Mathematics is an amazing and beautiful intellectual creation, one of the human race’s deepest endeavors. The world around us, and the future world we are creating, is woven through with mathematics — from the symmetry groups of Navajo weavings, to the airflow around a flapping bird’s wing, to the security of global computer networks.
Learn more about our vibrant department, explore our daily events calendar for the most current department events, and please come visit us in Kemeny Hall.
December 01, 2023
Professor of economics and math alum Heidi Williams ’03 is among Vox’s Future Perfect 50, which celebrates “the often unsung heroes who are finding exciting solutions to the world’s biggest problems.” Williams is recognized for her work “at the forefront of a growing movement aiming to kickstart the slumping rate of progress by reforming the science of science.” Read the article here.
December 01, 2023
Professor Martin Malandro PhD ’08 has written AI-assisted software to help compose music in a variety of styles, including classical music. The software has now been used to create the world's first AI-assisted opera, “Andromeda.” Malandro is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at Sam Houston State University. Click here for details.
November 29, 2023
Congratulations to Professor Herbert Chang ’18 for being named to the Forbes 30 under 30 for Science in 2024! Professor Chang is an adjunct assistant professor in the math department. The complete Forbes list for science is available here.
November 22, 2023
Congratulations to Professor John Voight for being elected to the American Mathematical Society Council! His three-year term will begin February 2024. The Council formulates and administers the scientific policies of the AMS and advises its Board of Trustees. See the complete list of 2023 election results here.
November 03, 2023
Congratulations to Mario Tomba Morillo ’25 for being selected to receive the Francis L. Town Scientific Prize for his achievement in Mathematics!
November 03, 2023
Jared Duker Lichtman ’18, Guarini ’18 is featured in Quanta with two other mathematicians for their work advancing the understanding of how prime numbers are distributed. Read the Quanta article here.
October 30, 2023
Pamela Harris will give a lecture titled How to Choose Your Own Mathematical Adventures at 6 p.m. on Thursday, November 2 in Haldeman 041. (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster with abstract.) Harris is an Associate Professor at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee, a cohost of the podcast Mathematically Uncensored, and the President and co-founder of Lathisms: Latinxs and Hispanics in the Mathematical Sciences.
October 05, 2023
Professor Pete Winkler has just made his newly revised book, Mathematical Puzzles, available free to the public. “This book belongs to math mavens all over the world,” says Winkler. Read the Arts and Sciences news release here.
September 22, 2023
A recent Quanta article describes the mysterious functions called modular forms. Professor John Voight emphasizes that “they're very elemental,” and comments on the role they play in the proof of Fermat's Last Theorem.
October 11, 2023
Mike Lopez, Senior Director of Data and Analytics at the National Football League, will give a lecture titled Analyzing football is challenging, but player tracking data is here to help: How the National Football League leverages Next Gen Stats to better understand the game at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, October 18 in 013 Carpenter. (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster with abstract.)
August 31, 2023
We are pleased to extend a warm welcome to five new graduate students in our department! Clockwise from upper left: David Shuster (Amherst College), Patrick Addona (Arizona State University), Will DeGroot (Amherst College), Ben Shapiro (Williams College), and Friedrich Bauermeister (Technical University Berlin). We look forward to working with them in the fall.
August 22, 2023
The article The Symmetric Group Through a Dual Perspective coauthored by Rosa Orellana and Mike Zabrocki was featured on the cover of the June/July 2023 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society. The article describes “how centralizer algebras can be used to study the representation theory of the symmetric group.” A web-friendly version of the article is linked here.
July 10, 2023
We are honored to celebrate the achievements of our graduate students who recently earned their doctoral degrees and participated in this year’s June Investiture ceremony! From left: Lizzie Buchanan PhD ’23, Richard Haburcak PhD ’23, Juanita Duque-Rosero PhD ’23, Alex Wilson PhD ’23, and Professor Rosa Orellana. See here and here for higher resolution photos. You may view recent PhD thesis abstracts as well as our list of recent PhD students, which goes back a number of years and shows the first jobs and current positions of our PhD alumni. Congratulations to all!
July 10, 2023
Xingru Chen, Guarini ’21, and Associate Professor Feng Fu coauthored the paper Outlearning extortioners: unbending strategies can foster reciprocal fairness and cooperation, recently published in PNAS Nexus. Read more in the Dartmouth News article What Math Can Teach Us About Standing Up to Bullies. Chen is currently an assistant professor at the School of Science, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications.
June 01, 2023
Daryl DeFord, PhD '18, is quoted in the June 1, 2023 Quanta article How Math Has Changed the Shape of Gerrymandering. Related to this, he is the coauthor with Dara Gold and Amy Becker of an amicus brief quoted in the ruling of Allen v. Milligan, the Alabama redistricting Supreme Court case. Their brief as computational redistricting experts focuses on the role of mathematical, statistical, and computational methods in evaluating claims and establishing baselines in racial gerrymandering cases, specifically with respect to optimization and the Gingles criteria for evaluating districting plans with respect to the Voting Rights Act of 1965. DeFord is Assistant Professor of Data Analytics in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Washington State University.
April 22, 2023
About 25 middle and high school girls enjoyed a day of mathematical activities at this year's Sonia Kovalevsky Math Day. The day is named after Sonia Kovalevsky, who was the first woman to earn a PhD in mathematics. This year the event was organized by Nadia Lafrenière, Tracy Moloney, Rosa Orellana, Ina Petkova, Beth Anne Castellano, and Juanita Duque-Rosero. Nadia Lafrenière gave the plenary lecture Mathematical Magic with a Deck of Cards, in which students learned how to perform a few card tricks and learned the mathematics behind them. In the Mathematical Games workshop, students learned about mathematical paradoxes and strategies for winning games. The Impossible Origami workshop showed how to use origami to create constructions that are impossible to do with straightedge and compass. And at the Artistic Tilings workshop, students learned about the mathematics of tilings by a single shape and created their own tilings in the style of M.C. Escher. Overall the girls really enjoyed the day — they were very engaged in the activities and enjoyed meeting new people.
May 08, 2023
Second-year PhD student David Freeman, Professor Dimitris Giannakis, third-year PhD student Brian Mintz, and Professor Joanna Slawinska are authors of the paper Data assimilation in operator algebras, recently published in PNAS. The paper grew out of a collaboration with Slawinska and Abbas Ourmazd (University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee) on using techniques from ergodic theory and quantum mechanics to perform sequential data assimilation of partially observed dynamical systems, with applications in climate dynamics. In 2021 work by Giannakis, Freeman, and Mintz as part of graduate independent reading course furthered the research: “During that course and in the subsequent months, we developed a formulation that views data assimilation as information processing through a quantum channel associated with algebras of observables of the dynamical system,” says Giannakis. “Classical (Bayesian) and ‘quantum’ data assimilation correspond to abelian and non-abelian choices of that algebra, respectively, which we believe provides an interesting unified viewpoint that offers opportunities for new algorithms for forecasting dynamical systems.”
April 30, 2023
Second-year applied mathematics PhD student Jonathan Lindbloom traveled to New Mexico last summer for an internship at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked with the Theoretical Division's T-1 group (Physics and Chemistry of Materials) on the project Surrogate Modeling for High Explosives Diameter Effect Calculations. Lindbloom’s research interests include learning about computational methods for solving Bayesian inverse problems and quantifying uncertainty. He has been a graduate student mentor in our department’s Directed Reading Program, guiding undergraduates in the topics Nonlinear Dynamics, Chaos, And Ergodicity and Bayesian Modeling And Computation. This photo, taken in fall 2021, shows Lindbloom in the White Mountains on his way to hike Mount Carrigain, one of New Hampshire’s 48 four-thousand footers.
April 23, 2023
Hearty congratulations to all the organizers, mentors, and undergraduates who have participated in our department’s successful Directed Reading Program! A recent Dartmouth News story describes how graduate student Richard Haburcak founded the program in 2021 with the idea of it being inclusive from the start: “The DRP strives to increase diversity in mathematics and foster a supportive environment for students to explore mathematics,” says Haburcak. “We want to give students the chance to see math the way that mathematicians see math, to see the human side of math, and to be able to learn about topics that you usually don't have the chance to study until much later.” At the recent 23W poster session in March, Sofia Goncalves ’25 presented her work Mathematics in Magic: Looking into the Magic of Universal Cycles. Sofia’s mentor was fifth-year graduate student Alex Wilson, whose research focuses on algebraic combinatorics, specifically combinatorial representation theory. Photo by Lizzie Buchanan
April 07, 2023
Attention first-year students! The Thayer Prize Exam, a contest organized by our department each year, will take place this year on Saturday, April 29 from 10am – 1pm in Kemeny 004. The Mathematics Department Prize fund for this exam is up to $1000, to be distributed among the exam winners. The exam consists of Mathematics Olympiad style problems, and originality and creativity are heavily weighed. You may view some recent exams for practice, along with a brief history of the prizes and the list of winners from the last 12 years. Please contact Prize Committee Chair Professor Dimitris Giannakis by Friday April 14 if you would like to take the exam but cannot take it on Saturday April 29; the alternate date is Sunday April 30. (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster.)
April 06, 2023
Fourth-year applied mathematics PhD student Xie He has been conducting summer internships at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center studying natural language processing and specifically focusing on the network science and subgraph matching theory of knowledge base question answering (KBQA). She works with Professor Peter Mucha and is a member of his interdisciplinary research group, which includes postdoctoral scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate researchers working on different aspects of networks and data science, including developments in community detection, network representations of data, modeling network dynamics, and diffusive processes with applications to disease and health behaviors. Xie's own interests lie in the area of link prediction, graph matching, and machine learning and she hopes to further her interest in these fields after graduation.
March 23, 2023
We are happy to host our 10th annual Sonia Kovalevsky Day on Saturday, April 22, 2023. SK Day is a fun-filled day of mathematics with hands-on workshops and talks for middle and high school female students and their teachers. Originally started and funded by the Association for Women in Mathematics, the purpose of the day is to encourage young women to continue their study of mathematics and to assist the teachers of female mathematics students. The Dartmouth Math Department hosts this event annually with the goal of inspiring young students to pursue degrees in the mathematical sciences and to honor female mathematicians such as Sonia Kovalevsky, who paved the way with her groundbreaking work and was a strong proponent of higher education for women. We are delighted to hold this empowering event in person once again. Join us for a day of networking, mentoring, and fun!
March 22, 2023
Alex Lubotzky, Professor of Mathematics at the Einstein Institute of Mathematics and at the Weizmann Institute of Science, will give a lecture titled New directions in error correcting codes at 6 p.m. on Monday, April 17 in 008 Kemeny. Lubotzky holds the Maurice and Clara Weil Chair in Mathematics at Hebrew University and is a leading researcher in group theory, having solved a number of central problems in that field and its applications to combinatorics, geometry, and theoretical computer science. According to his talk’s abstract: “We will present some of the sources and highlights of [the mathematical theory of ECC], putting an emphasis on the 1990s breakthrough of Sipser and Spielman, who created low-density parity check (LDPC) codes, as well as the recent solution to the long-standing problem of the existence of locally testable codes (LTC). These codes, whose existence was doubted for many years, enable the receiver to check if the message is mostly correct by reading only a few bits of it, a property that seems very counterintuitive!” Interesting in learning more about Lubotzky's work? Read the Quanta Magazine article Researchers Defeat Randomness to Create Ideal Code.
March 18, 2023
Former Byrne Scholar Herbert Chang ’18, Mathematics professors Feng Fu and Dan Rockmore, and Sociology professor Brooke Harrington have co-authored a new paper applying network science to the connections between wealth managers and their affluent clients. Published in the journal PNAS Nexus, their paper titled Complex systems of secrecy: the offshore networks of oligarchs explores “a new approach to targeting economic sanctions — a vital non-military tool in disputes among nations.” Chang, who has previously co-authored several papers with Professor Fu, carried out the study’s calculations and data visualizations. He is currently a PhD candidate at the University of Southern California with his primary research areas being polarization on social media, misinformation dynamics, and how algorithms reshape human behavior. We are pleased to welcome him back to Dartmouth in Fall 2023 as an Assistant Professor of Quantitative Social Science! “I’m excited to teach QSS 20: Modern Statistical Computing,” says Chang. “My principal goals are to help students develop a strong foundation in data science (suitable for further graduate study and industry) and discover a personal, social scientific core.” Read more about their study in Dartmouth News, and please join us in welcoming our alumnus back to Dartmouth this fall.
February 28, 2023
This past summer graduate student Dylan Green interned in the Autonomy Technology Research Center Summer Program at Wright State University, a 14-week program focusing on Air Force topics related to autonomous sensing. “My summer internship at the ATR Center provided me with the opportunity to collaborate with Air Force Research Laboratory researchers as well as other students from across the country on important problems facing the military today,” says Green. “It was an invaluable experience that helped me expand my research interests and develop new skills that I will use throughout my career.” Green, a fourth year PhD student working with Professor Anne Gelb, is interested in the overlap between imaging sciences and uncertainty quantification, with his recent work focusing on 2D and 3D SAR image reconstruction techniques. He is a member of Professor Gelb’s Sea Ice Modeling and Data Assimilation (SIMDA) group, a DoD Office of Naval Research MURI program, and has been a graduate student mentor in our department’s Directed Reading Program, guiding students on the topic of mathematical foundation for synthetic aperture radar.
February 18, 2023
Mathematics and Computer Science professor Peter Winkler has been elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, as reported in Dartmouth News. Professor Winkler is one of 505 scientists, engineers, and innovators spanning 24 scientific disciplines who are being recognized for scientific and socially notable achievements spanning their careers. AAAS recognized Winkler for contributions to combinatorics, discrete mathematics, and probability, and for his extraordinary work as an ambassador for mathematics. He has authored more than 150 research papers, with a primary focus on the intersection of probability theory, combinatorics, and theory of computing. “For me, the main motivating question for my research is, ‘Why is it that some things are easy to compute and others seem to be very hard?’ There are a lot of mysteries. I use mathematics to try to understand this phenomenon. It’s really fun to see something that you didn’t understand before.” In spring term 2023 he will be teaching Game Theory: Classical and Combinatorial, continuing his tradition of teaching a graduate probability course of interest to both computer scientists and mathematicians.
March 03, 2023
To conclude a wonderful term of learning mathematics in our Directed Reading Program, students will give poster presentations on Wednesday March 8 from 11am-1pm in Kemeny 300. Topics will include matrix groups, category theory, Bayesian inference, mathematical bioeconomics, magical mathematics, and more! Our program pairs undergraduate students with mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level, fostering a supportive environment for students seeking to further their interest in mathematics. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, especially program organizers Richard Haburcak, Ben Adenbaum, and Brian Mintz, and of course all our graduate students and postdocs who volunteered to mentor this term. From left: fifth year PhD student Richard Haburcak along with presenters Sofia Goncalves ’25 and Evan Barrett ’24. Other presenters will be Mimi Grozeva ’24, Paul Shin ’24, Ian Gill ’23, Andrew Koulogeorge ’24, Calvin George ’24, Mia Anwar ’25, Daniel Carstensen ’24, Amya Luo ’24, Damini Kohli ’23, and Heather Wang ’25.
February 06, 2023
Thanks to enrichment grants from the generous Byrne Gift, Byrne Scholars have explored a variety of opportunities so far this academic year, including: attending the Asia-Pacific Conference on Economics and Finance (APEF 2022) in Singapore; interning at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago; being a Program Lead at Ivy Camps USA in Princeton, NJ while teaching subjects such as cryptocurrency and blockchain; interning as a software engineer analyzing the security of cloud applications and working on front-end development of a sentiment analysis web app; honing data science analyst skills using financial marketplace research to create a model predicting the success of multiple portfolio companies; and working in Dartmouth’s Quantum Spin Lab with Physics Professor Chandrasekhar Ramanathan to study how the nitrogen-vacancy (NV) center can be used as a quantum magnetic field sensor. Clockwise from upper left: Maria Castro ’23, Brandon Chen ’23, Andrew Xu ’25, Tunmay Gerg ’22, Scott Dayton ’23, and Harrison Stropkay ’25.
January 28, 2023
Frederika Rentzeperis ’20, now an MD/PhD student at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, has continued collaborating with Professor Dorothy Wallace on two recently published articles in Mathematical Biosciences and Applied Mathematical Modelling. Rentzeperis did her senior honors thesis work under the guidance of Professor Wallace, and in 2020 participated in Dartmouth’s Mathematical Oncology DSP at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Professor Wallace led the program, which offered students opportunities to learn how to combine math, biology, evolutionary principles, and computer modeling while exploring oncology research. “One of our papers from 2022 has coauthors from the Moffitt collaboration/DSP and I still work remotely with some of the people there,” Rentzeperis says. She also did undergraduate research at Dartmouth, conducting in silico trials related to prostate cancer growth and also laboratory research to investigate glioblastoma metastasis and proliferation. After receiving her degree in Mathematics and Biology, she became a researcher in the NIH Postbac IRTA program before starting at Icahn.
January 14, 2023
Congratulations to Byrne Scholar Eliza Crocker ’23, one of 24 students who were inducted into Dartmouth’s chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in November. Crocker is pursuing a major in Computer Science as well as a minor in Mathematics. With support from Byrne funds, she spent winter term ’21 conducting a research assistantship under the guidance of Professor John Voight, learning about data collection and analysis techniques to make observations regarding the Galois groups of various Belyi maps; this led to her writing two papers and presenting her research findings to faculty and other undergraduates. During winter ’21 she also participated in our department’s Directed Reading Program with graduate mentor Alex Wilson, and gave her final DRP presentation on the topic of representation theory. Crocker is a member of Dartmouth varsity sailing, and last fall she helped the team win the 2022 Victorian Urn Trophy for the NEISA Fall Women's Championship!
