Profs. Luke Rogers and Alexander Teplyaev are members of the organizing committee of the 6th Cornell Conference on Analysis, Probability, and Mathematical Physics on Fractals. The conference will take place in Ithaca NY, from June 13–17, 2017, and is supported by the National Science Foundation.

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!

Alex Russell, Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, has been inducted into the Connecticut Academy of Science and Engineering. He is one of just 24 individuals to achieve this prestigious distinction this year from across the State of Connecticut.

Read more in the Hartford Courant.

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.

Professor Ralf Schiffler has been awarded a Simons Visiting Professorship by the Mathematisches Forschungsinstitut Oberwolfach in Germany. This program annually supports up to 40 Simons Visiting Professors, distinguished scientists from outside of Europe, who wish to combine an existing invitation to an Oberwolfach Workshop with a research visit to a European university of up to two weeks.

Professor Schiffler will use this award to work on several existing research projects as well as create new research collaborations during a two week visit to Germany. He will stay at the University Bielefeld and participate in the workshop Representation Theory of Quivers and Finite Dimensional Algebras in Oberwolfach.

This year’s awards ceremony took place on April 21 in IMS 20. The invited address was by Dr. Charles Haddock