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In memoriam: Evarist Giné-Masdéu (1944–2015)

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The department mourns the loss of our colleague and head, Evarist Giné-Masdéu, who passed away on Friday, March 13. Evarist received his PhD from MIT in 1973 and held positions at a number of other universities before joining UConn in 1990. He was 70 years old.

The following tribute comes from Jeremy Teitelbaum, Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Evarist was a distinguished mathematician who worked on mathematical statistics and probability in infinite dimensions. He authored 2 books and over 100 articles, with many appearing in the very top journals in his field such as the Annals of Statistics. His third book, Mathematical Foundations of Infinite-Dimensional Statistical Models, written with a former UConn post-doc of his, Richard Nickl of Cambridge, will appear soon with Cambridge University Press. Among many signs of professional recognition, he was a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics, an elected member of the International Statistical Institute, and a recipient of UConn’s Alumni Excellence in Research Award.

In June of 2014, friends and colleagues of Evarist organized a 3 day conference in honor of his 70th birthday at the Center for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University in England. The conference drew a worldwide audience who celebrated “the many areas that Evarist transformed and worked on in his distinguished career.”

Evarist was a quiet man with a dry sense of humor. When he assumed the Headship of Mathematics in 2012 after Miki Neumann’s death, he told me that he had never had the desire or ambition to take on the job, but that he felt a sense of responsibility to give back to the department. I will miss his kindness and his dedication.

I know that the department and the entire college joins me in sending Evarist’s wife Rosalind Eastaway, his daughters Roser and Nuria, and his entire family our deepest condolences.

Update (May 29, 2015). For a detailed obituary, see p. 8 of the June/July 2015 issue of the IMS Bulletin.

2015 Annual Calculus Competition

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The annual Calculus Competition will be held 7:00-8:30 p.m. Tuesday 24 March 2015 in room 109 of the Mathematical Sciences 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;
  • Over-all.

All UConn undergraduates, and pre-college students taking math courses at UConn are eligible to participate.

Participants should register by Monday 23 March, either on the sheet outside the Reception Office (MSB 102) or by email to Prof. S. J. Sidney. If registering by email, please 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 6:50 the evening of the exam.

In memoriam: Richard Schafer (1918–2014)

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Richard D. Schafer, Head of the UConn Department of Mathematics from 1953 to 1959, and Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at MIT, passed away on December 28, 2014. Schafer received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1942, and then served in the U.S. Naval Reserve until 1945. Subsequently, he spent time at IAS and at UPenn, before moving on to UConn and then MIT. His research was in non-associative algebras. He was the spouse of Alice T. Schafer, a founder of the AWM, for whom is named the Schafer Prize.

Read the full obituary from the Boston Globe.

Computational Geometry Workshop at UConn

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The 24th Fall Workshop on Computational Geometry will be held at UConn on Oct 31 – Nov 1, 2014

Following the tradition of the previous Fall Workshops on Computational Geometry, the format of the workshop will be informal, extending over 2 days, with several breaks scheduled for discussions. The workshop is open to the public, with no registration fee. There will be an Open Problem Session where participants are encouraged to pose and present research questions.

For more information, visit here.

Two PhD students win presentation awards at the 49th Actuarial Research Conference

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Two UConn PhD students received honorable mentions in the graduate student presentation competition for their presentations at the 49th Actuarial Research Conference in Santa Barbara, CA.

  • Wenyuan Zheng – “Portfolio Choice with life Annuities under Probability Distortion”
  • Gao Niu – “Agent Based Modeling of P&C Underwriting Cycles”

The official announcement is available here.

UConn Semester in Representation Theory

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The Mathematics Department at the University of Connecticut hosts a Special Semester on Representation Theory in the Fall of 2014. Activities include:

  • Distinguished lecture series by Claus Michael Ringel (Universität Bielefeld) and Bernard Leclerc (Université de Caen).
  • Colloquium talks by Alexander Kleshchev (University of Oregon), Lutz Hille (Universität Münster), Henning Krause (Universität Bielefeld) and Idun Reiten (NTNU Trondheim).

For more information, visit here.

Cardetti leads project helping Connecticut school districts meet Common Core math standards

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Prof. Fabiana Cardetti and her collaborators from the Neag School of Education are working with a large group of teachers from different school districts in Connecticut as part of the Bridging Practices Among Connecticut Mathematics Educators project, funded by a grant from the the State Department of Education. Prof. Lozano-Robledo is also involved this summer in the implementation of a summer professional development workshop.

Read more about the project, its goals, and members, on UConn Today, or in the CLAS Newsletter.

Department welcomes new faculty members

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The Department is proud to welcome Matthew Badger, Guojun Gan, Zhongyang Li, and Liang Xiao, who will join our Faculty as Assistant Professors in the Fall of 2014, and Vasilis Chousionis, who will join as Assistant Professor in the Fall of 2015.

Dr. Badger comes to UConn from a Simons Instructorship at Stony Brook. He received a Ph.D. in 2011 from the University of Washington, and researches geometric measure theory, analysis on rough domains, harmonic measure, modulus of curves and measures and quasiconformal mappings.

Dr. Chousionis received a Ph.D. in 2008 from the University of Helsinki, and was previously a Postdoctoral Researcher at the Finnish Academy. His research is in geometric measure theory, harmonic analysis and potential theory.

Dr. Gan received a Ph.D. in applied mathematics in 2007 from York University. Prior to coming to UConn, he was the Director of Variable Annuity Hedging Research & Development at Manulife Financial. His research is on variable annuity valuation and hedging, open source variable annuity valuation systems, and high dimensional data and large data clustering.

Dr. Li received a Ph.D. in 2011 from Brown, and was previously a Research Fellow at Cambridge. She works on lattice models in probability and statistical mechanics, including dimer model, Ising models, percolations, self-avoiding walks, 1-2 models and general vertex models; Gaussian free fields and , conformal invariance.

Dr. Xiao holds a 2009 Ph.D. from M.I.T. He was previously an assistant professor of mathematics at UC Irvine, and before that an L. E. Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago. Xiao researches the geometry of Shimura varieties, $p$-adic automorphic forms, $p$-adic Hodge theory and $(\varphi,\Gamma)$-modules, Iwasawa theory for non-ordinary modular forms, slopes of Newton polygons, and the theory of nonarchimedean differential modules and its applications to ramification theory.