January 10, 2023
Michael Gonzalez ’23 and Mario Tomba ’25 presented their poster Encoding trees with chromatic polynomials at JMM in Boston in early January. With co-author Andrew Koulogeorge ’24, they did research in algebraic combinatorics under the guidance of faculty mentor Rosa Orellana. “The poster session was an excellent opportunity to summarize our research findings and practice explaining them to others,” says Gonzalez, left, who is considering applying to PhD programs in Math or Computer Science. “It was fun interacting with other student researchers from all over the country and learning about their diverse mathematical backgrounds and interests. It was also cool to see so many other passionate students talking about their work — it puts into perspective the massive range of mathematical research going on today.” Tomba, right, was supported by the Kaminsky Award from UGAR and is studying pure mathematics with a growing interest in algebraic combinatorics and representation theory.
January 04, 2023
For the eighth year in a row our department is pleased to sponsor the Essay Contest Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics, modeled on the national AWM Essay Contest and open to all middle and high school students in the Upper Valley and to all Dartmouth undergraduates. We are very excited to share this program with our community and hope to receive some outstanding essays. In the past seven years we have had many students receive recognition or win prizes in the national AWM Essay Contest! You may submit your essay to both contests; the deadline is February 1, 2023. View detailed information including contest rules, tips on choosing an interviewee, and lists of past winners. Last year local student Haley Song received First Place, middle school level, in the AWM national contest for her essay on Carolyn Gordon, Dartmouth Professor of Mathematics, Emerita. (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster.)
January 03, 2023
Interested in working with a Math Department faculty member on independent research? View research opportunities available in various fields, including: arithmetic geometry; knot theory and applications to general relativity; enumerative combinatorics; network science; combinatorics, algebra and graph theory; and explicit methods in number theory. Additionally the Fu Lab always welcomes talented and motivated scientists at all stages (including undergraduates!) to join the lab, which seeks to understand a broad variety of evolutionary dynamics using mathematical modeling and computational approaches. Many undergraduate projects can lead to senior thesis for honors or high honors. We again congratulate our graduating seniors who submitted and presented honors theses in 2022: Archita Harathi ’22 (advisor Feng Fu), Zachary Couvillion ’22 (advisor John Voight), and Ivy Junqing Yan ’22 (advisor Anne Gelb).
December 21, 2022
Congratulations to Byrne Scholar Paul Shin ’24, who has received Dartmouth’s Francis L. Town Scientific Prize for his achievement in Mathematics! Shin has a broad range of academic interests, ranging from pure and applied mathematics to physics and climate science. Last spring he studied numerical semigroups in Barcelona, and last fall at Dartmouth’s Phi Beta Kappa meeting he received an award bestowed on sophomores “who have the highest academic rank at the conclusion of five terms of enrollment at Dartmouth, completed not later than June of the second calendar year following matriculation.” He plans to continue studying mathematics in graduate school, and is currently particularly interested in learning more about topics related to the foundations of mathematics.
December 07, 2022
Professor and Department Chair Sergi Elizalde is one of five Dartmouth faculty leaders selected for the inaugural class of Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network Leadership Fellows. The network includes 12 national research universities that collaborate to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging in the American professoriate. The leadership fellows were nominated by their deans and selected based on their commitment to inclusive and equitable leadership. “The Ivy+ Faculty Advancement Network provides a great resource for learning a lot of the skills necessary for being a department chair,” Elizalde says. “The fellowship consists of a series of workshops throughout the year that focus on topics like equity-minded leadership, advancing faculty diversity, and best practices for recruiting and assigning committee work.” Elizalde and the other Dartmouth 2022–2023 Ivy+ fellows join 40 department chairs, deans, and other senior administrators from Columbia, Cornell, Duke, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton, Stanford, the University of Chicago, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale.
November 23, 2022
We are pleased to announce that the John J. Byrne Jr. Prize in Mathematics has been awarded to Athina Avrantini ’23! This prize was established in 2019 and is awarded to the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. Avrantini, who is majoring in math and minoring in computer science, has participated in Dartmouth’s Summer Hybrid Undergraduate Research (SHUR) 2021 and our department’s Directed Reading Program, and is also involved with the Dartmouth chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics. “I am currently working with Professor Asher Auel on a senior thesis investigating cyclic error-correcting codes,” she says. “I am now in the process of applying to PhD programs, and I am immensely grateful for the Byrne Prize and the support I have received from the math department in the pursuit of this goal.” View more about Avrantini and past Byrne Prize recipients to hear more about their time at Dartmouth and future plans.
November 17, 2022
Congratulations to fifth-year PhD student Lizzie Buchanan, the recipient of this year’s Kenneth P. Bogart Teaching Award for dedication to and excellence in advancing the educational mission of the department! Buchanan, who this month received her Certificate in Mathematical Pedagogy, has taught Math 3 and Math 8, and will be teaching Math 22 in Spring ’23. Her research interests are in topology, specifically knot theory. In addition to teaching, she is also a mentor in the Winter Term 2023 Directed Reading Program, and for the past two years has supported our PhD students in her role as our department's Graduate Program Committee Liaison. “I am a huge fan of tactile and visual aids, and I try to incorporate them as much as possible,” Buchanan says. “For example, I bring in bowls, vases, and shoes to help visualize volumes of revolution or surfaces like paraboloids. I intentionally use common items instead of specially made math aids, because then my students can mentally attach a new unfamiliar object to a familiar one, making the new one easier to ‘hold’. Throwing around a travel pillow to talk about saddle points can be fun and silly, and makes the concept less intimidating.”
November 16, 2022
Our Directed Reading Program pairs undergraduate students with graduate mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level. We look forward to learning interesting mathematics with you! View a list of possible projects and graduate mentors; if you are very interested in a particular topic that is not on the list, there may be a graduate mentor who would be happy to read through that topic with you. The deadline to apply for the Winter 2023 DRP is December 9. From left: graduate student mentors Alex Wilson, Dylan Green, Juanita Duque-Rosero, Alina Glaubitz, Matthew Ellison; program organizers Ben Adenbaum and Brian Mintz; and organizer and mentor Richard Haburcak. The department gives special thanks to Richard, Ben, and Brian as co-organizers of this year’s program.
November 08, 2022
Bianca Viray, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Washington, will give a lecture titled The Interplay of Geometry and Arithmetic at 6 p.m. on Tuesday November 15 in Haldeman 041. “A trailblazer in her research field, Bianca Viray believes that mathematics is for everyone and works tirelessly to achieve a vision of inclusivity and diversity,” states the recent Simons Foundation article Mathematician Bianca Viray Invites Everyone to the Table. In addition to having received an early-career NSF CAREER award, Viray was named a 2020 Simons Fellow in Mathematics and has also received a 2022-2023 Birman Fellowship from the American Mathematical Society. Our department’s C. Dwight Lahr Lecture series is named in memory and honor of Dwight Lahr’s contributions to the Department of Mathematics and to Dartmouth, and in recognition of his commitment to inclusivity and diversity. (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster with abstract.)
October 30, 2022
The Neukom Institute for Computational Science is currently accepting applications for Class of 2023 Neukom Fellows, an interdisciplinary postdoctoral program at Dartmouth that may provide another means of working with or being mentored by faculty in our department. The Neukom Fellows program brings to campus early-career interdisciplinary postdoctoral researchers whose work has a computational theme. View the list of current Neukom fellows to see research interests and mentorships. Applications must be received by November 15, 2022. Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute also provides support for undergraduates working on computational projects by way of the Neukom Scholars Program for undergraduates and also Neukom Travel Grants, which support both undergraduate and graduate student research.
October 25, 2022
Congratulations to Professor Ina Petkova, one of six Dartmouth recipients of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) awards in 2022, as recently featured in Dartmouth News. “The CAREER grant is the NSF’s most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty. These awards are very difficult to obtain, particularly in pure mathematics,” says department chair Sergi Elizalde. Petkova studies the mathematics of knots, and with funding support from the CAREER grant, she will advance what are called cut-and-paste techniques of studying knots and links. As Principal Investigator, Petkova intends to further develop an invariant from bordered Floer homology for contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary, and use this invariant to address open questions in contact topology, an area with applications in physics, including classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and control theory. She also plans to extend bordered Floer homology and tangle Floer homology to integral coefficients and understand and develop the connections between knot Floer homology and quantum algebra. Photo by Katie Lenhart
October 12, 2022
The Dartmouth College Mathematical Society hosted its first gathering of the academic year on Thursday September 22, meeting for an hour of pizza and problem solving. This year the president is Andrew Koulogeorge ’24 and faculty advisors are Professor Vladimir Chernov and Professor Rosa Orellana. The purpose of the society is to create a community where students can interact and explore interesting mathematical topics in a setting outside of the classroom environment. The goal is to encourage, foster interest in, and enrich the understanding of mathematics; students can discuss news and share experiences in courses, study abroad programs, and research internships. Other math organizations on campus include the Dartmouth SIAM chapter (faculty advisors: Scott Pauls and Feng Fu) and the Dartmouth AWM student chapter (faculty advisors: Carolyn Gordon and Rosa Orellana).
October 04, 2022
“Why are we so intrigued by the infinite? Maybe it’s because of the tension between our finite lives and the seemingly unbounded range of our imagination,” writes Professor Dan Rockmore in his review of Netflix’s new documentary, A Trip to Infinity, in The New Yorker Annals of Inquiry. Rockmore is familiar with the fine balance needed when communicating mathematical concepts using film as a medium, having co-produced the 2002 NSF-funded educational documentary The Math Life, which featured lively interviews with a diverse group of mathematicians. “Math documentaries always pose a challenge to filmmakers because mathematics does not exist in the realm of images but in the realm of ideas,” says Rockmore, referencing his earlier Annals of Inquiry essay The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas.
September 29, 2022
We are now accepting applications for the 2023 Byrne Prize in Mathematics. If you are graduating this year and planning to go to graduate school in math or a related field, please consider applying! The prize, established in 2019, is a $35,000 fellowship that recognizes the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. View the application requirements along with info about our past recipients Zachary Couvillion ’22, Jacob Swenberg ’21, Matt Radosevich ’20, and Shikhin Sethi ’19. All materials should be received by November 1st, 2022.
September 28, 2022
Mark Levi, Professor and Head of Mathematics Department, Pennsylvania State University, will give a lecture titled A Physical Approach to Mathematics at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, October 12 in 041 Haldeman. Levi is the author of the books Why Cats Land on Their Feet: And 76 Other Physical Paradoxes and Puzzles and The Mathematical Mechanic: Using Physical Reasoning to Solve Problems. “Levi turns math and physics upside down, revealing how physics can simplify proofs and lead to quicker solutions and new theorems, and how physical solutions can illustrate why results are true in ways lengthy mathematical calculations never can,” states the Princeton University Press. “[Levi's work] will appeal to anyone interested in the little-known connections between mathematics and physics and how both endeavors relate to the world around us.” (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster with abstract.)
September 23, 2022
Congratulations to postdoctoral fellow Tongtong Li on receiving second place for her poster presentation at UMass Lowell's 2022 High Performance Computing Day! Li’s poster Improving Numerical Accuracy for the Viscous-plastic Formulation of Sea Ice presented research she is conducting with Professors Anne Gelb and Yoonsang Lee. Li’s recent SIAM News blog describes their research in some detail. The related research has also been formed into a manuscript available on arXiv and submitted. Li, along with Principal Investigators Gelb and Lee, is part of a team that received a high-profile multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) award from the Office of Naval Research in 2020. Their MURI project Integrated Foundations of Sensing, Modeling, and Data Assimilation for Sea Ice Prediction seeks to improve environmental variables prediction by combining disparate environmental data into a common computational toolkit, which will enhance information currently extracted from existing environmental data and physical knowledge.
September 20, 2022
We are proud to celebrate the accomplishments of Zachary Winkeler and Zachary Garvey, who both received their doctoral degrees this summer! Winkeler, currently Visiting Assistant Professor at Smith College, earned his PhD under the guidance of faculty advisor Ina Petkova. His research is in topology, specifically knot theory and, more specifically, knot homology theories. Garvey studied index theory and noncommutative geometry and completed his thesis under the guidance of faculty advisor Erik van Erp. He is currently Lecturer in Mathematics at University of Colorado Boulder. You may view recent PhD theses abstracts as well as our list of recent PhD students, which goes back a number of years and shows the first jobs and current positions of our PhD alumni. Congratulations to both!
September 14, 2022
Professor Eugene Demidenko has received an award from the American Statistical Association’s Technometrics Journal for his recent book Advanced Statistics with Applications in R. Professor Demidenko received the award in August at the Joint Statistical Meetings in Washington, D.C., where his book was named “Outstanding Book in Statistics”. The book is the product of forty years of experience teaching probability and statistics and their applications for solving real-life problems. The book, on display in the second floor of Kemeny Hall, is a primary text in Math 40 and Math 70, the latter being the culminating course of our Mathematical Data Science major. The course is generally taught every spring and prepares students for a career in data analysis and statistical problem solutions. Congratulations to Professor Demidenko on this award!
September 12, 2022
The Math Department warmly welcomes the Class of 2026 Byrne Scholars! The Jack Byrne Scholars Program in Math and Society allows students to study with faculty committed to using mathematics to build solutions to today’s complex problems; to present research findings at conferences; to conduct independent research at Dartmouth; and to participate in research exchanges domestically and abroad. Each Byrne Scholar receives an enrichment grant from the generous Byrne Gift and joins a community of Byrne Scholars who provide mentorship both in and out of the classroom. Left to right: Alek Mekhanik and Klara Drees-Gross. Second row, left to right: Henry Moore, Samuel Ryan, John Wang, and Ari Nathanson. Third row, left to right: Matthew Marks, Travis Owusu, and Kabir Moghe.
August 23, 2022
What does a photo of Sister Mary Kenneth Keller teaching R. Buckminster Fuller about computer programming tell us about Dartmouth’s early computing history? Prior to being the first person in the U.S. to earn a PhD in Computer Science, Mary Kenneth Keller, a Catholic religious sister, participated in an NSF-funded summer program led by Mathematics Professor Tom Kurtz to introduce high school teachers to computing, using the College’s first computer, an LGP-30 (console on left) in 1961. She went on to receive her doctorate in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in June 1965 and became a widely known and respected pioneer in computing education. A recent pre-print about Mary Kenneth Keller notes it was her first experience in computer education: “It looked to me as if the computer would be the most revolutionary tool for doing math that I could get.” Just a few years later, Dartmouth reached the conclusion that “learning to use a high-speed computer should be an essential part of liberal education,” resulting in the creation of BASIC in 1964 under the leadership of Professors Kurtz and John Kemeny. Photo credit, right: Clarke University Archives
August 12, 2022
A recent article in Scientific American features the work of Professors Carolyn Gordon and David Webb in the field of spectral geometry, which provides information about geometric shapes based on their vibration frequencies. In 1992, Gordon, Webb, and Scott Wolpert, currently an emeritus professor at the University of Maryland, published a groundbreaking paper, One cannot hear the shape of a drum, in which they provided examples of differently shaped heads of drums that produce the same sound. The Scientific American article, Mathematicians Are Trying to ‘Hear’ Shapes—And Reach Higher Dimensions, goes on to describe more recent work in the field. Gordon and Webb present spectral geometry more generally in a 1996 article in American Scientist where they make an analogy between spectral geometry and spectroscopy which can be used to identify elements in distant stars by looking at the spectrum of the light they produce. The figure here, from their 1996 article, depicts two drumheads of different shapes having the same vibration frequencies.
July 31, 2022
We are pleased to extend a warm welcome to nine new graduate students in our department! Clockwise from upper left: Luke Askew (Colorado State University), Lily McBeath (University of California, Los Angeles and Irvine), Atticus McWhorter (Bowdoin College), Jessica Rattray (Vassar College), Mark Lovett (University of Pennsylvania), Jamie Schmidt (Michigan State University), Caroline Hammond (University of Delaware), Lucy Knight (University of Durham, England), and (center) Beth Anne Castellano (Lafayette College). We look forward to working with them in the fall.
July 21, 2022
Congratulations to the middle and high school winners of our local essay contest Biographies Of Contemporary Women In Mathematics, modeled on the national AWM Essay Contest and open to all middle and high school students in the Upper Valley. The local 2022 winning essays are from students (clockwise from upper left) Beatrix Bornholdt-Collins, Haley Song, Sora Shirai, and Bonnie Blake. In addition to the local prize, Haley received First Place, middle school level, in the AWM national contest! Haley’s and Bonnie’s essays both feature Carolyn Gordon, Dartmouth Professor of Mathematics, Emerita, and Research Professor of Mathematics. Professor Gordon, who is adamant about providing welcoming environments in which girls and women can pursue mathematics with confidence, served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics from 2003–2005 and subsequently established an AWM chapter at Dartmouth, which she continues to advise. You may read all the 2022 winning essays here, along with those from prior years.
July 07, 2022
In a wonderful and popular new Numberphile video, Jared Duker Lichtman AB, AM ’18 expounds and further discusses his recent proof of the Erdős primitive set conjecture. Lichtman talks in some depth about primes and primitive sets, describing his fascination with uncovering hidden mathematical beauty and structure within an ostensibly very chaotic class of sets. When he heard about this particular Erdős conjecture during his undergraduate years at Dartmouth, Lichtman states that he “absolutely fell in love with the problem, because it’s saying that these primes are very special in a precise way... I just found this such a beautiful statement.” In a second, follow-up Numberphile video, Lichtman provides additional context for primitive sets in general and mentions some examples of related open problems. He dedicates his proof of the Erdős primitive set conjecture to his undergraduate advisor, Professor Carl Pomerance, with whom he has written several joint papers.
