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2007 and Earlier News

2007

  • Min Kang was awarded the 2007 Alumni Outstanding Teacher Award and was also awarded an NC State Outstanding Teacher for 2006–2007. She is a member of the Academy of Outstanding Teachers.
  • The Department hosted an Alumni Reception at the Joint Mathematics Meetings, San Diego, California, on Monday, January 7, 2008, from 5:45 PM to 7:00 PM. The reception was held in the Irvine Room of the San Diego Marriott Hotel and Marina on the 4th level. All alumni, friends, and family were invited for hors d’oeuvres, conversation, and to hear about recent events in the department.
  • Tim Kelley, together with NC State physicists Dr. Jerry Bernholc and Dr. Wenchang Lu, is leading a research team that includes scientists from the University of Tennessee, in a project to create software for the world’s most powerful supercomputers. The research is being funded by a five-year, $1.7 million grant from the National Science Foundation. (story)
  • Grad student Drew Pasteur predicts football winners. (story)
  • Carl Meyer has been selected for the 2007 Mathematics Department Alumni Award at Colorado State University. Dr. Meyer will travel to Fort Collins at the beginning of November to be presented with his award during Math Day, and to give a Mathematics Department colloquium.
  • Jack Silverstein has been elected to Fellowship in the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. He will be presented with a plaque on Monday, July 30 at the 2007 IMS Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City. The citation reads: “For seminal contributions to the theory and application of random matrices.
  • Steve Schecter will give a plenary talk and short course at the 10th Workshop on Partial Differential Equations: Theory, Computation and Applications at the Instituto Nacional de Matematica Pura e Aplicada in Rio de Janeiro, August 6–10, 2007. The talk is on “Stability of patterns in viscous conservation laws”; the short course is on “Stability of fronts in gasless combustion.”
  • Graduate student Brandy Benedict is one of two mathematics graduate students nationwide named Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellows for summer 2007 by the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The program sends advanced science, mathematics, and engineering students to work in major news organizations. Brandy is assigned to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, where she has reported on the return of Kirtland’s warbler to Wisconsin, the use of bacterial biofilms to clean up harmful metal compounds in a flooded mine, and the mathematics of Sudoku.
  • Professor Sandra Paur received the 2007 NCSU Faculty Adviser Award.
  • Michael Shearer gave an invited plenary lecture at the SIAM-SEAS meeting at the University of Memphis, on May 5th, 2007. The title of the lecture was “Motion of Thin Liquid Films Driven by Surfactant and Gravity.”
  • NCSU Alum Robert Bryant (Mathematics, 1974) has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences (story) and has been named the new Director of MSRI (story).
  • Graduate student Kelly Dickson, President of the NC State University SIAM Student Chapter, has been awarded the Student Chapter Certificate of Recognition by SIAM. Kelly is completing her Ph.D. degree under the direction of Tim Kelley. In addition to her outstanding service to the SIAM chapter, Kelly is also active as a board member of the Mathematics Graduate Student Association.
  • Carl Meyer will present the 2007 LAA Lecture “Google’s PageRank and Beyond” on May 4 at the University of Wisconson-Madison.
  • NC State Math Undergrads Adam Attarian, Cameron Swofford, Roberto Rodriguez and Cheryl Zapata win awards for their research posters at the AMS/MAA Joint Meetings in New Orleans, Jan 5–8. (story).
  • Naihuan Jing and Kailash Misra are among the co-organizers of the week-long conference “Quantum affine Lie algebras, extended affine Lie algebras, and applications” to be held Mar. 2–7, 2008 at the Banff International Research Station .
  • Tom Banks and Hien Tran co-direct $3.5 million project to develop mathematical and statistical models for designing new HIV treatment strategies. (story)
  • Math alumnus Michael Binger (BS, Applied Mathematics, 1999) uses math to master poker (article).
  • Jack Silverstein will give a series of three lectures as part of the Séminaire de Printemps du 3e Cycle romand de statistique et probabilités appliquées in Les Diablerets, Switzerland, March 4–7, 2007
  • Erich Kaltofen is a co-organizer of the workshop “Interactive Parallel Computation in Support of Research in Algebra, Geometry and Number Theory” held at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, CA January 29–February 2, 2007.

