

In a decade, Philadelphia native Stephen Shank has gone from delivering pizzas to accepting a prestigious post-doctoral position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

A 2007 magna cum laude Temple graduate in mathematics, Shank was awarded his PhD in mathematics at the 2014 Commencement. His graduate work has focused on scientific computing and numerical linear algebra research. At MIT he is researching seismic imaging related to oil and gas exploration with the Imaging and Computing Group in the Department of Mathematics.

“With seismic imaging I think we’ve barely scratched the surface of the Earth and I’d really like to contribute to innovations that will help continue to power our daily lives,” says Shank.

“Temple,” he adds, “was fantastic for me, both in terms of my classes and the opportunities I was afforded that led me to MIT.” As an undergraduate he worked as a tutor in the university’s Math and Science Resource Center and, as a graduate teaching assistant, taught six pre-calculus and calculus courses.

Support from a European Union-U.S. program enabled him to launch his dissertation research during a semester at the University of Bologna. The remainder of his thesis was written while employed as a research assistant with his advisor Professor Daniel B. Szyld, supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation.

His experience performing mathematical research led to a summer spent working as an intern at Sandia National Laboratories.

Shank also somehow found time to collaborate with two childhood friends to develop KangaStock, an inventory control mobile app currently being used by a corrugated box plant that has significantly reduced the time required to conduct an inventory and caught inventory errors of up to $50,000 on the company’s books. “It’s a lot more efficient and accurate than the process they were using,” says Shank.

—Bruce Beans

Stephen Shank, May 2014. His thesis, Low-rank solution methods for largescale linear matrix equations, was completed under the supervision of Professor Daniel Szyld. Dr. Shank has a postdoctoral research appointment at MIT. Dong Zhou, August 2014. His thesis, High-order numerical methods for pressure Poisson equation reformulations of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equation, was completed under the direction of Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold. Dr. Zhou will continue his research at Temple and at MIT, working on an NSF-funded project with Dr. Seibold and also with Professor R. Ruben Rosales (MIT).

Summer Schools and Internships Hussein Awala and Luca Pallucchini attended the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley, summer graduate school in geometry and analysis, July 28 to August 8, 2014.

Kathryn Lund was awarded a Temple University First Summers Research Initiative grant to study traffic modeling with Dr. Seibold.

Fadoua El Mostaid was a summer intern at the Center for Biofilm Engineering, Montana State University.

Star-Lena Quintana participated in the 2014 Industrial Math/Stat Modeling Workshop for Graduate Students, Water Purification via Membrane Separation, at the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute, Research Triangle Park, North Carolina.

Scott Ladenheim was a summer intern at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratories.

Luca Pallucchini particpated in the International Conference on Complex Analysis and Geometry, Wuhan University, China.

Fadoua El Mostaid gave a presentation at the annual meeting of the Pacific Northwest section of the Mathematical Association of America, University of Montana, Missoula, June 2014.

Hussein Awala gave a presentation at the 72nd Midwest PDE Seminar, Purdue University, November 2013.

Ahmad Sabra spoke at Progress in Harmonic Analysis and Geometric Measure Theory, Temple University, April 2014, and at the Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, Temple University, October 2013.

Dong Zhou spoke at the Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, Temple University, October 2013, and at the International Conference on Spectral and High Order Methods, Salt Lake City, June 2014, and participated in the Short Course on Uncertainty Quantification, Stanford University, June 2014.

Scott Ladenheim presented a talk at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics annual meeting in Chicago, July 2014, and received second prize for best student paper at the 13th Copper Mountain Conference on Iterative Methods, April 2014.

Selected Graduate Student Publications Christian Millichap: “Factorial growth rates for the number of hyperbolic 3manifolds of a given volume,” Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, to appear.

Ahmad Sabra (with C. Gutierrez): “The reflector problem and the inverse square,” Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods & Applications, 2014; “Design of pairs of reflectors,” Journal of the Optical Society of America A,31(4), 891899.

GRADUATE PROGRAM continued Stephen Shank (with D. Fritzsche, A. Frommer, and D. Szyld), “Overlapping blocks by growing a partition with applications to preconditioning,” Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Journal of Scientific Computation, 2013.

Awards Jessie Hamm was selected as 2014-2015 Project NExT Fellow of the Mathematical Association of America. He also received the 2013 College of Science and Technology Distinguished Graduate Student Teaching Award.

Changes At the end of June 2014, Professor Martin Lorenz stepped down as graduate chair. The department is grateful for his dedicated service to the graduate program. In July 2014, Professor Shiferaw Berhanu began serving as graduate chair.

UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM • In November 2013, Louis Graup (below) won First Place at the CST Undergraduate Research Program Symposium for his poster, Optimization of Macroscopic Models for the Approximation of Microscopic Traffic Flow. His research was supervised by Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold. Graup also presented his research in the student paper session at the Fall Meeting of the Eastern Pennsylvania-Delaware Section of the Mathematical Association of America, at St. Joseph’s University.

• Several undergraduate students engaged in mathematics research, including Joshua Lloret (supervised by Dr. Brian Rushton), Mark Mikida (Professor Yury Grabovsky), Samuel Lee (Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold), and Joseph Buhler (Seibold).

• In April, Louis Graup and Samuel Lee presented their research at the 21st Temple Undergraduate Research Forum & Creative Works Symposium.

• The Math Club met frequently throughout the academic year for interesting and entertaining lectures, the Calculus Carnival, and the annual Pi Day Celebration.

• Associate Professor (Instructional) Maria Lorenz is now director of the Temple undergraduate programs in mathematics.

K-12 Outreach Approximately 40 middle-school students participated in the annual Temple University Mathematics Circle in November 2013. Topics for this year included algorithms, prime numbers, the golden ratio, logic, probability, topology, and math in music and art.

The program was organized by Professor Irina Mitrea, Associate Professor Instructional Professor Maria Lorenz, Dr. Elia Ziade, and Temple mathematics graduate student Jessie Hamm. Sponsors included the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), the National Association of Mathematics Circles, the National Defense Education Program, and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division.

In April 2014, Professor Mitrea and department volunteers, including Temple math faculty Drs. Maria Lorenz and Sunnie Joshi, represented the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) at the USA Science and Engineering Festival, in Washington, DC. This year’s theme was cryptography, and the festival included 750 exhibits, including hands-on learning for children and parents, and attracted more than 325,000 participants. A full report is available in the July/August AWM newsletter.

Also in April, Temple’s hosted its third annual Sonia Kovalesky Day, organized by Maria Lorenz and graduate student Jessie Hamm.

This one-day event featured numerous mathematical activities.

Funding and support for this event was provided in part by the Mathematical Association of America, the National Defense Education Program, and the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division.

Graduate student Eric Stachura organized a two-hour workshop “Handson Geometric Optics,” in the STEM Scholars Program for High School Students, at The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, May 2014.

The 2014 Temple Girls and Mathematics Summer Program ran July 7-11, 2014. Fifty middle school girls participated, studying mathematics of origami; geometric constructions with the ruler and the compass; the game of life; braids; mathematical card tricks; reasoning by contradiction; taxicab geometry; operations and relations.

Directed by Professor Irina Mitrea, with assistant directors Drs. Janet Fierson and Meredith Hegg, the program was supported by the National Defense Education Program, the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Carderock Division, and the Mathematical Association of America.

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NEW RESEARCH GRANTS

FACULTY AWARDS

Temple hosted the Fall Eastern Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society, October 12-13, 2013. There were approximately 400 attendees, 21 special sessions and four plenary addresses. Local organizers were Professors Shiferaw Berhanu and Edward Letzter, with many department faculty, students, and staff helping to make the meeting a great success.

• Associate Professor David Futer Connections in low-dimensional topology, NSF • Professor Yury Grabovsky Linear and non-linear elasticity: Study of exact relations and instabilities, NSF • Professors Yury Grabovsky and Isaac Klapper Spatiotemporal distribution of oxygen in biofilm infections, NIH • Professor Martin Lorenz Noncommutative and commutative invariant theory,National Security Agency • Professor Brian Rider Limit laws arising in random matrix theory, NSF • Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold Control of Vehicular Traffic Flow via Low Density Autonomous Vehicles, NSF • Professor Daniel Szyld Multiple preconditioners for saddle-point and other problems, NSF

EVENTS

Professors Irina Mitrea and Igor Rivin (above) were elected to the 2015 class of Fellows of the American Mathematical Society. Professor Mitrea was cited for contributions to partial differential equations and related fields as well as outreach to women and underrepresented minorities at all educational levels. Igor Rivin was singled out for his contributions to geometry and related fields, pure and applied.

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.

Associate Professor (Instructional) Maria Lorenz was awarded the 2013 College of Science and Technology Dean's Distinguished Excellence in Mentoring Award.

Professor Daniel Szyld was elected Vice President at Large of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

The 2013 Grosswald Lectures, “Configuration Spaces,” were delivered

by Professor Günter M. Ziegler of Freie Universität Berlin, September 23-25.

Temple hosted its third annual Numerical Analysis Day graduate student conference, organized by Assistant Professor Benjamin Seibold and Professor Daniel Szyld. The keynote speaker was Professor Marcia Berger, of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.

The department hosted the third annual North American Gone Fishing workshop on Poisson Geometry, September 28-29, 2013. Previous Gone Fishing workshops were held at Washington University and UCLA. Associate Professor Vasily Dolgushev was the local organizer.