July 03, 2022
Please join us in congratulating Ina Petkova, who has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure! Professor Petkova works in low-dimensional topology, with focus on Heegaard Floer homology and its various generalizations. Earlier this year she received the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, described as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.” Her five-year grant will provide funding for her project, Bordered Floer homology and applications, as well as for mentoring and outreach. This summer Professor Petkova is co-leading Dartmouth SHUR 2022, partially funded by the NSF, which has invited Dartmouth undergraduates to participate in research exploring computational approaches to Legendrian Knots.
June 29, 2022
We are honored to celebrate the achievements of our graduate students who recently earned their doctoral degrees and participated in this year’s June Investiture ceremony! From left: Professor Feng Fu, Yao Xiao PhD ’22 (advisor Anne Gelb), Professor Anne Gelb, Matt Jones PhD ’22 (advisors Feng Fu and Scott Pauls), James Ronan PhD ’21 (advisor Anne Gelb), Sam Tripp PhD ’22 (advisor Ina Petkova), and Laura Petto PhD ’21 (advisor M. Cheney). James Ronan and Laura Petto both received their PhDs in June 2021 during a time of COVID restrictions, and were able to celebrate their achievements by walking in Investiture this year. You may view recent PhD theses abstracts as well as our list of recent PhD students, which goes back a number of years and shows the first jobs and current positions of our PhD alumni. Congratulations to all!
June 08, 2022
In February Jared Duker Lichtman AB, AM ’18, currently a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute, released A proof of the Erdős primitive set conjecture, resolving a longstanding conjecture which states that the Erdős sum of the set of prime numbers is the largest of any set of primitive numbers (sets in which no number divides any other). Lichtman began working on the primitive set conjecture with his advisor, Professor Carl Pomerance, while an undergraduate at Dartmouth. Their work led to several joint papers, including The Erdős conjecture for primitive sets and A generalization of primitive sets and a conjecture of Erdős. Quanta Magazine describes his resolution of the conjecture in some detail. You may read Lichtman’s own explanation of his fascination with this topic and watch a short video in an article by the Oxford Mathematical Institute. Noted number theorist András Sárközy, who co-authored many papers with Paul Erdös, said proof of the conjecture “seemed beyond reach”; other number theorists were of similar opinion. Please join us in congratulating our alumnus on this major achievement!
June 07, 2022
To conclude a wonderful spring term of learning mathematics in our Directed Reading Program, four undergraduates gave final presentations on June 1. Topics included sheaf cohomology, the probabilistic method, Bayesian modeling and computation, and integer-point enumeration in polyhedra. Our program pairs undergraduate students with graduate mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level, fostering a supportive environment for students seeking to further their interest in mathematics. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, especially all of our graduate mentors! Clockwise from top left: Varun Malladi ’23, Michael Gonzalez ’23, Ivy Junqing Yan ’22, program organizer Richard Haburcak, and Calvin George ’24. DRP will resume in Winter Term 2023!
June 06, 2022
Congratulations to our graduating seniors who submitted and presented honors theses this year! Archita Harathi ’22 (Cliques Can Click! Evolutionary Dynamics on Two-Clique and Clique-Like Graphs with Resource Heterogeneity, advisor Feng Fu) and Zachary Couvillion ’22 (On Specializations of Belyi Maps and Inverse Galois Theory, advisor John Voight) were both awarded high honors, and Ivy Junqing Yan ’22 (Pre-processing Methods for Change Detection on Under-sampled and Noisy Fourier Data, advisor Anne Gelb) was awarded with honors. Archita received the Hazleton Mirkil Prize for Best Senior Thesis Presentation. Our Honors Program page has PDF versions of their theses as well as those from prior years. Interested in doing independent work in mathematics? View the section on The Honors Program in Mathematics in the Dartmouth ORC.
June 03, 2022
Under the guidance of faculty mentor Rosa Orellana, undergraduates Michael Gonzalez ’23, Mario Tomba Morillo ’25, and Andrew Koulogeorge ’24 did research in algebraic combinatorics and presented their poster Encoding graphs with chromatic polynomials at this year’s Wetterhahn Science Symposium on May 25. Michael (left), a Math major and Computer Science minor, is an E.E. Just Fellow for the 2021-2022 academic year. He is especially interested in discrete mathematics, and is also interested in math/CS education. Mario (center) and Andrew (right) were both supported by funds from UGAR; Mario’s intended field of study is pure mathematics and Andrew is pursuing a degree in mathematics and computer science. Professor Orellana’s own research is in algebraic combinatorics with a focus on combinatorial representation theory and symmetric functions.
May 23, 2022
Sharpen your problem solving skills and find out what college math is like! This year we are hosting Math Camp in-person, offering two summer enrichment sessions for local high school students in July and August. Topics covered will be outside of the usual high school syllabus and students can interact with mathematicians in a fun, non-graded environment, where an exploratory approach will be emphasized. Each program will cover different mathematical topics and students are invited to attend one or both 5-day sessions. This year’s sessions are How to win games with math and Solving puzzles with the mathematics of chance. There is no charge for this program. View more info and registration link. (Click/tap to view a larger image.)
May 17, 2022
The Math Department is pleased to announce impressive results in this year’s Thayer Prize Exam, an annual first-year Dartmouth mathematics competition organized by our department. Congratulations to first place winner Matthew Coleman ’25 and second place winner Jessica Jiang ’25! In his previous studies, Matthew won Mathematics Award for Outstanding Student and was named a Commonwealth Honors Scholar. Jessica was first violinist of the Wisconsin Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Youth Orchestra, and is currently a first violinist in the DSO. She intends to study applied mathematics and music. You may view the list of winners from the last 12 years along with a brief history of the prizes, which were established in 1869 to “to constitute a perpetual prize fund for superior proficiency in the higher branches of Mathematics.” The exam consists of Mathematics Olympiad style problems, and originality and creativity are heavily weighed.
May 13, 2022
Could you tell if an online review describing the palate-pleasing notes of grapefruit and tangerine in your off-dry Riesling was written by a human, or by an algorithm? Professor Dan Rockmore is part of a team that developed software to produce original expert wine reviews and syntheses of beer reviews using existing datasets and product metadata. Both approaches use transformer-based deep learning neural net architecture. Started by former Neukom Institute fellow Allen Riddell, right, and developed under Rockmore’s guidance by Keith Carlson, Guarini ’21 and postdoctoral research fellow at Tuck, the project became a cross-campus collaboration resulting in a paper in the International Journal of Research in Marketing. Practical applications include tools to assist consumers and professional reviewers, although the paper acknowledges and explores the inherent ethical implications involved. Read more in Dartmouth News and Scientific American, and listen to a short fun segment on BBC Tech Tent (@18:35).
May 09, 2022
Graduating PhD student Matt Jones, here enjoying a local fall hike at Holt’s Ledge, has accepted a postdoctoral research position at the Human Nature Lab at Yale’s Institute for Network Science. Part of a collaboration between the lab and the Sunwater Institute, a think tank whose mission is to strengthen the foundations of democracy through interdisciplinary science, technology, and open dialogue, the position has two research directions: group decision-making with a focus on the US Congress, and an evolutionary perspective on human rights and liberties. Matt and other members of Dartmouth’s Fu Lab co-authored the recently published paper Polarization, abstention, and the median voter theorem. Along with his scholarly research, Matt also received the Math Department's Kenneth P. Bogart Teaching Award in 2021 for his dedication to and excellence in advancing the educational mission of the department. Congratulations to Matt on his accomplishments! Photo by Yoonsang Lee
May 07, 2022
Byrne Scholar Maria Castro ’23, right, took on research last winter seeking to explore the ways in which the 1965 Immigration Act changed the scope of legal immigration into the US. Working with Economics professor Elizabeth Cascio, she compared countries that were impacted far more by the Act to countries largely unaffected by the new legislation. They found that after the Act, the share of unauthorized immigration grew in countries whose restrictions had expanded. “We tried to control for factors like civil wars, natural disasters, and economic disparities as we ran regressions to explore the relationship between unauthorized immigration and countries most affected by the Hart-Celler Act,” says Maria. “My research with Professor Cascio sought to contribute to economic immigration research, which remains largely unexplored.” Maria is an Economics major and LALACS minor interested in exploring research related to labor and public economics.
April 22, 2022
Congratulations to Professor Craig Sutton, one of five 2022 Social Justice Award recipients recognized for “outstanding contributions to social justice, peace, civil rights, education, public health, and environmental justice.” The recipients will be presented with their awards on May 23 in a ceremony featuring a speech by Martin Luther King III, whose father delivered a lecture at Dartmouth Hall 60 years earlier. Professor Sutton is director of the E.E. Just Program, which aims to increase the number of students from underrepresented groups who choose to pursue degrees and careers in STEM disciplines. Since 2015, he has also been house professor of School House, one of six house communities designed to increase intellectual and civic engagement as well as cross-cultural exchange. His research interests in differential geometry include Riemannian geometry, spectral geometry, and homogeneous spaces. Please join us in congratulating Professor Sutton on receiving this award! Read more in Dartmouth News.
April 15, 2022
The Department recently hosted a special High Tea in honor of the 31 students in our PhD program. We would like to give our heartfelt thanks to all the graduate students in our program as we celebrate their achievements in scholarship, research, teaching and service! Graduate Student Appreciation Week was started in 1993 by the National Association of Graduate and Professional Students as a way to support and appreciate graduate and professional students. Specifically, the week seeks to emphasize the contributions, impact, and value of graduate and professional students on campuses throughout the United States. From left: Matt Jones (research interests: networks, evolutionary dynamics, game theory, social systems), Lizzie Buchanan (research interests: topology, specifically knot theory), and Alex Wilson (research interests: algebraic combinatorics).
April 07, 2022
Sonia Kovalevsky Day is a fun-filled day of mathematics with hands-on workshops and talks for middle and high school female students and their teachers, both women and men. Originally started and funded by the Association for Women in Mathematics, the purpose of the day is to encourage young women to continue their study of mathematics and to assist the teachers of female mathematics students. The Dartmouth Math department hosts this event annually with the goal of inspiring young students to pursue degrees in the mathematical sciences and to honor female mathematicians such as Sonia Kovalevsky, who paved the way with her groundbreaking work and was a strong proponent of higher education for women. We are delighted to hold this fun and inspiring event in person once again!
March 28, 2022
Congratulations to Melanie Fraser PhD ’19, Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Southern New Hampshire University, whose paper Lewis Carroll and the Red Hot Potato: A graph theoretic approach to a linear algebraic identity is featured on the 2022 Editor's Choice list in Discrete Mathematics! In 1866, Charles Dodgson, better known as Lewis Carroll, published an algorithm for computing the determinant of a matrix. Fraser created a new proof of the Lewis Carroll Identity and its equivalence to a graph-theoretic approach called the Forest Identity. The paper is will be freely accessible for the rest of the year, and replication code for the algorithm, coded in Mathematica, is publicly available. While earning her PhD in Mathematics under the supervision of Professor Peter Doyle, Fraser received Dartmouth’s 2019 Graduate Teaching Award. She also gave a talk about the research leading up to her paper at the “AMS Special Session on Advances by Early Career Women in Discrete Mathematics” at JMM 2019.
March 25, 2022
Graduate student Matt Jones, center, is lead author on the paper Polarization, abstention, and the median voter theorem, recently published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications. With co-authors Feng Fu and Antonio Sirianni, Jones developed a mathematical model in response to apparent limitations in the median voter theorem, long considered the default model of voter behavior and candidate choice. Taking into consideration three contemporary factors — the influence of ideologically motivated third-party candidates, varied reasons for voter abstention, and increasing political polarization — the new model suggests voters may be drawn further to either side of a one-dimensional political spectrum, with the existence of extreme third-party candidates potentially causing a distributional tipping point with a feedback effect. “The minimal number of realistic assumptions necessary to obtain this result makes it all the more compelling and concerning,” state the authors, who propose continued reassessment of existing rational choice voting models. Read more in Dartmouth News.
March 21, 2022
In a touching memorial tribute appearing this month in Notices of the AMS, Professor Carl Pomerance and co-author Andrew Granville write on the remarkable life of mathematician Richard K. Guy, who passed away in 2020 at the age of 103. The article is a fascinating human interest story as well as an exploration into Guy’s mathematical research interests of combinatorial game theory, number theory, and geometry. For Guy, who initially considered himself an enthusiastic amateur mathematician, an encounter with Paul Erdős in 1960 was transformative: “He ended up writing four papers with Erdős, even solving an Erdős problem and developing his voracious appetite for unsolved problems.” For many years Guy ran a Research Problems column in the American Mathematical Monthly, and his books Unsolved Problems in Number Theory and The Book of Numbers (joint with John Conway) continue to inspire and delight both experienced and aspiring mathematicians.
March 11, 2022
Byrne Scholar Jacob Fyda ’22 spent two terms last year doing remote research at Stockholm’s Wenner-Gren Institute for Molecular Biosciences, investigating cellular energy metabolisms related to the genetics of thermogenesis of eutherian mammals. Working with PhD student Michael Gaudry in Dr. Martin Jastroch’s Integrative Physiology of Mammalian Energy Metabolism research group, Jacob expanded on previous work he had done in-person at the institute in Summer 2019. “Our findings helped provide additional insight into the evolution of brown adipose tissue and associated genes, with the eventual goal of applying this functional and molecular knowledge to enhance treatment of metabolic diseases, including obesity and diabetes,” says Jacob. “I am incredibly grateful for the generosity of Jack and Dorothy Byrne which allowed me to develop this relationship with the lab.” Jacob’s work in Dr. Jastroch’s group has led to his co-authorship on two papers, the second of which was published in PNAS in January 2022.
March 05, 2022
Attention first-year students! The Thayer Prize Exam, a contest organized by our department each year, will take place this year on Saturday, April 30 from 10am – 1pm, with location TBD. The Mathematics Department Prize fund for this exam is up to $1000, to be distributed among the exam winners. The exam consists of Mathematics Olympiad style problems, and originality and creativity are heavily weighed. You may view some recent exams for practice, along with a brief history of the prizes and the list of winners from the last 11 years. Please contact Prize Committee Chair Professor Vladimir Chernov at least 10 days in advance if you would like to take the exam but cannot take it on April 30; the alternate date is Sunday May 1.
March 04, 2022
To conclude a wonderful term of learning mathematics in our Directed Reading Program, students will give final presentations on March 7. Topics include elliptic curves, chaos, the probabilistic method, game theory, knot theory, and fractional calculus. Presentations will be about 20 minutes each with short breaks between talks. Our program pairs undergraduate students with graduate mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level, fostering a supportive environment for students seeking to further their interest in mathematics. Thank you to everyone who made this possible, especially all of our graduate students who volunteered to mentor this term! From left: fourth year PhD student Richard Haburcak, organizer of the program, along with presenters Athina Avrantini ’23 and Jenny Song ’23. Other undergraduates presenting include Love Tsai ’23, Andrew White ’22, Katie Woolfolk ’23, Jessica Liu ’23, and Gayeong Song ’22.
February 16, 2022
Neukom Fellow Olivia Chu is co-author of the paper The microdynamics of spatial polarization: A model and an application to survey data from Ukraine, recently published in December’s special feature in PNAS. Chu is a Neukom Postdoctoral Fellow whose research focuses on the dynamics of human behavior and in particular, the effects that heterogeneous population structures have on these dynamics. Mentored by Professor Feng Fu, her research has applications to the evolution of cooperation, social integration, and polarization. In the paper, she and co-authors use a modified version of the adaptive voter model combined with survey data to show how social learning from other individuals in discussion networks can explain growing local consensus, while at the same time exacerbating spatial differences in attitudes. Chu recently presented her work in a virtual seminar at Santa Fe Institute's CounterBalance series on cyberhate, misinformation, social polarization, and other applied aspects of belief dynamics.
February 11, 2022
This spring’s Topics in Probability course (MATH 100 / COSC 149.9 / COSC 49.02) will be “The Many Faces of Random Walk”, taught by Professor Peter Winkler. The class will meet in the 10 hour, MWF 10:10-11:15. Random walk is simple and ubiquitous, both a fascinating topic in its own right and a powerful tool in mathematics and computer science. Course topics will include: reversible Markov chains; electrical networks; Markov chain Monte Carlo; mixing time and approximation algorithms, Rayleigh’s “random flight” theorem; martingales and stock exchange betting; and games and other applications. Prerequisites: mathematical background of a senior mathematics major or a beginning graduate student in mathematics or theoretical computer science, including a course in probability (e.g., MATH 20 or MATH 60). If in doubt, please contact Professor Winkler. (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster.)
February 01, 2022
Professor Ina Petkova is a recipient of the National Science Foundation’s Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award, described as its “most prestigious award in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their organizations.” The grant will provide funding over the next five years for her project, Bordered Floer homology and applications, and for mentoring and outreach. As Principal Investigator, Professor Petkova will seek to develop and apply cut-and-paste mathematical tools in low-dimensional topology. She intends to further develop an invariant from bordered Floer homology for contact 3-manifolds with convex boundary, and use this invariant to address open questions in contact topology, an area with applications in physics, including classical mechanics, thermodynamics, and control theory. She also plans to extend bordered Floer homology and tangle Floer homology to integral coefficients and understand and develop the connections between knot Floer homology and quantum algebra.