2006

2005

  • Marilyn McCollum received a 2005 Award for Outstanding Service in Support for Teaching and Learning from the Faculty Center for Teaching and Learning at NC State.
  • Robert Bryant (BS in Mathematics, 1974) has received the 2005 College of Physical and Mathematics Distinguished Alumnus Award. Professor Bryant is the J.M. Kreps Professor of Mathematics at Duke University.
  • Erich Kaltofen co-organized the workshop Challenges in Linear and Polynomial Algebra in Symbolic Computation Software at the Banff International Research Station, October 1–6, 2005.
  • Mathematics Undergraduate Charles R. Rogers presented the poster “The Effect of Alcohol on Neuron Firing” at the 2005 SACNAS Conference held in Denver, September 29 to October 2, 2005.
  • Kailash Misra has been appointed to the Southeastern Section Program Committee of the American Mathematical Society starting February 1, 2006, for a term of two years.
  • Erich Kaltofen and co-author Pascal Koiran received the Association for Computing Machinery Special Interest Group on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation ISSAC 2005 Distinguished Paper Award for their paper “On the complexity of factoring bivariate supersparse (lacunary) polynomials.” The paper was presented at the International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) in Beijing on July 25, 2005.
  • Three Mathematics Department faculty are co-organizing special sessions at the annual AMS-MAA-SIAM Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Antonio, Texas, January 12–15 2006: Loek Helminck (Algebraic Groups, Symmetric Spaces, and Invariant Theory), Agnes Szanto(Symbolic-Numeric Computation and Applications), and Dimitry Zenkov (Contemporary Dynamical Systems).
  • Loek Helminck will become Interim Department Head and Hien Tran will become Interim Associate Department Head on July 1, 2005.
  • Ralph Smith will become NC State’s Associate Director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) on July 1, 2005, replacing Tom Banks. 
  • Ilse Ipsen has been appointed Problems and Techniques section editor for the SIAM Review. She has also been named to the International Householder Committee, the permanent organizing committee for a series of international meetings in linear algebra that started in 1961.
  • Tim Kelley has been named SIAM Vice President for Publications effective January 1, 2006.
  • Graduate Student Rachel Levy has won one of three SIAM Student Paper Prizes, to be awarded at the SIAM Annual Meeting in July.
  • John Griggs and Mansoor Haider have been named NC State Outstanding Teachers for 2004–2005, and have become members of the Academy of Outstanding Teachers.
  • Graduate Student Matthew Lasater, won student paper awards at the Advanced Workshop on Frontiers in Electronics in Aruba in December, 2004, and the SIAM-SEAS meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, in March, 2005.
  • Tim Kelley gave an invited plenary talk at the SIAM-SEAS meeting in Charleston, South Carolina, in March, 2005, and will give one at the 7th IMACS International Symposium on Iterative Methods in Scientific Computing in Toronto this May. 
  • Helge Kristian Jenssen,has received a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Development (Career) Award. (story)
  • Tim Kelley was reelected to the SIAM Council for a second three-year term beginning January 1, 2005.
  • NC State’s Master’s Program in Financial Mathematics is spotlighted by the News and Observer.
  • Erich Kaltofen gave a plenary talk, “The Role of Algorithms in Symbolic Computation,” at the East Coast Computer Algebra Day at Ashland University, March 12, 2005.
  • Michael Shearer has been elected chair of the SIAM Activity Group on Analysis of Partial Differential Equations. His two-year term ends December 31, 2006.
  • The NC State Mathematics Department will be well-represented at the Mathematical Association of America Southeastern Sectional Meeting at Meredith College, March 11–12, 2005. Carl Meyer and Amy Langville are organizing the short course “Web Search and Information Retrieval”; James Selgrade and Cammy Cole (together with Huseyin Kocak) are organizing the short course “Some Deterministic Models in Mathematical Biology”;and Robert Bryant is organizing the short course “Geometry and the Calculus of Variations”. Meyer and Selgrade are professors at NC State, Langville and Cole received their PhDs at NC State, and Bryant received his BS at NC State.
  • Sharon Lubkin has been named Publications Chair of the Society for Mathematical Biology.
  • Francisco Aguilar, a senior majoring in Mathematics, has been selected to receive the College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences Senior Award for Leadership.

