Valdez, Vadiveloo and Gan receive CAE research grant from the Society of Actuaries

August 29, 2017

Professors Emiliano A. Valdez, Jeyaraj Vadiveloo and Guojun Gan have been awarded a Center of Actuarial Excellence (CAE) research grant from the Society of Actuaries. The grant will support a three-year (2017-2020) research project on “Applying Data Mining Techniques in Actuarial Science” which aims to examine and evaluate data mining tools and approaches for analyzing data in actuarial science and insurance. In particular, they will focus on tools and methods that will effectively demonstrate on how actuaries can use them to preform predictive analytics in three specific areas: claims tracking and monitoring in life insurance, understanding policyholder behavior in general insurance, and model efficiency for variable annuity products.

This research grant is part of a competition that is sponsored by the Society of Actuaries each year for schools that have received the CAE designation. The submission process involves passing two rounds that make it extremely competitive and the review process normally takes about 5-6 months till final decision. In the first round, interested CAE universities must submit a brief letter of intent with a summary of proposed research project. In 2016, 18 CAE schools submitted letters of intent and only about half were invited to submit a full proposal in the second round. Full proposals are then judged according to five criteria: impact, cost-benefit, uniqueness, viability, and overall quality. Each year, only about 2-3 universities receive an education or research grant.

This is the first time that the SOA awarded such a research grant to the University of Connecticut. Other universities that have received such grants include University of Waterloo, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and University of Michigan. A complete list of past CAE grant awards may be found here (https://www.soa.org/Education/Resources/Cae/edu-cae-grants-award-history.aspx).

A website detailing the UConn research grant may be found on this link

Summer 2017 REU on Stochastics and Fractals

June 19, 2017

This summer the Mathematics REU program on stochastics and fractals is organized by Professors Luke Rogers, Masha Gordina and Sasha Teplyaev. In addition, Luke Rogers, Phanuel Mariano and Gamal Mograby organized the 5th Northeast Mathematics Undergraduate Research Mini-Symposium at the University of Connecticut on August 3rd, 2017. The program is supported by an NSF REU Site Grant. Visit the UConn Math REU Page for more information.

2017 Awards Day

April 20, 2017

Come and help us celebrate the accomplishments of our students!

Our Annual Awards Day Ceremony is on Friday, April 28th. We will have tea at 3:00 PM in Monteith 201, followed by the awards ceremony at 3:30 PM in Schenker Lecture Hall. (Program and list of awards.)

This year’s Invited Address will be given by Dr. Brendan Kelly, preceptor in Mathematics at Harvard University. He will speak on “How many ways can I get to the coffee shop?”.

2017 Putnam Team Soars High

April 17, 2017

The 2017 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition saw 4164 contestants from 568 colleges in the USA and Canada. There were also teams from 415 institutions.

The UConn delegation saw one of its best performances in recent years. Out of 415, our team ranked 49th overall. We placed 60th and 85th in 2016 and 2015, respectively, so this is a marked improvement, but also a continuation of our consistently excellent performance. Congratulations to all!

Our team fielded 15 competitors, a wonderful group of very talented and hard working students. Many of them are graduating this year, and we wish them well in their future endeavors, and look forward to welcoming the next cohort of competitors in the fall!

2017 Calculus Competition

March 22, 2017

The annual Calculus Competition will be held 6:30-8:00 p.m. Thursday
6 April 2017 in room 226 of the Monteith Building. Cash and book prizes
will be awarded in three categories: Beginner (roughly, through first-year
calculus), Intermediate (roughly, through multivariable calculus, beginning
differential equations, and beginning linear algebra), and Over-all. All
UConn undergraduates, and pre-college students taking math courses
AT UCONN (not co-op courses in high school), are eligible to participate.
Participants should register by Monday 3 April, either on the sheet outside
the Reception Office (Monteith 217) or (better) by email to Prof. Sidney; if you register by email, give your name, phone
number, email address, and the numbers of UConn math courses you are taking
now, with instructor names for multi-section courses. Participants should
arrive at the competition by 6:20 the evening of the exam. Questions may be
addressed to Prof. Sidney.

Professor Badger Awarded NSF CAREER Award

February 4, 2017

Dr. Matthew Badger, Assistant Professor of Mathematics, has been awarded a five-year, $410,000 grant (2017–2022) from the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program for his project “Analysis and Geometry of Measures.” A CAREER award is considered the highest distinction the NSF provides to a junior researcher in the mathematical sciences. Dr. Badger earned his PhD from University of Washington in 2011, and prior to joining the faculty at UConn, he was a James H. Simons Instructor and NSF postdoctoral fellow at Stony Brook University from 2011–2014.

The area of mathematics in which Dr. Badger specializes is called geometric measure theory. Measures are abstract generalizations of length, area, or volume, which assign a size to every mathematical set. They were first developed by Lebesgue in 1902 to define the integral of certain discontinuous functions that could not be computed using the Riemann integral. Lebesgue gave a rigorous definition of the length of a subset of the real line. Geometric measure theory was born out of attempts to define the length of subsets of Euclidean spaces.

Imagine, for example, that you wanted to measure the length of a piece of wire or string. This is easy: unwind the string into a straight line, place it next to a ruler, and read off its length. What if the string was cut into two pieces? This is easy, too: use the ruler to measure the length of the first piece of string, repeat with the second piece of string, and then add the two lengths together. What if the string is cut into infinitely many pieces, some short, some long, some as short as a fleck of dust? The pieces are scattered and cannot possibly be lined up next to a ruler without misplacing some of the pieces. How can you measure the length of the string now?

An answer to the question of how to assign length to subsets of Euclidean space was given by Carathéodory in 1914 and was studied in greater depth by Besicovitch in the 1920s and 1930s. In a recent series of three papers, Dr. Badger and his collaborator, Dr. Raanan Schul of Stony Brook University, solved a 70-year-old problem in geometric measure theory from the 1940s of how to identify the “length-like” part of an arbitrary measure in Euclidean space. The research component of Dr. Badger’s CAREER award is directed at related problems, whose resolution would significantly increase our understanding of the internal structure of general measures.

Dr. Badger’s CAREER project also has a significant educational component, with activities aimed at training and professional development for graduate students and postdocs in analysis inside and outside of UConn. One highlight is a pair of linked conferences Dr. Badger will organize for young researchers working in geometric measure theory and related areas. The first conference (for postdocs) will take place at UConn in Fall 2017; the second conference (for graduate students) will take place in Spring 2019. Several postdocs from the first conference will be invited back to UConn to give mini-courses for graduate students in the second conference. For more information about these upcoming events, please contact Dr. Badger at matthew.badger@uconn.edu.