January 23, 2022
Congratulations to Zachary Couvillion ’22, the recipient of the 2022 John J. Byrne Jr. Prize in Mathematics! This prize was established in 2019 and is awarded to the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. “I would say that the algebra track at Dartmouth made a particularly strong impact on my future research interests,“ says Zach. “I studied specializations of Belyi maps with Professor Voight, and some aspects of the project are evolving toward a senior thesis. I hope to begin a PhD program in math in the Fall of 2022 and explore more topics in algebra and number theory. I have received excellent mentorship and support from the math department at Dartmouth, and I am excited to continue this journey in mathematics.”
January 14, 2022
Since 2019 Professor Peter Winkler has hosted a series of discussions on “Probability and Intuition” over dinner in New York City. The series, started by MoMath, often focuses on mathematical questions with surprising answers. Professor Dan Rockmore describes one of the gatherings in a recent article in The New Yorker. “You don’t need to be a researcher or math teacher to appreciate the beauty of mathematics, any more than you need to be a composer or performer to enjoy music,” says Winkler. Puzzles are his particular specialty. “Puzzles are my outreach device. I like to use puzzles to teach, to get people excited, and to challenge them to think.” One recent guest reported struggling with a certain puzzle: “On average, how many cards does it take to get to a jack in a shuffled deck of fifty-two cards?” (A good exercise for our readers!) You can register to receive a new puzzle every week from Professor Winkler at mindbenders.momath.org.
January 13, 2022
For the sixth year in a row our department is pleased to sponsor the Essay Contest Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics, modeled on the national AWM Essay Contest and open to all middle and high school students in the Upper Valley and to all Dartmouth undergraduates. We are very excited to share this program with our community and hope to receive some outstanding essays. In the past six years we have had many students receive recognition or win prizes in the national AWM Essay Contest! You may submit your essay to both contests; the deadline is February 1, 2022. View detailed information including contest rules, tips on choosing an interviewee, and lists of past winners. Last year two local students won prizes at the national level! (Click/tap to view a larger image of poster.)
January 12, 2022
The Math Department warmly welcomes the Class of 2025 Byrne Scholars! The Jack Byrne Scholars Program in Math and Society allows students to study with faculty committed to using mathematics to build solutions to today’s complex problems; to present research findings at conferences; to conduct independent research at Dartmouth; and to participate in research exchanges domestically and abroad. Each Byrne Scholar receives an enrichment grant from the generous Byrne Gift and joins a community of Byrne Scholars who provide mentorship both in and out of the classroom. Left to right: Ahrav Jain, Garrett H. Cheng, and Carter Kruse. Second row, left to right: Harrison Stropkay, Logan Dailey, Allison Zhuang, and Andrew Xu. Third row, left to right: Niccolo Campolo, Tunmay Gerg, and Katie Cox. (Not pictured: Clark Paolini.)
January 03, 2022
In the January 13, 2022 issue of The New York Review of Books [may require subscription], Professor Dan Rockmore gives a delightfully erudite review of Philip Ording’s 99 Variations on a Proof. Ording’s book was inspired by Raymond Queneau’s Exercises in Style (1947) and is wide in scope and style — deep, historical, amusing, and playful — as is Professor Rockmore’s review. “Mathematics is writing,” says Rockmore. A proof is “as close to the written transmission of one person’s pure thought as any writing can be. But even in mathematical writing, it’s not just what you say but how you say it — better known as style.” Rockmore, Professor of Mathematics and director of the Neukom Institute, is co-editor of the recently published book Law as Data: Computation, Text, & the Future of Legal Analysis.
January 02, 2022
With support from the generous Byrne gift, Byrne Scholar and Thayer School of Engineering student Ben Martin ’22 pursued an independent research project this past summer designing a testing setup to experimentally determine the braking characteristics of the Dartmouth Formula Racing team’s current generation of brake system. DFR designs and builds hybrid race cars to compete in the Formula Hybrid annual competition in New Hampshire; Dartmouth’s team has been competing in automotive engineering design competitions since 1995, and has competed in Formula Hybrid since its inauguration in 2006. “I planned out experiments to determine kinetic and static coefficients of friction between the pads and rotors at various temperatures, thermal response of the brake system at different levels of energy dissipation, and long term wear characteristics,” says Ben, who is Brakes Team Lead and Manufacturing Team Lead at DFR. DFR photo by Kathryn Lapierre.
December 07, 2021
Our Directed Reading Program pairs undergraduate students with graduate mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level. We look forward to learning interesting mathematics with you! View a list of possible projects and graduate mentors; if you are very interested in a particular topic that is not on the list, there may be a graduate mentor who would be happy to read through that topic with you. The deadline to apply for the Winter 2022 DRP is December 24. Clockwise from top left: program organizer Richard Haburcak along with DRP graduate mentors Matt Jones, Sam Tripp, Grant Molnar, Juanita Duque-Rosero, Jonathan Lindbloom, Yanbing Gu, Kathy Lin, Matthew Ellison, and Ben Adenbaum.
December 06, 2021
Byrne Scholar and Mathematical Data Science major Joe Gyorda ’22, second from left, interned this summer at HALE Sports, which seeks to optimize the health and performance of athletes through analyzing somatic and biometric data. “The first team was building a computer vision model in which athletes could receive real-time feedback on various exercises (e.g., squat, pushup) to correct their form. Machine learning and body pose estimation models were implemented to analyze body position/angles and identify correct/incorrect form,” says Joe, himself a triathlete. In his second team Joe worked with longitudinal somatic survey data collected from college athletes, with the goal being to implement clustering algorithms to track athlete variables over time and using predictive models to determine which variables (e.g., energy, mood) are impacted by changes in another (e.g., sleep). “I am very grateful for the generosity of the Byrne Fund for supporting me and my work!”
November 09, 2021
Daniel Krashen, Presidential Professor of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, will give a public lecture titled Professional empathy at 3:15 p.m. on Tuesday November 16 in Kemeny 008. Dr. Krashen’s research is in algebra and arithmetic geometry, specifically the study of division algebras, quadratic forms, and linear algebraic groups. These areas have connections to a wide range of fields, including physics and cryptography. He has been awarded multiple NSF grants, including a CAREER award and the prestigious Presidential Early Career (PECASE) award. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. Dr. Krashen has been active in promoting outreach and diversity in mathematics at a range of levels, from middle school through early career professors, including in his work on the editorial boards of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society and the American Mathematical Monthly.
November 03, 2021
Professor Dimitris Giannakis, whose research connects ideas from data science, machine learning, and dynamical systems theory, was recently quoted in an article in the Concord Monitor [may require subscription], speaking on the development of mathematical frameworks to improve understanding of complex systems such as the earth’s climate dynamics. “We are combining this existing body of theoretical knowledge from abstract math with data science ... to identify phenomena in nature and generate questions that are relevant at the abstract mathematical level as well as the world,” he says. “It brings in a lot of different fields of mathematics in one arena.” This image is from his paper Bridging Data Science and Dynamical Systems Theory (co-authored with Tyrus Berry and John Harlim), which was featured in the October 2020 issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society. “I think mathematics is very beautiful as a language; beautiful in its own right, without reference to anything else,” says Professor Giannakis, who is a member of the Jack Byrne Academic Cluster in Mathematics and Decision Science.
November 02, 2021
Congratulations to Byrne Scholar Archita Harathi ’22, one of 22 students recently inducted into Phi Beta Kappa in this year’s fall ceremony at Dartmouth. Archita, who is majoring in Math and Economics and minoring in Computer Science, has been supported by Byrne funds in several endeavors: a summer ’21 investment banking internship at Goldman Sachs in the structured finance group; a virtual winter ’21 management consulting internship focusing on technology, media, and telecom industries at Altman Solon; and, during her freshman summer, research abroad at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. Archita also received the Town Scientific Prize for her achievement in mathematics in 2020. When not busy with academics, Archita finds time to study Indian classical music and competed in this year’s Dartmouth Idol with the help and guidance of Walt Cunningham at the Hop.
October 21, 2021
Professor Feng Fu is among thirteen members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences who have been recognized for exceptional achievement in scholarship, teaching, and mentoring for 2021. We congratulate Professor Fu on his many successes, as well as those of his students and mentees! “I am very fortunate to have the opportunity of working with our group of talented students at all levels,” says Professor Fu. “I am particularly passionate about working with both undergraduate and graduate students, and always do my best to help them to succeed in their later careers (academia and industry) after training in my lab.” The Fu Lab invites creative and self-motivated scientists (postdocs, graduate students, and undergraduates) to join the research group.
October 18, 2021
We are now accepting applications for the 2022 Byrne Prize in Mathematics. If you are graduating this year and planning to go to graduate school in math or a related field, please consider applying! The prize, established in 2019, is a $35,000 fellowship that recognizes the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. View the application requirements along with info about our past recipients Shikhin Sethi ’19, Matt Radosevich ’20, and Jacob Swenberg ’21.
October 17, 2021
Math orgs on campus include Dartmouth SIAM (faculty advisors: Scott Pauls and Feng Fu), Dartmouth Math Society (faculty advisors: Vladimir Chernov and Rosa Orellana), and the Dartmouth AWM student chapter (faculty advisors: Carolyn Gordon and Rosa Orellana). This term the Dartmouth AWM exec board would like to share news of the AWM’s 50th anniversary We Speak: Inspiring Women in Math Speaker Series, featuring talks by women who have made a positive difference in the mathematics community. Clockwise from upper left: Current members of the Dartmouth AWM exec board Kayla Hamann ’22, Paola Karapataki ’22, Lizzie Hernández-Videa ’22, Jenny Song ’23, and Sonal Butala ’22.
October 11, 2021
The department welcomes Assistant Professor Ethan Levien, whose research interests include stochastic processes, mathematical biology, and applied statistics. Professor Levien, who will be starting his own research group in our department, obtained his PhD in Mathematics from the University of Utah, where he studied the stochastic dynamics of chemical reaction networks. He went on to spend three years as a postdoctoral fellow in applied mathematics at Harvard University and Brandies University. His current research focuses on the role of randomness in biology, especially single-cell physiology and evolution. “Using mathematics, I try to answer questions such as: How do cells regulate their size? Why do certain traits appear to evolve separately in distinct organisms? What causes physiological differences in genetically identical cells?”
October 10, 2021
Join us at 5 p.m. on Friday, October 15 in Kemeny 008 for a screening of the movie Adventures of a Mathematician. Released in theaters last week, the film is a thought-provoking account of Jewish-Polish immigrant and mathematician Stan Ulam, who flees to the US in the 1930s. There, Stan helps build the first computer and create the hydrogen bomb. View more information, including the trailer! There will be an introduction and Q&A with the film director Thor Klein and the science advisor George Dyson at 5pm, followed by the screening. RSVP is encouraged to help us with planning. Sponsored by the Jack Byrne Scholars Program.
October 09, 2021
Supported by the Byrne gift, Byrne Scholar Anne Bailey ’22 interned at language-learning startup Cambly, whose web and mobile apps facilitate learning English as a second language by connecting students with tutors around the world. During her time at Cambly, Anne developed a system using the AWS Lambda service and learned much about developing scalable software along the way — something not necessarily easy to learn in the classroom. “Overall, this internship taught me a lot about full-stack software engineering, and I had a great time,” Anne says. “As a computer science major and linguistics minor, working as a software engineer intern at a language-learning company was a great intersection of my interests.”
September 30, 2021
Cristopher Moore, Professor at the Santa Fe Institute, will give a lecture titled Easy, Hard, and Impossible: The Limits of Computation at 6 p.m. on Wednesday, October 6 in 008 Kemeny Hall. From the abstract: “Every day we ask computers to solve problems for us — to find the fastest route across town, fold a protein into the right shape, or prove an unsolved mathematical question. In each case the space of possible solutions is vast. Why is it that for some problems, we can quickly zoom in on the solution, while for others it’s like looking for a needle in a haystack? What is it about the structure of a problem that makes it easy, or hard, or even impossible to solve?” (Click/tap to view a larger image.)
September 27, 2021
Professors Peter Mucha and Dimitris Giannakis are the newest members of the Jack Byrne Academic Cluster in Mathematics and Decision Science, as reported in a recent Dartmouth News story. Part of the Academic Cluster Initiative, the Byrne cluster focuses on applying mathematical thinking to some of society’s major challenges in health care, transportation, and manufacturing. Peter Mucha, Jack Byrne Distinguished Professor in Mathematics, notes that “the Byrne Cluster was particularly appealing to me because its goals are so well aligned with the activities of my research group, both developing new mathematical tools for analyzing data and working with others to use those tools in different applications.” Dimitris Giannakis, Jack Byrne Professor in Mathematics, looks forward to working across disciplines: “One of my primary research areas is climate dynamics, and I am excited about the opportunities that the Byrne Cluster will provide for innovative work in this area, in both its physical and societal dimensions.”
September 20, 2021
The Fields Medal is awarded to only a few young mathematicians every four years and was, in part, intended to recognize underrepresented mathematicians. In their analysis Elitism in mathematics and inequality, published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications and referenced in Scientific American, former Byrne Scholar Ho-Chun Herbert Chang ’18 and Professor Feng Fu explore how 60 Fields Medal recipients relate to each other and to the broader community of mathematicians. They find that while the medal has helped to promote some previously underrepresented groups, a “Western bias” is still evident, along with an under-representation of minority groups. In particular, the study found that 44 out of 60 Fields medalists come from a highly interconnected group of mathematicians. Image by Shirley Wu.
September 09, 2021
In July SIAM News highlighted research by second-year graduate student Alina Glaubitz (joint with Professor Feng Fu) and her work on the oscillatory dynamics of social distancing. In her presentation, delivered virtually at the 2021 SIAM Annual Meeting, Alina described how she and Professor Fu incorporated an evolutionary game theory model into the epidemiological process, revealing the presence of a feedback loop between infections and social distancing. This feedback loop, an “oscillatory tragedy of the commons,” can lead to multiple waves of infection in emerging novel zoonotic diseases, such as COVID-19, which are caused by respiratory viruses and are highly contagious through proximity transmissions.
September 08, 2021
Professor Carl Pomerance was an invited speaker to a recent conference of the Northeastern Section of the MAA. His talk, ‘Is 73 the best number?’, was connected to his paper Proof of the Sheldon Conjecture (co-authored with Chris Spicer), which proved a mathematical concept inspired by an episode in the CBS series The Big Bang Theory. As stated in his talk’s abstract, “According to Sheldon Cooper, the often annoying lead character in the TV sitcom The Big Bang Theory, 73 is the best number. And he's eager to tell you why. But is it really? In joint work with Chris Spicer (Morningside College in Iowa), we show Sheldon just may be right.” Sheldon photo credit: Michael Yarish/©2019 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
September 05, 2021
Jonathan Meng ’18 and Professor Feng Fu have recently published the paper Understanding gambling behaviour and risk attitudes using cryptocurrency-based casino blockchain data in Royal Society Open Science. The research was funded by the Neukom Scholars Program and Neukom-Vechain RFP. Their joint work was based on Jonathan’s mathematics senior honors thesis, Understanding Gambling Behavior and Risk Attitudes Using Massive Online Casino Data, for which Professor Fu served as advisor.
August 12, 2021
The article Spectral geometry in the presence of symmetry by Professor Craig Sutton was featured in the June/July issue of Notices of the American Mathematical Society. This image from the paper represents a cubical tiling of hyperbolic three-space $\Bbb{H}^3$, one of the eight Thurston geometries. Professor Sutton, whose research interests in differential geometry include Riemannian geometry, spectral geometry, and homogeneous spaces, is currently the House Professor of the School House community and is director of Dartmouths’s E.E. Just Program. Image courtesy of Steve Trettel.
August 11, 2021
We are pleased to extend a warm welcome to nine new graduate students in our department! Clockwise from top left: Jiayi Chen (Grinnell College), Haochen Wu (Wake Forest University), Casey Dowdle (Clemson Univesity), Anna Vasenina (Grinnell College), Peter Nielsen (University of Wisconsin, Madison), Yanbing Gu (CUNY Graduate School and University), and Jonathan Lindbloom (Southern Methodist University). (Not pictured: Xie He and David Freeman.) We look forward to working with them in the fall.
August 10, 2021
Jacob Swenberg ’21 was selected as this year’s recipient of Dartmouth’s Gazzaniga Award recognizing scientific achievement by an undergraduate. Jacob had previously received the John J. Byrne Jr. Prize in Mathematics, was the recipient of our department’s Best Senior Thesis Presentation award, and was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society in 2021. Jacob, who will be starting in a PhD program at the UCLA Department of Mathematics, thanks the Dartmouth Math Department, especially his thesis advisor John Voight, for supporting him during his time as an undergraduate. Congratulations to Jacob on his many accomplishments!
July 26, 2021
The career and job resource website Zippia recently assembled a panel of academic statisticians to talk about current trends in the job market for statisticians. The distinguished panel included Professor Eugene Demidenko, who teaches Math 70 as the culminating course of our Mathematical Data Science major. According to Professor Demidenko, to be successful, statisticians “must possess essential skills in data analysis and computer programming, such as R, Python, or MATLAB.” His most recent textbook Advanced Statistics with Applications in R addresses the needs of modern applied statistics.
June 15, 2021
Please join us in congratulating Asher Auel and Feng Fu, who have received tenure and promotions to the rank of Associate Professor! Professor Auel’s research interests are in algebraic geometry and number theory; he was among the 2020 awardees of the Simons Foundation Collaboration Grants for Mathematicians. His five-year grant will explore a project on the geometry of splitting fields and rationality. Professor Fu’s research integrates applied mathematics, social science, computer science, evolutionary biology, and statistical physics. He favors a multidisciplinary approach to research and teaching in what he calls “mathematical humanities”, ranging from quantitative explorations into human behavior, the ethics of algorithms, and mathematical models of morality.