2004 

  • The Todd Fuller Wake County High School Mathematics Competition Awards were announced at the Wake County School Board meeting on December 7, 2004. This competition is run by the NC State Mathematics Department.
  • 2003 graduate C. Franklin Goldsmith wins an NSF Fellowship for graduate study in chemical engineering at MIT
  • Sharon Lubkin has been named co-chair of the NC State Association of Women Faculty.
  • Michael Singer has been elected to the Council of the American Mathematical Society. (link)
  • Kailash Misra is the organizing committee co-chair for the NSF-sponsored conference “Lie Algebras, Vertex Operator Algebras, and Their Applications” held at NC State May 17–21, 2005.
  • The work of Carl Meyer and Amy Langville on algorithms used in search engines is described in the article “The Ongoing Search for Efficient Web Search Algorithms” by Sara Robinson in SIAM News, November 2004.
  • The Richard Skalak Award for best paper in the Journal of Biomechanical Engineering for the year 2003 has been awarded to Mansoor Haider and his coauthors for the article “Alterations in the mechanical properties of the human chondrocyte pericellular matrix with osteoarthritis,” (L.G. Alexopoulos, M.A. Haider, T.P. Vail and F. Guilak) Journal of Biomechanical Engineering, Vol. 125, pp. 323–333.
  • Ralph Smith has been named Editor-in-Chief for the SIAM Series on Advances in Design and Control.
  • 2003 PhD Bob Wieman discusses the pros and cons of doing a postdoc abroad in the October 2004 Dynamical Systems Magazine. (link)
  • 2001 PhD Rebecca Segal‘s work at CIIT Centers for Health Research is featured in the July 2004 Dynamical Systems Magazine. (link)
  • Erich Kaltofen has been named chair of the steering committee of the International Symposium for Symbolic and Algebraic Computation for 2004–2005.
  • Tim Kelley has been named organizing committee co-chair for the SIAM 2005 annual meeting. (link)
  • Zhilin Li has been named organizing committee co-chair for the International Conference on Scientific Computing (ICSC05), Nanjing, China, June 4–8, 2005. (link)
  • Tom Banks has received the Turkish Governors’ Medal of Honor Award. Banks was honored for his “outstanding research contributions” at the International Conference on Inverse Problems: Modeling and Simulation in Fethiye, Turkey, June 7–12, 2004.
  • Naihuan Jing was named a Fulbright Scholar for 2003–2004, and was a member of the Max-Planck-Institut fuer Mathematik in Bonn, Germany, from December 2003 to June 2004. He was also awarded a Humbolt Fellowship for 2004–2005, with which he will visit Bielefeld University from December 2005 to August 2005.
  • Zhilin Li delivered a plenary talk at the Third International Conference on Numerical Analysis and Applications, Rousse, Bulgaria, June 29 to July 3, 2004. (link)
  • Tim Kelley gave a plenary talk on “Simulation of Nondifferentiable Models for Groundwater Flow and Transport” at the Computational Methods in Water Resources 2004 International Conference, Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
  • Bioterrorism: Mathematical Modeling Applications in Homeland Security, co-edited by Professor H. T. Banks and published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, was selected in May 2004 for the Scientific American Book Club. It was the first book published by SIAM to be chosen for this distinction. Chapter 6 of the book, “Modeling and Imaging Techniques with Potential for Application in Bioterrorism,” was written by Banks, 2002 PhD David Bortz, 2001 PhD Laura Potter (now a research scientist at GlaxoSmithKline), and former postdoc Gabriella Pinter. (link)
  • Graduate Student Rachel Levy won the Best Student Talk award at the 2004 British Applied Mathematics Colloquium.
  • Professor Carl Meyer delivered a keynote address on “Mathematical Fuel For Search Engines” at the SIAM Southeast Atlantic Section Meeting, East Tennessee State University, April 2–3, 2004. 
  • ‘2003 Grad David Johnson has won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship. (story
  • Agnes Szanto has been awarded an NSF CAREER Award. (story)
  • Lavon Page has been named to direct implementation of NC State’s “Learning in a Technology-Rich Environment” plan (story 1story 2).
  • Ilse Ipsen has been named SIAM Vice-President for Programs. (story)
  • Graduate Student John May won the Best Student Paper Award at the 2004 International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation in Santander, Spain.

2003 and earlier 

  • The College of Physical and Mathematical Sciences honored 1974 Grad Christine Hemrick as its 2003 Distinguished Alumna. (story)
  • 2003 graduate C. Franklin Goldsmith wins a Fulbright Scholarship to study applied mathematics in Germany.
  • 2002 Grad Nathan George wins an an NSF Fellowship for graduate study in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley.
  • An NC State team including 2003 Grad Jeremy Maness took third place in the 2003 IEEE Computer Society International Design Competition. It was the only U.S. team in top the ten. (story)
  • 2003 Grad Justin Brockman has won a Goldwater Scholarship. (story)
  • 2002 Grad Nathan George has won a Gates Cambridge Scholarship.  (story)
  • Carla Savage, Professor of Computer Science and associate member of the Mathematics Department, and two collaborators, including Charles “Chip” Killian, an undergraduate in Computer Science and Applied Mathematics, have solved a 30-year-old problem about drawing Venn diagrams. (Science, January 31, 2003)
  • Tom Banks says HIV modeling effort is a “paradigm for SAMSI.” (story)
  • Tom Banks has won the 2002 W.T. and Idalia Reid Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. (story)
  • “NC State’s ‘WebAssign’ Online Homework Changing the Classroom.” (story)
  • The National Science Foundation has funded the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI) in Research Triangle Park. (story)
  • Michael Singer has been appointed Acting Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, for the academic year 2002–2003.
  • Lavon Page has received the Gertrude Cox Award for Innovative Excellence in Teaching and Learning (meritorious recognition).
  • Tim Kelley has been elected to the SIAM Council. (story)
  • Stephen Campbell has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). (story)
  • Tim Kelley has been appointed editor of SIAM Journal on Optimization. (story)
  • Tom Banks has been elected chair of the SIAM Board of Trustees. (story)
  • “NC State Workshop Gives Students Hands-on Industrial Modeling Experience.” (SIAM News, November 1998)