June 14, 2021
Congratulations to our graduate students who received their doctoral degrees at this year’s Investiture ceremony in June! Clockwise from upper left: Doug Knowles (advisor Ina Petkova), Yitong (Pepper) Huang (advisors Scott Pauls and D. Forger), James Ronan (advisor Anne Gelb), Xingru Chen (advisor Feng Fu), and Laura Petto (advisor M. Cheney). You may view their theses abstracts as well as our list of recent PhD students, which goes back a number of years and shows the first jobs and current positions of our PhD alumni.
June 25, 2021
On Father’s Day, The New Yorker published a reflective essay by Professor Dan Rockmore discussing the history of mathematical proofs and the major influence of one particular proof — the Rockmore theorem, developed by his father — on his own family’s history. About his father, a professor emeritus in the theoretical nuclear physics group at Rutgers, Rockmore says “My dad still marvels at a career and a life that he never could have anticipated... math was a gateway to order in his life.” Reflecting on the equations in his father’s proof brings Proustian moments: “For me, the symbols are mathematical madeleines. They remind me of the pads of paper that were scattered around our house, each full of my father’s scribblings.”
June 24, 2021
Congratulations to our graduating seniors who submitted and presented honors theses this year! Jacob Swenberg ’21 (advisor John Voight) and Andreas Louskos ’21 (advisor Yoonsang Lee) were both awarded high honors; Jacob received the Hazleton Mirkil Prize for Best Senior Thesis Presentation. Our Honors Program page has PDF versions of their theses as well as theses from prior years. Interested in doing independent work in mathematics? View the section on The Honors Program in Mathematics in the Dartmouth ORC.
June 17, 2021
Research by professor Sergi Elizalde was recently published in a solo paper in Journal of Combinatorial Theory Series A and in a co-authored paper in Nature. “My research interests are mostly in enumerative and algebraic combinatorics. I work on problems involving permutations, pattern avoidance, bijections, generating functions, lattice paths, and Young tableaux.” Regarding the Nature paper, he says “Lately I have also become interested in applications to mathematical biology, modeling chromosomal instability in cancer cells using combinatorial and probabilistic tools.” Professor Elizalde is currently the House Professor of East Wheelock and advisor to the Byrne Scholars. In 2018 he chaired the organizing committee for the 30th international FPSAC conference, which drew over 230 participants from 25 different countries to Hanover.
June 11, 2021
Congratulations to Xingru Chen PhD ’21, this year’s Hannah Croasdale Graduate Scholar Award winner! The recipient of this Dartmouth award possesses personal qualities of intellectual curiosity, dedication, and commitment to the pursuit of new knowledge and to teaching, as well as a sense of social responsibility to the community of scholars. “It is a great honor and a privilege to be the recipient of the award. I just feel lucky to do my PhD here. Everyone, from the students to the faculty, and to the other staff, is loving and caring. I am forever grateful to the department, the graduate school, and the college for offering help and support all the time.”
June 03, 2021
This year we are hosting Math Camp virtually, offering two summer enrichment sessions for local high school students in July and August. Topics covered will be outside of the usual high school syllabus and students can interact with mathematicians in a fun, non-graded environment, where an exploratory approach will be emphasized. Each program will cover different mathematical topics and students are invited to attend one or both sessions. This year’s sessions are Knot Theory and Combinatorial Games. View more info and registration link. (Click/tap to view a larger image.)
June 02, 2021
The Math Department is pleased to announce excellent results in this year’s Thayer Prize Exam, an annual first-year Dartmouth mathematics competition organized by our department. Congratulations to first place winner Hoang Nguyen ’24 and second place winner Dylan Fridman ’24! You may view the list of winners from the last 11 years along with a brief history of the prizes, which were established in 1869 to “to constitute a perpetual prize fund for superior proficiency in the higher branches of Mathematics.” The exam consists of Mathematics Olympiad style problems, and originality and creativity are heavily weighed.
May 27, 2021
Congratulations to the middle and high school winners of our local essay contest Biographies Of Contemporary Women In Mathematics, modeled on the national AWM Essay Contest and open to all middle and high school students in the Upper Valley. The local 2021 winning essays are from students (clockwise from upper left) Saia Patel, Ben Hourdequin, Allyson Lee, and Sora Shirai. (Not pictured: local winner Leah Twarog.) In addition to the local prize, Ben received an Honorable Mention in the AWM national contest for his essay on Dr. Lori Siegel, Senior Modeler at Climate Interactive. You may read the winning essays here, along with those from prior years.
May 20, 2021
We invite Dartmouth undergraduate student applications for a Summer Hybrid Undergraduate Research (SHUR) project, partially funded by the NSF and the Neukom Institute for Computational Science. Our group will pursue a research project in low-dimensional topology with a computer science component, investigating phenomena in the intersection between low-dimensional topology and contact geometry, with the goal of building a graphical calculator for Legendrian knots. This research has entry points for students with many different backgrounds and skill sets, and we will also provide professional development opportunities, including discussions with mathematicians on research presentation and writing personal statements.
May 14, 2021
Congratulations to Jacob Swenberg ’21, the recipient of the 2021 John J. Byrne Jr. Prize in Mathematics, awarded to the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. Jacob intends to continue studying algebraic number theory (and possibly algebraic geometry) in UCLA’s Mathematics PhD program. “With each math class I took, I became more convinced that I wanted to pursue math as a career,” says Jacob. “I couldn’t have done it without the support of Dartmouth’s Math Department, especially my thesis advisor, Professor John Voight.”
May 06, 2021
2021 Reese T. Prosser Memorial Lecture Series by Colm Mulcahy.
“One of the most astonishing mathematical card tricks ever invented dates back over 70 years: given any five cards from a regular deck, it is possible to show just four of them to a friend and magically convey the identity of the fifth...”
Wednesday, May 19, 2021 @ 6:00PM. Zoom ID 922 7125 3913.
April 09, 2021
A recent SIAM News article highlights the career of Anne Gelb, the John G. Kemeny Parents Professor of Mathematics, mentioning her leadership in the mathematical sciences and her many contributions to SIAM. Professor Gelb’s research involves developing highly accurate and efficient data-driven numerical methods for extracting important information in applications such as medical imaging, synthetic aperture radar imaging, climatology, signal processing, and fluid dynamics. She is currently a PI of the project Sea Ice Modeling and Data Assimilation (SIMDA), a new MURI project sponsored by the Office of Naval Research (ONR), and has co-directed Dartmouth Mathematics REU programs during the summers of 2017, 2018, and 2020.
April 08, 2021
Katherine Lasonde ’23 and Yangyang Li ’22 won first and second prizes at the college level in our local AWM essay contest Biographies Of Contemporary Women In Mathematics. Other 2021 winning essays are from local high school students Saia Patel, Sora Shirai, and Leah Twarog, and local middle school students Ben Hourdequin and Allyson Lee. In the national AWM contest, Yangyang Li ’22 (Dartmouth) received first place at the undergraduate level, and Ben Hourdequin (Richmond Middle School) received an Honorable Mention at the middle school level. Both Yangyang's and Ben's essays feature Dr. Lori Siegel, Senior Modeler at Climate Interactive.
March 31, 2021
“The 2020-2021 school year (junior year for the Class of 2022) wasn’t exactly how anybody could have predicted when my class matriculated,” says Byrne Scholar Maria Roodnitsky ’22. However, thanks to the generous Byrne gift, Maria had the opportunity to spend an off term as a software engineering intern working on improving accessibility features in an iOS application with the mobile development team at Grove Collaborative. “I never could have imagined three years ago that I would be applying my love for data science and mathematics in the technology sector,” says Maria. “Having used funding to do both hands-on research with a renowned statistician and to go work in the industry itself, I can safely say that as a result of the Jack Byrne Scholars Program, I am one step closer to knowing what I want to do post-graduation. I look forward to seeing what else is in store!”
March 25, 2021
Mary Gray, Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at American University, will give a special public lecture titled “Don’t Say No! A Mathematician’s Journey into Human Rights” at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, April 7 via Zoom. Professor Gray researches and applies statistics and law to address human rights and equity throughout the world. Early in her career, she co-founded and served as first president of the Association for Women in Mathematics. Among her many honors, she has received a Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Engineering and Mathematics Mentoring, the Karl E. Peace Award for Outstanding Statistical Contributions for the Betterment of Society, and honorary degrees from three institutions. Dartmouth’s own AWM Student Chapter is sponsoring this very special public event. View the department’s poster for more details!
March 23, 2021
Professor Feng Fu was the senior researcher on a study of political discourse in social media published in Physical Review X. In the article Public Discourse and Social Network Echo Chambers Driven by Socio-Cognitive Biases, Professor Fu, visiting scholar Xin Wang, and their co-authors present a computational model demonstrating how aggressive political messages conveyed through social media can lead to polarization and the formation of echo chambers. “This research finds that overly-amplified exposure and super-strong positioning of a campaign can actually lessen the likelihood of winning the widespread support that is desired,” says Professor Fu. “Political strategists need to consider how attack ads and other extreme messages might backfire,” observes Xin Wang, lead author of the paper. Learn more about joining the Fu Lab at Dartmouth.
March 05, 2021
View the recording of the lecture titled A Dream Deferred: 50 Years of Blacks in Mathematics, given by Edray Goins, a number theorist, professor at Pomona College, and recent past president of the National Association of Mathematics. Professor Goins’ lecture was the inaugural talk in the C. Dwight Lahr Lecture series, named in memory and honor of Dwight Lahr’s contributions to the Department of Mathematics and to Dartmouth, and in recognition of his commitment to inclusivity and diversity. Professor Goins has recently been instrumental in carrying on the mission of Professor Scott Williams of SUNY Buffalo with his ongoing work on a searchable database for the MAD pages: Mathematicians of the African Diaspora, and in summer 2020 led an NSF-funded REU dedicated to enhancing and updating this valuable resource.
March 04, 2021
To conclude a wonderful term of learning mathematics in our new Directed Reading Program, students will give final presentations on March 11. Our program pairs undergraduate students with graduate mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level, fostering a supportive environment for students seeking to further their interest in mathematics. Clockwise from lower right: third year PhD student Richard Haburcak, organizer of the program, along with Dylan Fridman ’24, Jacob Swenberg ’21, Eliza Crocker ’23, Sara Catherine Cook ’23, and Alex Bakos ’22. Not pictured: Ahmed Naveed ’22 and Katie Woolfolk ’23.
February 26, 2021
The book Mathematical Puzzles by Professor Peter Winkler was recently published by Routledge. Each chapter explains a mathematical technique, then uses it to solve puzzles, and finally to prove a theorem. The book has received impressive praise from legendary computer scientist and mathematician Don Knuth: “This book may well be the best collection of mind-stretching teasers ever assembled. You can’t help but be inspired...” Professor Winkler is the author of two previous puzzle books, and in 2019 – 2020 was the Puzzle Master at the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) in New York City.
February 25, 2021
An IEEE Milestone marker commemorating the creation of the BASIC programming language has been installed at Dartmouth’s Collis Center. Under the leadership of Professors of Mathematics John Kemeny and Thomas Kurtz, BASIC and the Dartmouth Time Sharing System were developed at Dartmouth in the early 1960’s; much of the software was written by Dartmouth undergraduates. In 2014, Professor Dan Rockmore and filmmaker Bob Drake produced the film Birth of BASIC, a fascinating story featuring interviews with Professor Kurtz and others who were instrumental in the project.
February 14, 2021
Edray Herber Goins, Professor of Mathematics at Pomona College, will give a lecture titled A Dream Deferred: 50 Years of Blacks in Mathematics at 7 p.m. on Thursday, February 25 via Zoom. This is the inaugural talk in the C. Dwight Lahr Lecture series, named in memory and honor of Dwight Lahr’s contributions to the Department of Mathematics and to Dartmouth, and in recognition of his commitment to inclusivity and diversity. Among his numerous contributions to the field of mathematics, Professor Goins is a recent past president of the National Association of Mathematics, which seeks to promote the success of underrepresented minorities in the mathematical sciences. View the department’s poster for more details!
February 13, 2021
Professor Asher Auel is among the 2020 awardees of the Simons Foundation Collaboration Grants for Mathematicians. His five-year grant will explore the project titled Geometry of splitting fields and rationality. Professor Auel, whose research is in algebraic geometry and number theory, had presented work at the 2016 Simons Symposium Geometry Over Nonclosed Fields. A meeting with a fellow presenter at the symposium ultimately led to the 2019 joint paper Conic bundle fourfolds with nontrivial unramified Brauer group, published in Journal of Algebraic Geometry.
February 12, 2021
The work of Byrne Scholars Jacob Fyda ’22 and Connor Spencer ’22 was published in an article in the Journal of Experimental Biology, joint with Martin Jastroch and Michael Gaudry of the Department of Molecular Biosciences at the Wenner-Gren Institute. In summer 2019, Jacob and Connor had conducted research in biomathematics at the institute, studying mitochondria and cellular energy metabolisms related to the genetics of thermogenesis of eutherian mammals. Former Math Department member Bjoern Muetzel, now Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Eckerd College, facilitated the exchange, which was supported by the generous Byrne gift.
February 04, 2021
Fifth-year PhD student Xingru Chen is the recipient of this year’s Kenneth P. Bogart Teaching Award for her dedication to and excellence in advancing the educational mission of the department. Regarding her teaching and pedagogical approaches, Xingru notes, “An overarching goal of my teaching is to engage students, awaken their capability in mathematics, their confidence in the truth of what has been demonstrated, and in the value of demonstration. I will do my utmost to create a motivating environment where students can realize their potential to master the power of understanding and discovering such truths gradually.” Congratulations to Xingru!
February 03, 2021
Congratulations to Professor John Voight, one of fourteen members of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences recognized for exceptional achievement in scholarship, teaching, and mentoring for 2020. Professor Voight, who received a John M. Manley Huntington Award for Newly Promoted Faculty, remarks, “Even at the frontier of discovery with my students and postdocs, we still learn from each other. One of my goals as an educator is to counter the reputation of mathematics as being a difficult subject. I try to make it intuitive, attainable, and inviting — whether in the classroom, on the page, or over breakfast.”
January 20, 2021
In The New Yorker Annals of Inquiry, Professor Dan Rockmore reflects on the lives of three mathematicians we lost in 2020: John Conway, Ronald Graham, and Freeman Dyson. These three were among those interviewed by Professor Rockmore and his co-producers in their 2002 documentary The Math Life. In his New Yorker essay, Professor Rockmore explores not only their contributions, but also the human dimension of mathematics, touching on the joy of embarking on journeys of discovery. As John Conway stated, “I can sit here in this chair and go on a voyage of exploration. A very different voyage of exploration, but, still, there are things to be discovered, things to be seen, that you can quite easily be the first person ever to see.”
January 06, 2021
A recent New York Times article discusses the use of game theory to factor in the effect of human behavior on SARS-CoV-2 transmission, vaccination hesitancy, and vaccine delivery models. The article references papers by graduate students Xingru Chen (left) and Alina Glaubitz (right), each co-authored with Professor Feng Fu: Imperfect vaccine and hysteresis and Oscillatory dynamics in the dilemma of social distancing. “It boils down to a fundamental problem known as the tragedy of the commons,” says Xingru Chen in the article. “There is a misalignment of individual interests and societal interests.” Professor Fu notes that the department is fortunate to have such talented students in our PhD program!
December 13, 2020
The Math Department is sponsoring the Essay Contest Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics, modeled on the national AWM Essay Contest and open to all middle and high school students in the Upper Valley and to all Dartmouth undergraduates. You may submit your essay to both contests; the deadline is January 31, 2021. View detailed information including contest rules and tips on choosing an interviewee. Last year three local students won prizes at the national level!
December 12, 2020
Our Directed Reading Program pairs undergraduate students with graduate mentors to undertake independent reading projects covering advanced topics in mathematics that are generally not taught at the undergraduate level. We look forward to learning interesting mathematics with you! View a list of possible projects and graduate mentors; if you are very interested in a particular topic that is not on the list, there may be a graduate mentor who would be happy to read through that topic with you. The deadline to apply for the Winter 2021 DRP is December 24. From left, four of our DRP graduate mentors: Richard Haburcak, Juanita Duque-Rosero, Matt Jones, and Grant Molnar.
December 10, 2020
Professor Dorothy Wallace, along with Geography professors Xun Shi (Dartmouth team lead) and Jonathan Winter, are core members of the University of Idaho-led NSF RII Track-2 FEC project to study environmental risk factors of vector-borne diseases. Professor Wallace, who in Winter 2022 will lead Dartmouth’s third Mathematical Oncology DSP at the Moffitt Cancer Research Center in Tampa, has current research interests in mathematical biology and was a 2016 co-recipient of a Neukom Institute CompX Faculty Grant to explore factors contributing to the expansion of Lyme disease in the northeast.
November 25, 2020
Congratulations to Archita Harathi, who received Dartmouth’s Francis L. Town Scientific Prize for her achievement in Mathematics. Archita is a ’22 from Portland, Oregon, majoring in Math and Economics and minoring in Computer Science. “After graduation, I am hoping to work in finance and later attend law school,” says Archita. “I would like to thank the math department at Dartmouth for being my second home, and all of my professors for making my math experience at Dartmouth so fun and rewarding!”
November 19, 2020
Graduate student Doug Knowles (left) and Claremont Middle School science teacher Larry Bilodeau joined with a group of fellow graduate students, several Dartmouth faculty, and a collection of local middle school educators to discuss and develop a curriculum to promote STEM education in the Upper Valley. During his time working on the pilot program of the Dartmouth Rural STEM Educator Partnership, supported by a Science Education Partnership Award (SEPA) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences, Doug and his group developed a fully-contained educational module which they began implementing in early 2020, with graduate students traveling to act as classroom assistants and visible examples of modern-day scientists.
November 12, 2020
During Winter 2020, Connor Spencer ’22 worked with the Dartmouth Pauls Lab developing mathematical models to study disturbances in the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN), a group of oscillating neurons responsible for coordinating circadian rhythms. Connor (left), here in 2019 with Dartmouth Triathlon teammates Maya Khanna ’22 and Colin Goodbred ’21, is a Byrne Scholar with an interest in the intersection of computer science and applied mathematics. He hopes to more fully explore this question and help establish some idea as to what could be happening in the SCN from a game theoretic perspective.
November 11, 2020
“Our current pandemic is not a first excursion into remote learning. Many may know of the origins story of calculus, born over Isaac Newton’s retreat to the countryside from Cambridge University during The Great Plague of London in the 17th century,” begins Professor Dan Rockmore in his LitHub essay How Storytellers Use Math (Without Scaring People Away). Rockmore discusses recent compelling mathematical writings by Steven Strogatz and Karen Olsson, observing that “one is a tale of how mathematics has changed all of our lives, the other a tale of how mathematics changed one life.”
November 04, 2020
The Dartmouth Association for Womxn in Mathematics will host a Math Alumnae Panel at 6:30 p.m. EST on Wednesday, November 11. Join on Zoom for a chat with some wonderful alumnae about their careers and paths after graduation! The speaker lineup features Qian Zhang ’13, Stella Safari ’13, Glynnis Millhouse ’12, Kate Royce ’19, and Mary Versa Clemens-Sewall ’20, representing careers and work in business, fashion, tech, computer science, research, law, and data science. This event is open to all who are curious; visit the Dartmouth AWM website for event details and more information about our guests.
October 26, 2020
We are pleased to announce the establishment of an annual lecture series, to be called the C. Dwight Lahr Lecture Series, in memory and honor of Dwight Lahr’s contributions to the Department of Mathematics and to the College, and in recognition of his commitment to inclusivity and diversity. Dwight retired from our department in 2014 and passed away in 2016, so not all of us had the privilege of knowing him. The brief obituary contains a further link to an outline of his academic career, stating “Those who grew to know him better and interact with him daily describe him as an outstanding faculty member and professional who played a great role in pushing for the growth and support of diversity at Dartmouth.”
October 22, 2020
Professors Anne Gelb and Yoonsang Lee, along with adjunct professors Matthew Parno (Mathematics) and Chris Polashenski (Thayer School) of Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) are part of a team that has received a 2020 multidisciplinary university research initiative (MURI) award from the Office of Naval Research. As the principal investigator of their project Sea Ice Modeling and Data Assimilation (SIMDA), Professor Gelb is one of six women lead researchers among this year’s 26 awards. Dartmouth is represented on two of teams that received these high-profile awards for 2020. Please join us in congratulating Professor Gelb’s team on receiving this highly competitive award!
October 19, 2020
The Dartmouth Association for Womxn in Mathematics is rolling out a new peer mentoring program for self-identifying womxn and allies who enjoy math. Come share your expertise and help the Classes of 2023 and 2024 make an upperclass student connection! You do not need to be a math major to participate, and you also may to join as a mentee if you wish. Please contact the chapter for more information. Current members of the chapter’s executive board are (clockwise from upper left): Roxy Holden ’21, Kayla Hamann ’22, Lizzie Hernández-Videa ’22, Jenny Song ’23, Paola Karapataki ’22, and Sonal Butala ’22.
October 08, 2020
A recent Quanta article mentions several Dartmouth connections in the quest to solve one of number theory’s most intriguing puzzles: are there any odd perfect numbers (OPNs)? Professor Carl Pomerance proved one of the many necessary conditions for OPNs as part of his thesis work, and in 1999 Professor John Voight, inspired by Richard Guy’s book Unsolved Problems in Number Theory, discovered a new kind of spoof OPN. Graduate student Grant Molnar was involved in subsequent work by the BYU Computational Number Theory Group, whose research led to the discovery of some interesting properties of spoofs. Paul Pollack, PhD ’08, professor of mathematics at UGA, expresses caution as to whether these properties may lead to a proof of the non-existence of OPNs, while Professor Voight says “It is indeed a problem for the ages, [and] perhaps it will remain so.”
October 04, 2020
We are now accepting applications for the 2021 Byrne Prize in Mathematics. If you are graduating this year and planning to go to graduate school in math or a related field, please consider applying! The prize, established in 2019, is a $35,000 fellowship that recognizes the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. View the application requirements along with info about our past recipients Matt Radosevich ’20 and Shikhin Sethi ’19.
September 21, 2020
Professor Dorothy Wallace led Dartmouth’s 2020 Mathematical Oncology DSP at the Moffitt Cancer Center in Tampa, Florida. Offered once every two years, the program offers students the opportunity to learn how to combine math, biology, evolutionary principles, and computer modeling while exploring oncology research. Students learn at the Moffitt Department of Integrated Mathematical Oncology five days a week, and when not working hard at modeling cancer processes can relax on a visit to Crystal River to swim with manatees. View details on the next program, to be offered in Winter 2022.
September 19, 2020
The work of Katherine Royce ’19 and Professor Feng Fu was recently published in PLOS One as their joint paper Mathematically modeling spillovers of an emerging infectious zoonosis with an intermediate host. The timely paper, based on Royce’s honors thesis, describes how zoonotic diseases are a top-10 pandemic threat, and argues for the necessity of understanding these processes via mathematical modeling. Royce presented her work in our department’s 2019 Poster Contest, in which she won second place in applied mathematics. View our gallery of 2019 posters to see interesting examples of our student-faculty research.
September 15, 2020
Quaternion Algebras by Professor John Voight will soon be published in hardcover and e-book form. Part of Springer’s Graduate Texts in Mathematics series, and opening with a description of what is possibly the “most famous act of mathematical vandalism” in history, the over 800-page monograph encompasses a vast wealth of knowledge at the intersection of many fields, according to Springer. As Professor Voight writes in the book’s preface, “It is somehow fitting that I would find myself writing this text while a faculty member at Dartmouth College: the story of the quaternions is interwoven with the history of mathematics at Dartmouth.” View the current version on Professor Voight’s Quaternions page.
September 10, 2020
After completing their second year of our graduate program, Richard Haburcak, Alex Wilson, Lizzie Buchanan, Steve Fan, and Grant Molnar led two weeks of Math Camp, a summer enrichment program for junior and high school students, where topics covered are outside of the usual high school syllabus and students interact with mathematicians in a fun, non-graded environment. Supervised by Professor Marcia Groszek and instructor Mits Kobayashi PhD ’10, the graduate students devised and led workshops on cryptography, beginning with the Caesar cipher and eventually working up to public-key encryption and RSA, and, in the second week, graph theory, with a heavy emphasis on the six, five, and four color theorems. About 30 students participated in each of the week-long virtual sessions.
September 02, 2020
Jared Duker Lichtman AB, AM ’18, currently a Clarendon Scholar at the University of Oxford Mathematical Institute, describes recent progress on the Erdős primitive set conjecture. Lichtman’s work with Dartmouth Professor Carl Pomerance has led to several joint papers, including The Erdős conjecture for primitive sets and the forthcoming A generalization of primitive sets and a conjecture of Erdős. “I find it irresistible how subtle patterns emerge from basic multiplication,”says Lichtman. “The full Erdős conjecture has remained elusive, but working towards it has led to interesting developments.” Photo by Oxford Mathematical Institute
August 23, 2020
Manifolds provide mathematicians and other scientists with a way of grappling with the concept of “space” (from a global viewpoint). The space occupied by an object. The space that we inhabit. The space of solutions to a system of equations. Or, perhaps, the space of configurations of a mechanical system. While manifolds are central to the study of geometry and topology, they also provide an appropriate framework in which to explore aspects of mathematical physics, dynamics, control theory, medical imaging, and robotics, to name just a few. This course will demonstrate how ideas from calculus can be generalized to manifolds, providing a new perspective and toolkit with which to explore problems where “space” plays a fundamental role.
August 21, 2020
Throughout her long and distinguished career at Dartmouth, Professor Carolyn Gordon has been an outstanding mentor and instructor for students at all levels. She served as adviser to half a dozen PhD students and several postdoctoral fellows, each of whom went on to successful careers. A leader in promoting and supporting women in mathematics, she served as president of the Association for Women in Mathematics and subsequently established an AWM chapter at Dartmouth. As a scholar, she is best known for her groundbreaking work with fellow mathematicians David Webb and Scott Wolpert on the mathematical question “Can One Hear the Shape of a Drum?” Learn more +
July 31, 2020
Allison Henrich, PhD ’08, Professor of Mathematics at Seattle University, and Nicholas Scoville PhD ’10, Associate Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science at Ursinus College, along with co-authors Colin Adams and Kate Kearney, received the Paul R. Halmos–Lester R. Ford Award for Top Expository Mathematical Writing in MAA Publications for their paper Knots Related by Knotoids published last year in the American Mathematical Monthly. “We are grateful to Susan Colley, Editor of the Monthly, for being such a wonderful steward of this paper, to our referees who gave us useful feedback and encouragement, and to those who decided to honor us with this award.”
July 30, 2020
Congratulations to Victor Churchill, PhD ’20, who received a third place Neukom Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research for his thesis Synthetic Aperture Radar Image Formation with Uncertainty Quantification. Advised by Professor Anne Gelb and having also worked with Dr. Matthew Parno of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL), Victor’s research areas include synthetic aperture radar image formation, compressed sensing, algorithm development for edge detection and image reconstruction, and Bayesian learning methods. His work with Professor Gelb and Dr. Parno has led to several joint papers.
July 09, 2020
Please join us in congratulating John Voight, who has been promoted to the rank of Professor! Professor Voight’s research interests are in number theory and arithmetic geometry, with a focus on algorithmic aspects. His recent work has included research concerning rational points on elliptic curves and the spaces that parametrize them. He has twice been awarded the Selfridge Prize, and has written a graduate textbook on quaternion algebras. He is one of six Principal Investigators on the Simons Foundation Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory and Computation, which seeks to accelerate research in these fields through the computational realization of deep theory and to use algorithmic methods to probe our conceptual understanding of complex arithmetic objects.
July 01, 2020
We are happy to announce the winners of this year’s Thayer Prize Exam, a contest organized by our department each year. Pictured clockwise from top left: Finn Hulse, Sicong (George) Shan, and Brandon Chen. George and Finn share a two-way tie for first place, with Brandon winning second place. View winners from the last 10 years along with a brief history of the prizes, established in 1869 to “to constitute a perpetual prize fund for superior proficiency in the higher branches of Mathematics.”
June 26, 2020
This year we are hosting Math Camp virtually, offering two summer enrichment sessions for local high school students. Topics covered will be outside of the usual high school syllabus and students can interact with mathematicians in a fun, non-graded environment. This year’s sessions are Cryptography: from permutation ciphers to RSA, and Theory of Graphs (networks): from Königsberg bridges to the Six Color Theorem and beyond. Students are invited to attend one or both sessions. View more info and registration link.
June 25, 2020
We are pleased to share the team projects from Math 70, Elements of Multivariate Statistics and Statistical Learning, taught by Professor Eugene Demidenko this spring. Data scientists are among the most in-demand technical jobs, and Dartmouth offers a Mathematical Data Science major with Math 70 as the culminating course. The course combines theoretical mathematics empowered by proficient programming in R for solving real-life problems, such as the analysis of COVID-19 dynamics and its prediction, and prepares students for a career in data analysis and statistical problem solutions. View the three team projects in full PDF form.
June 11, 2020
Congratulations to our graduating seniors who submitted and presented honors theses this year! Clockwise from upper left: Sriram Bapatla (advisor Anne Gelb), Frederika Rentzeperis (advisor Dorothy Wallace), Jack Zhang (advisor Anne Gelb), and Matthew Radosevich (advisor John Voight). Our Honors Program page has PDF versions of their theses as well as theses from prior years. Interested in doing independent work in mathematics? View the section on The Honors Program in Mathematics in the Dartmouth ORC.
June 07, 2020
Congratulations to our graduate students who are receiving their doctoral degrees this June! Clockwise from left: Victor Churchill (advisor Anne Gelb), Lizzie Tripp (advisors Scott Pauls and Feng Fu), Michael Firrisa (advisor Dana Williams), Ben Breen (advisor John Voight), and Juan S. Auli (advisor Sergi Elizalde). You may view their theses abstracts as well as our list of recent PhD students, which goes back a number of years and shows the first jobs and current positions of our PhD alumni.
June 03, 2020
In their article The Hidden Life of Viruses published in Nautilus, Professor Dan Rockmore and David Krakauer, Professor of Complex Systems at the Santa Fe Institute, draw parallels between the driving forces of nature which shape the universe at both the grandest and smallest scales. Alongside the dark matter and dark energy of the cosmos, equally invisible forces of our microbial world continue to drive the evolution of multicellular life in ways that remain largely hidden to us. “Our understanding of the biological world has also been a story of discovery of dark matter and dark energy — our collision with the coronavirus is just a most recent reminder of that theme.”
May 21, 2020
Congratulations to Matt Radosevich ’20, the recipient of the 2020 John J. Byrne Jr. Prize in Mathematics, awarded to the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. With advisor John Voight, Matt has been working on research involving Euclidean triangle groups and Belyi maps, to be presented as his senior honors thesis. Matt was inducted into the Phi Beta Kappa Society last October and was also captain of the club Nordic ski team and a leader in the Outing Club.
May 18, 2020
“It is worth remembering, as communications during the pandemic rely so heavily on computers, that it was just over 50 years ago, on May 1, 1964, that Dartmouth math professor and future president John Kemeny and math professor Tom Kurtz, along with a handful of Dartmouth undergraduates, ushered in the era of personal computing with the introduction of the BASIC programming language,” says Professor Dan Rockmore. Read the Dartmouth News story, which includes two videos on the computer language that changed the world.
May 16, 2020
Computational science and computational techniques are now ubiquitous across the research landscape, creating a wide range of diverse and fascinating projects. The Neukom Institute is offering Undergraduate and Graduate Research Prizes, which were created to encourage undergraduate and graduate interest in research and to recognize outstanding research in the computational sciences. The submission deadline is May 22.
May 07, 2020
Math professor Carolyn Gordon and Thayer School of Engineering professor Petra Bonfert-Taylor have co-organized a screening and discussion of the film Secrets of the Surface: The Mathematical Vision of Maryam Mirzakhani, a documentary film by George Csicsery. See our special event listing for details on how to view the film at your convenience and then join the community discussion on May 15. Photo by Jan Vondrák
May 06, 2020
Attention first-year students! The Thayer Prize Exam, a contest organized by our department each year, will take place this year on Saturday, May 30, 2020. This year’s exam will be held online. To register, please contact Professor Vladimir Chernov by Sunday May 10, 2020. If you cannot take the exam on Saturday May 30, please contact us in advance. The alternate date is Sunday May 31. For more details, please visit the Thayer Prize page.
April 25, 2020
Professor Rosa Orellana’s research has led to the publication of two recent co-authored papers: An insertion algorithm on multiset partitions with applications to diagram algebras in the Journal of Algebra, and Commutation and Normal Ordering for Operators on Symmetric Functions in Séminaire Lotharingien de Combinatoire. Professor Orellana’s research is in algebraic combinatorics with a focus on combinatorial representation theory and symmetric functions.
April 24, 2020
We are pleased to welcome the incoming class of PhD students for the fall! Clockwise from top left: Alina Glaubitz (TU Braunschweig, Germany, BS), Matthew Ellison (MIT, BS), Juanita Duque Rosero (University de Los Andes, Bogota, BS; Colorado State University, MS), Benjamin Logsdon (Williams College, BA), Jinman Park (Pohang University of Science & Tech, BS), and Michael Cerchia (SUNY Geneseo, BA; Wake Forest, MA). Brian Mintz (Brandeis University, BS), not pictured, is also joining the class.
April 16, 2020
Dartmouth’s Neukom Scholars Program provides support for undergraduates working on computational projects. The program’s goal is to support undergraduate research across the campus, and it seeks to fund third or fourth-year students engaged in faculty-advised research in the development of novel computational techniques as well as the application of computational methods to problems in the Sciences, Social Sciences, Humanities, and the Arts. Awards are $1000/term for one or two terms. The application deadline for summer term is extended to May 13.
April 15, 2020
Professor Dan Rockmore and Government professor Michael Herron describe how a relatively small set of randomly distributed tests could give health officials a more accurate picture of the current spread of the novel coronavirus throughout the U.S. Currently, testing is heavily skewed towards those with symptoms. While this makes sense, considering limited testing resources, it prevents us from fully understanding how the impact of COVID-19 varies among regions and communities.
April 09, 2020
Kira Hamman MA ’99, Assistant Teaching Professor of Mathematics at Penn State, is featured in the February/March issue of MAA FOCUS, in which she recounts learning something entirely new this past summer: how to play the cello. “How often,” she asks, “do we become students of things that are uncomfortable for us to learn?” Professor Hamman’s research interests include logic and set theory, the philosophy of mathematics, and mathematics and democracy.
April 01, 2020
Math major Mary Versa Clemens-Sewall ’20 won first prize at the college level in our local AWM essay contest Biographies Of Contemporary Women In Mathematics. Her essay, For the Love of (Sharing) Math, features visiting faculty member Nadia Lafrenière, who has organized Maths en Ville walking tours of Montréal. Other 2020 winning essays are from high school students Sophie Usherwood and Sora Shirai, and middle school students Hannah Malin-Stremlau, Farren Stainton, Benjamin Thaler Wellborn, and Leigh Grace Eggleton. Three local students won prizes at the national level!
March 29, 2020
The Math Department has jumped into the work at hand for remote learning this spring! Almost all of our focus in the last few weeks has been on our courses, which you may browse on our course offerings page. We have added a new link with more details, including course descriptions and information about how each course will be taught this spring. As we move into the term, we are mindful that extending our empathy, generosity, and kindness will help ensure a smooth transition for all in the new learning environment.
March 24, 2020
Can you solve this puzzle devised by Professor Peter Winkler? Featured in this week’s Monday Puzzle series in The Guardian, Professor Winkler is described by the article’s author as “one of my all time puzzle heroes.” Currently the Puzzle Master at the National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath), Professor Winkler reminds us that to keep our minds fresh, we may sign up for free on Mind-Benders for the Quarantined! to receive his weekly mathematical puzzles from MoMath.
February 21, 2020
The work of Instructor Bjoern Muetzel and Yana Mohanty was featured in the JMM 2020 Art Exhibition this winter. Starting with a snub dodecahedron with mirrored inside faces, they used a spherical camera to produce an image which, when transformed via stereographic projection, highlights the chirality of this Archimedean solid. Read their submission to the art exhibition about how this was done.
February 21, 2020
Dartmouth News writes about Professor Feng Fu’s multidisciplinary approach to research and teaching in what he calls “mathematical humanities”, ranging from quantitative explorations into human behavior, the ethics of algorithms, and mathematical models of morality. “The research we do has a focus on understanding multifaceted human behavior, ranging from public health cooperation, political polarization, and diversity,” says Fu. Learn more +
February 13, 2020
Mark Tomforde Ph.D. ’02, Professor of Mathematics at the University of Houston, is a 2020 recipient of the MAA Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award, which recognizes teaching effectiveness that has been shown to have had influence beyond the honorees’ own institutions. He has received several other teaching awards, including the 2019 Distinguished College and University Teaching of Mathematics Award (Texas section) and the 2015 John C. Butler Excellence in Teaching Award at UH.
February 05, 2020
During Fall term Byrne Scholar Hugo Nam ’21 spent four months at the Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique in Avignon, France. During his internship at INRA’s Biostatistics and Spatial Processes center, Hugo studied the application of Hawkes processes in developing statistical models related to the spread of wildfires in various European regions and wrote code to model such phenomena.
January 15, 2020
Professor Anne Gelb and Dr. Matthew Parno of the Cold Regions Research and Engineering Laboratory (CRREL) will lead the Dartmouth Mathematics REU this summer. Students will have the opportunity to work on applications in areas such as sea ice dynamics, radar imaging, subsurface flow, near-shore wave modeling, Arctic microbial communities, and snowpack evolution.
January 09, 2020
In an essay titled The Mechanical Muse in The New Yorker Annals of Inquiry, Dan Rockmore, professor of Mathematics and director of the Neukom Institute, explores the idea of computer programs generating lyrical poetry. He poses the question: “Given the power of new techniques in artificial intelligence, why not think more broadly about the kinds of art one can make using it?”
January 08, 2020
Supported by the Byrne gift, Byrne Scholars Aadil Islam ’21 and Raymond Chen ’22 participated in summer 2019 internships. Aadil interned in a JHU APL data science camp working on models to detect fake news, and Raymond developed quality control code as a cloud applications intern at an American multinational corporation. “It was very rewarding to be able to apply what I learned in both Computer Science and Mathematics courses at Dartmouth,” says Raymond.
January 03, 2020
Professor Sergi Elizalde, house professor of East Wheelock House, traveled to Puerto Rico with five East Wheelock students last spring as part of a service trip to El Departamento De La Comida (El Depa), a sustainability and food justice collective devoted to empowering the island’s communities to be ecologically resilient through local and sustainable farming. From left: Angel Aguilar ’22, community member Victor Dacosta, and Professor Elizalde. Learn more +
December 13, 2019
Professor Rosa Orellana has been elected to the Council of the American Mathematical Society as Member at Large. Professor Orellana’s research is in algebraic combinatorics with a focus on combinatorial representation theory and symmetric functions. At Dartmouth she co-founded a chapter of the AWM in an effort to increase the number of women taking and majoring in mathematics at Dartmouth and has organized Sonia Kovalevsky Math Days to encourage young women in our community to study mathematics.
December 12, 2019
Byrne Scholar Jacob Fyda ’22 spent eight weeks this summer in the Integrative Physiology of Mammalian Energy Metabolism research group at the Wenner-Gren Institute. “I had the incredible opportunity to experience a foreign country and actively participate in a productive, high-impact lab.” Jacob’s work involved the analysis and annotation of the genomes of several hundred representative animal species, as well as phylogenetic analysis, selection pressure analysis, and the construction of evolutionary trees.
December 06, 2019
Professor Eugene Demidenko is the author of the recently published book Advanced Statistics with Applications in R. Professor Demidenko has broad interests in theoretical and applied statistics, applied mathematics, and biomathematics. The book is the product of a forty-year experience in teaching of probability and statistics and their applications for solving real-life problems.
November 22, 2019
Sonia Kovalevsky Day is a fun-filled day of mathematics with hands-on workshops and talks for middle and high school female students and their teachers, both women and men. Originally started and funded by the Association for Women in Mathematics, the purpose of the day is to encourage young women to continue their study of mathematics and to assist the teachers of female mathematics students.
November 20, 2019
The Math Department is sponsoring the Essay Contest Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics, which is modeled on the national AWM Essay Contest and is open to all middle and high school students in the Upper Valley and to all Dartmouth undergraduates. Two of last year’s winning essays received national awards. The contest deadline is January 31, 2020.
November 14, 2019
Joint work of fifth-year graduate student Juan S. Auli and Professor Sergi Elizalde on inversion sequences in combinatorics has led to two papers published this year: Consecutive Patterns in Inversion Sequences in Discrete Mathematics & Theoretical Computer Science and Consecutive Patterns in Inversion Sequences II: Avoiding Patterns of Relations in Journal of Integer Sequences. Learn more +
November 08, 2019
Where do mathematical ideas come from? In part, from “a feeling of being free, of forgetting for a moment that we are bound by gravity and logic and convention, of letting the magic happen,” writes Professor Dan Rockmore in The Myth and Magic of Generating New Ideas in The New Yorker Annals of Inquiry. “Perhaps it is the momentary feeling of being untethered that gives the mind free rein — the space to have a good idea.”
November 07, 2019
Byrne Scholar Connor Spencer ’22, second from left, conducted research on the genetics of thermogenesis of eutherian mammals at the Wenner-Gren Institute this summer. Connor is especially interested in the intersection of computer science and applied mathematics. “My research this summer at the Wenner-Gren Institute at Stockholm University offered me with a truly life-changing experience,” he says. “I am really glad to have taken part in this research and worked with some of the best thinkers in this field.”
November 06, 2019
Professor Dorothy Wallace will give a talk titled Creating a Broadly Useful In Silico Tumor Simulation Through Leveraging Multiple Data Sources at Norris Cotton Cancer Center Grand Rounds on Tuesday November 12 from 12 – 1pm at DHMC. Professor Wallace, whose current research focuses on mathematical biology, will lead Dartmouth’s second Mathematical Oncology DSP at the Moffitt Cancer Research Center in Tampa this winter.
October 25, 2019
Math 19 (Introduction to Set Theory) will be offered in Winter 2020. Topics covered include the algebra of sets, ordinals and cardinals, transfinite induction and recursion, and the axiom of choice. Students will learn language and concepts used throughout mathematics, and will learn how to write mathematical proofs, which makes Math 19 excellent preparation for upper level courses. View the full advertisement for more information.
October 24, 2019
What can you do with a math degree? Accounting, finance, and computer programming might come to mind, but what about writing and journalism? Mathematician and freelance writer Evelyn Lamb will give a talk titled Building a Creative Career in Mathematics on Thursday November 7 at 5:30pm in 008 Kemeny. This talk is sponsored by the Department of Mathematics, the Byrne Scholars Program, the Dartmouth Math Society, and the Association for Women in Mathematics.
October 24, 2019
Professor Scott Pauls and Daryl DeFord Ph.D. ’18 co-authored the paper Spectral clustering methods for multiplex networks, recently published in the journal Physica A. Professor Paul’s research focuses on building and analyzing network models for social, biological, and physical systems. DeFord, currently a postdoctoral associate at MIT (CSAIL), received the Hannah Croasdale Award for his approach to research and teaching while at Dartmouth.
October 23, 2019
Instructor Bjoern Muetzel and Byrne Scholar Hugo Nam ’21 participated in the fourth annual NYC Math Festival where they led geometry activities with children. Using solids built from Geometiles® and mirrors attached to the inside faces they created a new type of kaleidoscope with which to view New York City postcards at the festival.
October 18, 2019
Byrne Scholar Kayla Hamann ’22 (standing, fifth from left) recently attended MAA MathFest, where she attended talks on topics ranging from recreational mathematics to math in social justice. She also attended a mentoring workshop for women where she learned from other undergrads, graduate students, professors, and professionals. “I came away from MAA MathFest with a wealth of resources,” she says. Kayla is an aspiring math major and on the executive board of the student chapter of the AWM.
October 16, 2019
Together with Thayer professors Petra Bonfert-Taylor and Laura Ray and computer science professor Lorie Loeb, Professor Scott Pauls received a $2.8M NSF Accelerating Discovery Award for the grant Data Science Infused for Undergraduate STEM Education. With this award, Dartmouth will develop teaching materials to introduce data science into first-year courses in science, technology, engineering, and math by the Fall of 2020. Learn more +
October 11, 2019
Dartmouth’s Neukom Institute provides support for undergraduates working on computational projects by way of the Neukom Scholars Program and Travel Grants. In addition, the Neukom Fellows program brings to campus early-career interdisciplinary postdoctoral researchers whose work has a computational theme. View the list of current Neukom fellows to see research interests and mentorships.
October 06, 2019
On Thursday October 17 Adjunct Professor of Mathematics Eugene Demidenko will give a lunchtime talk on how machine learning can be enriched by statistics. Professor Demidenko’s interests include methodological and applied statistical research with applications to advanced bioengineering technologies. He is the author of the book Mixed Models: Theory and Applications with R and is the recipient of several awards from the American Statistical Association. Register here for the talk.
September 20, 2019
Thanks to the generous Byrne gift, Byrne Scholar Archita Harathi ’22 recently traveled to the U.K. to conduct research under the guidance of Marie Curie Fellow Irena Vankova at the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge. “My experience working at the British Antarctic Survey was full of learning and exploring the potential of mathematics in a variety of applications. I am forever grateful for experience and the memories I made along with it!”
September 19, 2019
Professor Carl Pomerance, Jared Duker Lichtman AB, AM ’18, and Nathan McNew Ph.D. ’15 attended the 2019 Paul Erdős Lecture Series, a conference in memory of one of Professor Pomerance's greatest mentors. Jared will be starting a Ph.D. at Oxford with an interest in number theory of the sort Erdős particularly enjoyed, and Nathan is now Assistant Professor at Towson University. Professor Pomerance spoke on “Erdős and Primitive Sets” at the conference.
September 19, 2019
The Dartmouth Association for Womxn in Mathematics welcomes the Class of 2023! The executive board invites you to attend meetings where you can suggest programming ideas for the term and be around other self-identifying womxn (and allies) who enjoy mathematics. Clockwise from upper left: Kayla Hamann ’22, Itzel Castañeda Ruvalcaba ’20, Roxy Holden ’21, Lizzie Hernández-Videa ’22, and Paola Karapataki ’22.
September 09, 2019
The National Museum of Mathematics (MoMath) has selected Professor Peter Winkler as the second Distinguished Chair for the Public Dissemination of Mathematics. He will launch “A Year of Puzzles” at MoMath and will lead a series of public initiatives, including mini-courses in puzzle solving, special events at city high schools, and a series of puzzle-themed dinners on probability and decision theory. “Being good at math is great, but not necessary. Being unafraid of math, and a bit curious, is enough to give any child or adult a big advantage.” Learn more +
September 06, 2019
Enrique Treviño Ph.D. ’11, Associate Professor of Mathematics at Lake Forest College, is a 2019 Lathisms honoree in the category of Latinx and Hispanic mathematics educators. He earned his Ph.D. in mathematics with an emphasis in number theory under the guidance of Professor Carl Pomerance. Lathisms was founded in 2016 to showcase the contributions of Latinx and Hispanic mathematicians during Hispanic Heritage Month. “My favorite part of Lathisms has been the podcast. It is great to hear about the life of other mathematicians. To listen to the struggles on their path and their resilience... and to hear the joy mathematics brings to them.”
August 30, 2019
The paper Edge-adaptive $\ell_2$ regularization image reconstruction from non-uniform Fourier data by graduate student Victor Churchill and Professor Anne Gelb (joint with Rick Archibald at Oak Ridge National Laboratory) was recently published in Inverse Problems and Imaging. Below are synthetic aperture radar images of a car reconstructed using (left) $\ell_1$ regularization and (right) edge-adaptive $\ell_2$ regularization. The top panels show the full car and the bottom are close-ups of the lower right wheel.
August 29, 2019
The department welcomes Assistant Professor Asher Auel, whose article The Mathematics of Grace Murray Hopper was published earlier this year in Notices of the American Mathematical Society. “I think that her story should be retold in our courses because it emphasizes the broad importance of basic training in mathematics. In some sense, you could think of mathematics as the liberal arts of the sciences. It’s the language you’ll use in all scientific disciplines. It’s a way of knowing, a way of thinking, and a way of understanding truth.”
August 28, 2019
Instructor Bjoern Muetzel and Yana Mohanty will be exhibiting photographs and sculptures of mirror solids at the ICERM Illustrating Mathematics Program at Brown this fall. For the piece Archimedean billiards II, they explored what happens when you attach mirror surfaces to the inside faces of a rhombicosidodecahedron. “We set out to find this out by placing a spherical camera near the center of the solid and then stereographically projecting the output.” Learn more +
August 23, 2019
Isabel Pantle, Varun (Rooney) Malladi, Eliza Crocker, and Anna Mikhailova (clockwise from top left) are among ten named Byrne Scholars in the class of 2023. The generous Byrne gift allows students to study with faculty committed to using mathematics to build solutions to complex problems, to present research findings at conferences, and to participate in research exchanges abroad.
August 22, 2019
Michael Musty and Sam Schiavone received their Ph.D.s this summer focusing on topics in algebra, geometry, and number theory. Michael’s thesis is 2-group Belyi Maps and he has a visiting position at ICERM where he will be working on visualizations of dessins d’enfants in the Illustrating Mathematics program. Sam’s thesis is On Algebras Of Low Rank And On Belyi Maps and he is moving on to a postdoc position at MIT in the Number Theory group.
August 21, 2019
Byrne Scholars Connor Spencer ’22 and Jacob Fyda ’22 conducted an undergraduate research project in biomathematics at the Wenner-Gren Institute in Stockholm, Sweden this summer. Martin Jastroch and Michael Gaudry, the project’s supervisors, study mitochondria and cellular energy metabolisms. Instructor Bjoern Muetzel facilitated this exchange. From left: Martin Jastroch, Bjoern Muetzel, Connor Spencer, and Michael Gaudry.
July 26, 2019
The annual report of the Simons Foundation features Principal Investigator John Voight’s research in arithmetic geometry and number theory and explores where this work may lead in the future. “Our collaboration grew out of the questions: What does computational number theory look like in the 21st century, and what tools should be developed for use by the arithmetic geometry community?” Learn more +
July 25, 2019
Jared Hodes ’20 discusses his group’s joint work on their poster $\alpha\beta\gamma$ Conjecture for Gaussian Integers, which won Second Place in Pure Mathematics at our undergraduate poster session held annually in May. View the gallery of 2019 posters to see interesting examples of our student-faculty research.
July 18, 2019
Allison Henrich Ph.D. ’08, Professor of Mathematics at Seattle University, is the editor of Living Proof: Stories of Resilience Along the Mathematical Journey. This collection has an impressive Dartmouth showing: along with Henrich, Lola Thompson Ph.D. ’12, David Neel Ph.D. ’02, Nicholas Scoville Ph.D. ’10, and Dominic Klyve, Ph.D. ’07 each contributed a chapter. The book is available as a free download. Learn more +
July 17, 2019
Instructor Bjoern Muetzel (right), Byrne Scholar Hugo Hyung Ju Nam ’21, and Math major Ty Fierce Metteba ’20 recently traveled to the National Math Festival in Washington, D.C. where they led geometry activities with children. Muetzel’s research interests include low dimensional geometry and topology, systolic geometry, and harmonic forms on surfaces.
July 07, 2019
The Dartmouth Alumni Council presented the 2019 Rassias Award to Professor Dorothy Wallace. The award is granted to a faculty member each year and recognizes exceptional educational outreach to alumni. Professor Wallace, who has recently led alumni trips to Iceland and Greece, incorporates mathematical concepts into the excursions, making math accessible to alumni and their families.
July 06, 2019
Angelica Babei received her Ph.D. in June and will be starting a postdoc position at Vanderbilt this fall. Her research interests are in algebraic number theory and her thesis On the Arithmetic of Tiled Orders focused on computing type numbers of orders in central simple algebras.
July 05, 2019
Math major Will Kaufman ’20 is the second place winner of the Neukom Prize for Outstanding Undergraduate Research in Computational Science for 2019. Will's project, Improving change detection algorithms with variance based joint sparsity recovery, explored image reconstruction problems in signal processing.
June 27, 2019
Congratulations to Victor Churchill, winner of a second place Neukom Prize for Outstanding Graduate Research in Computational Science for his project Detecting edges from non-uniform Fourier data via sparse Bayesian learning. Victor works with Professor Anne Gelb on image reconstruction problems; their work has recently led to two joint papers.
June 26, 2019
Sara Chari and Melanie Dennis pose for family photos on the Dartmouth lawn following the 2019 Investiture ceremony. Sara (thesis: Orders in Quaternion and Central Simple Algebras) is moving on to a position at Bates College, and Melanie (thesis: Combinatorial Proofs to Linear Algebraic Identities) will be teaching at SNHU.
June 25, 2019
Math alumni Ken Swinski ’73, Dan Crowley ’73, and Bill Keegan ’75 enjoy refreshments and share stories at our open house during reunion week. Ken reports that his Dartmouth alumni club recently distributed copies of Professor Dan Rockmore’s book What Are the Arts and Sciences? A Guide for the Curious to local high school students.
June 14, 2019
Juan S. Auli is the recipient of this year’s Kenneth P. Bogart Teaching Award for his dedication to and excellence in advancing the educational mission of the department. Juan was also recognized this year as Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher for Math 20. Congratulations to Juan!
June 08, 2019
Spotted this week: a New Hampshire historical marker honoring the work of John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz on the development of BASIC. How did this come about? See the Granite Geek blog article, and click to view a larger image.
June 07, 2019
Ethan Goldman ’22 stops by the department to receive congratulations for First Place in Pure Mathematics for his poster Continued Fractions and abc-Triples. The poster was a project for the course An Introduction to Mathematics Beyond Calculus led by Professor John Voight. Ethan has not yet declared a major but is considering Mathematics.
May 31, 2019
Congratulations to Melanie Dennis, the recipient of the 2019 Guarini Graduate Teaching Award! This award recognizes dedication, commitment, creativity, innovation, and overall excellence in teaching. Melanie has accepted a position at Southern New Hampshire University and we wish her much success.
May 30, 2019
Louisa Gao ’22 and Matt Sawicki ’20 won First Place in Applied Mathematics for their poster For Whom the Bell Tolls: Modeling Wind Chimes with the Classical Wave Equation. Combining their interests in math and music, they applied the wave equation to model the acoustics of vibrating cylinders in a project for Introduction to Applied Mathematics taught by Professor Dorothy Wallace.
May 15, 2019
Fourth-year graduate student Laura Petto works with Professor Anne Gelb on image reconstruction problems and is helping to design new algorithms with potential applications in the fields of aerial and medical imaging. Learn more +
May 12, 2019
This year we are hosting Math Camp, two summer enrichment sessions for local high school students. Topics covered will be outside of the usual high school syllabus and students can interact with mathematicians in a fun, non-graded environment. Each program will cover different mathematical topics and students are invited to attend one or both sessions.
April 27, 2019
All undergraduates who have done research projects in pure or applied mathematics are invited to present a poster at the department's annual Undergraduate Poster Session on Wednesday May 29 from 4:30–6:30pm in the main floor of Kemeny Hall. View our gallery of 2018 posters for inspiration!
April 25, 2019
Professor Carl Pomerance's paper Proof of the Sheldon Conjecture, co-authored with Chris Spicer, proves a mathematical concept inspired by an episode in the CBS series The Big Bang Theory. In the April 18 episode, excerpts from Professor Pomerance's proof can be seen written on the whiteboard in the show. Learn more +
April 24, 2019
Sonia Kovalevsky Day is a fun-filled day of mathematics with hands-on workshops and talks for middle and high school female students and their teachers, both women and men. Originally started and funded by the Association for Women in Mathematics, the purpose of the day is to encourage young women to continue their study of mathematics and to assist the teachers of female mathematics students.
April 23, 2019
The Thayer Prize Exam, a Dartmouth mathematics competition for first-year students, will take place this year on Saturday, April 27 from 10am – 1pm. Please notify the Mathematics Department in advance if you would like to take the exam but cannot take it on April 27.
April 18, 2019
Professor Yoonsang Lee and graduate student Victor Churchill recently gave research talks at New England Numerical Analysis Day 2019 at WPI. Professor Lee gave a talk about his recent paper A seamless homogenization method for multiscale diffusion and advection operators based on joint work with Bjorn Engquist at UT Austin. Churchill's talk was on joint work with Professor Gelb, Image reconstruction via edge-masked regularization.
April 17, 2019
Math graduate student Juan S. Auli was named an outstanding graduate student teacher for his work teaching Math 20 — Probability in Fall 2018. Every year, DCAL invites undergraduates to nominate graduate students who have been outstanding teachers to be recognized during Grad Student Appreciation Week. Congratulations to Juan!
April 12, 2019
Are you doing research in science, math, or engineering? Present your findings at the 28th Annual Wetterhahn Science Poster Symposium on May 22. Register online by Wednesday May 8. Questions? Contact Undergraduate.Research@Dartmouth.edu.
April 10, 2019
Professor Rosa Orellana's research on symmetric functions was recently published in the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A. The paper Products of symmetric group characters is co-authored by Professor Orellana and Mike Zabrocki.
April 09, 2019
The department celebrated our Math Essay Contest, Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics, with a reception and prize ceremony. Two of this year's winning essays received national awards.
April 03, 2019
Professor Craig Sutton, whose research interests in differential geometry include Riemannian geometry, spectral geometry, and homogeneous spaces, will speak at the 2019 Bloomington Geometry Workshop at Indiana University. His talk, titled Geometric Structures and the Laplace Spectrum, is based on collaborative work with Instructor Samuel Lin.
March 28, 2019
Professors Jody Trout and Erik van Erp are featured speakers at this year’s Noncommutative Geometry Festival. The festival will highlight some of the most significant recent advances in noncommutative geometry and identify promising new research directions. Our own department will host NCG 2020.
March 27, 2019
Instructor Bjoern Muetzel and student volunteers will be leading geometric games and activities for children and visitors at the National Math Festival in Washington, D.C. this May. The festival hopes to “inspire and challenge all ages to see math in new and unexpected ways.”
March 26, 2019
View the winning essays in the department-sponsored 2019 Essay Contest, Biographies of Contemporary Women in Mathematics. Edel Galgon ’22 is the undergraduate winner, and two middle school contestants won national awards.
March 14, 2019
Graduate students Emma Hartman and Melanie Dennis enjoy pizza, conversation, and a break from thesis-writing at the department's end-of-term party, held in Fall, Winter, and Spring terms.
March 06, 2019
The John J. Byrne Jr. Prize is awarded to the top Dartmouth graduating mathematics major interested in continuing mathematics at the graduate level. The award will cover Shikhin’s tuition for the first year of graduate school at Princeton University. Congratulations to Shikhin!
January 31, 2019
The work of Ken Bogart (1943–2005) on an inquiry-based learning approach for undergraduate combinatorics, Combinatorics Through Guided Discovery, is now available in an interactive web version, a new print edition, and pdf.
Learn more +
December 12, 2018
Geometer and John Wesley Young Research Instructor Bjoern Muetzel presents “Reach Out and Touch Space!” at MoMath's Family Fridays series. According to the museum, the series is “designed to bring families together to enjoy a diverse array of engaging mathematical activities, promoting interest and enthusiasm among kids and adults alike. The activities are designed so that all attendees, regardless of age, can participate on an equal footing.”
November 25, 2018
Former instructor Jay Pantone co-authored the paper A lower bound on the length of the shortest superpattern, which verifies a proof posted by an anonymous 4chan user in 2011. A recent Quanta article sheds some light on this mathematical problem.
November 16, 2018
Professor John Voight co-authored the paper A heuristic for boundedness of ranks of elliptic curves, soon to be published in The Journal of the European Mathematical Society. Read more in the Quanta article Without a Proof, Mathematicians Wonder How Much Evidence Is Enough.
November 16, 2018
Congratulations to Will Kaufman ’20 for being selected to receive the Francis L. Town Scientific Prize for his achievement in Mathematics.
November 01, 2018
After hiking Holt’s Ledge near the Dartmouth Skiway, the Math extended family takes a well-earned break in anticipation of dinner and good cheer at the department’s annual Fall Party.
November 01, 2018
What’s the science and math behind these films? Professor Dan Rockmore organized the STEM @ The Nugget series to spark discussion among local school students. Colleagues from Dartmouth's departments of Computer Science, Physics, History, and Earth Sciences will bring their expertise. The films will run on Monday school holidays during this year.
November 01, 2018
Math major Tucker Evans ’19 and Professor Feng Fu co-authored the paper Opinion formation on dynamic networks: identifying conditions for the emergence of partisan echo chambers, recently published in Royal Society Open Science. “I would like to express my gratitude to the college and the mathematics department in particular for their support,” says Evans. “This project has been a wonderful learning experience.”
October 04, 2018
Byrne scholars Anuraag Bukkuri, Megan Green, and Kyle Bensink did summer research internships at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, working in the genetic diversity, bioinformatics, and genome research groups. From left: Kyle Bensink, Anuraag Bukkuri, Bjoern Muetzel, Ben Peter, and Kay Pruefer.
September 27, 2018
Professor Rosa Orellana supervised three students for eight weeks as part of the ASURE summer program at Dartmouth. The three students, all from UPR, were supported by the PR-LSAMP funded by NSF. From left: Fermin Arraiza Truust, Andres Ramos-Rodriguez, and Dylan Cruz Fonseca. Their research was in algebraic combinatorics.
September 20, 2018
Professor Sergi Elizalde has received the Dean of the Faculty Award for Outstanding Mentoring and Advising. “I enjoy mentoring research, both at the undergraduate and graduate level, and I love teaching smart and motivated Dartmouth students who are eager to learn,” says Professor Elizalde, whose main field of research is enumerative combinatorics.
Learn more +
September 10, 2018
Mathematics Professor Scott Pauls will be the new director of the Dartmouth Center for the Advancement of Learning (DCAL), announced Interim Provost David Kotz. 'Scott is ideally suited to carry on the important and innovative work that flourished at DCAL thanks to Lisa Baldez and the center’s talented staff,' says Kotz.
September 07, 2018
Math Professor Jody Trout co-authored the paper \(K_0\)-theory of n-potents in rings and algebras, recently published in the European Journal of Mathematics. Professor Trout’s research interests include functional analysis, operator algebras, \(K\)-theory, noncommutative geometry, and quantum theory.
August 17, 2018
Professors Feng Fu and Anne Gelb organized the Dartmouth Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) program, which brought eight students from all over the United States to Dartmouth for seven weeks this summer for collaborative research on “The Mathematics of Misinformation”.
August 05, 2018
Participants enjoy a talk during FPSAC 2018, hosted by the Math Department this summer. “Everybody who works in combinatorics anywhere in the world knows about this conference,” says Professor Sergi Elizalde, chair of the organizing committee. “Each talk is eye opening.”
Learn more +
July 30, 2018
The Number Theory Foundation’s 2018 Selfridge Prize in Number Theory has been awarded to Michael Musty, Sam Schiavone, Jeroen Sijsling, and John Voight for their paper A Database of Belyi Maps. The prize is awarded to the best paper submitted to the Algorithmic Number Theory Symposium (ANTS) conference proceedings.
July 17, 2018
View our gallery of undergraduate research posters presented at this year's undergraduate poster session. Matthew Yung ’18, Hailey Jiang ’19, Ray Guo ’19, and Eva Wang ’19 authored the poster shown here, which was the first place winner in applied mathematics.
July 12, 2018
Bjoern Muetzel, a John Wesley Young Research Instructor in Mathematics, recently organized an exhibition of geometry games and puzzles at several local schools. The K-5 students learned about geometric shapes such as the platonic solids, projections, and tessellations.
June 17, 2018
Congratulations to Daryl DeFord PhD ’18 as he receives Dartmouth's Hannah Croasdale Award! Daryl is currently a postdoc in the Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group at MIT and Tufts.
Learn more +
June 07, 2018
Prof. Peter Winkler, the William Morrill Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science, has been appointed to the Mathematics Advisory Board for National Museum of Mathematics, an award-winning museum located in Manhattan. “The museum highlights the role of mathematics in illuminating the patterns and structures all around us. Its dynamic exhibits, gallery, and programs are designed to stimulate inquiry, spark curiosity, and reveal the wonders of mathematics,” says the museum’s website. “The museum’s innovative exhibits will engage folks from 105 to 5 years old—and even younger.”
May 16, 2018
Faculty, graduate students, and undergrads gather while hosting seventy middle and high school students at Sonia Kovalevsky Math Day, a fun-filled day of mathematics with hands-on workshops and talks for middle and high school female students and their teachers.
May 09, 2018
Congratulations to Ph.D. student Ben Breen, winner of this year's Kenneth P. Bogart Teaching Award for his dedication to and excellence in advancing the educational mission of the department. In Fall term Ben taught an accelerated version of multivariable calculus for first-year students.
February 28, 2018
Jared Duker Lichtman ’18 has received a Churchill Scholarship, which annually funds 15 American students nominated from 110 participating U.S. institutions for a year of master's-level study in a STEM field.
Learn more +
February 14, 2018
When not working hard at modeling cancer processes, students in our new off-campus program at the Moffitt Cancer Research Center relax by swimming with manatees. From left: Lawrence Abu-Hammour '19, Alice Hsu '19, Shannon Fee '18, and Jade Yen '19.
January 17, 2018
Anirudh Udutha ’18 and Jared Duker Lichtman ’18 join Professor Emeritus Carl Pomerance at the 2018 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego. Jared and Professor Pomerance spoke in the AMS Special Session on Computational Combinatorics and Number Theory.
January 17, 2018
Dartmouth Math undergraduate students Tucker Evans '19, Jonathan Meng '18, and Herbert Ho-Chun Chang '18 (from left) are invited to present their research work with Professor Feng Fu at the 2018 Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego.
November 22, 2017
Professor Carolyn Gordon is a member of the inaugural class of the Association for Women in Mathematics Fellows Program. This program recognizes Professor Gordon and other mathematicians for their “unwavering commitment to promoting and supporting women in mathematics”, honoring their sustained work in support of the AWM mission.
November 22, 2017
Congratulations to Math major Shikhin Sethi ’19, who received the Francis L. Town Scientific Prize for his achievement in Mathematics. Shikhin works with Professor Peter Doyle on projects involving topology, algorithms, and probability. He plans to go to graduate school and eventually do research in mathematics or computer science.
November 03, 2017
Professor Dan Rockmore speaks with VPR on the new Neukom Institute Literary Arts Awards and what he sees as an opportunity for the arts to provide an important pause for reflection which is often overlooked in an age of accelerating digital technologies.
September 21, 2017
Yixuan He '18 was one of twelve undergraduate students invited to give a talk at the 2017 SIAM Annual Meeting, where she presented on her research with Professor Dorothy Wallace on a model of cancer tumor growth.
September 08, 2017
SIAM News Online features graduate student Xingru Chen’s research on vaccine compliance joint with Professor Feng Fu.
August 29, 2017
In this Numberphile video, Professor Emeritus Carl Pomerance recounts how a “joke” article in the Journal of Recreational Mathematics led to a career-changing collaboration with Paul Erdős — and to a meeting between Erdős and baseball legend Hank Aaron.
August 17, 2017
Prof. Dan Rockmore has been named associate dean of the sciences in the Faculty of Arts and Sciences. “It’s important for scientists and mathematicians to talk to each other on college campuses,” says Rockmore, “but we should not let that conversation become too hermetic. Our ideas need to be out in the world.”
August 17, 2017
Professor Emeritus Carl Pomerance explains what makes 210 especially interesting with regard to Golbach’s Conjecture. How can a number be very “Goldbachy”? Watch the Numberphile video to find out.
July 19, 2017
Professor Dorothy Wallace has received the Dean of the Faculty Mentoring Award for 2016-17. Professor Wallace has previously earned an award for Graduate Faculty Mentoring.
July 17, 2017
Professor John Voight is a Principal Investigator on the newly announced Simons Foundation Collaboration on Arithmetic Geometry, Number Theory and Computation. The collaboration seeks to accelerate research in these fields through the computational realization of deep theory and to use the computational tools to probe our conceptual understanding of complex arithmetic objects.
July 06, 2017
Coming in 2018: the The 30th International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics. The Math Department is hosting this conference which will take place July 16-20, 2018.
July 04, 2017
Our graduate students have many talents. Everett Sullivan won a Dartmouth College Libary Book Arts Prize this year, receiving an Honorable Mention in Letterpress Printing. From left are Everett, Tim Dwyer, and Seth Harris.
June 13, 2017
Fourth year Ph.D. student David Freund received this year's Kenneth P. Bogart Teaching Award. The Dartmouth Mathematics Department gives this award annually to the final year graduate student who best exemplifies outstanding dedication to and excellence in advancing the educational mission of the department. Congratulations, David!
June 13, 2017
Fourth year Ph.D. student Daryl DeFord, pictured here coaching at NHSPE Mathcounts, received this year's Dartmouth Graduate Teaching Award. This award recognizes dedication, commitment, creativity, innovation, and overall excellence in teaching. Congratulations to Daryl!
May 25, 2017
Professor Dan Rockmore is the editor of the new book What Are the Arts and Sciences? A Guide for the Curious (Dartmouth College Press/University Press of New England), in which his colleagues explain their fields and what it is that they do. Professor Rockmore wrote the chapter on mathematics.
May 16, 2017
On May 6, the Math department hosted Discrete Math Day. It was co-organized by Sergi Elizalde, Rosa Orellana, Jay Pantone and Peter Winkler. Discrete Math Days in the Northeast is a conference series that seeks to bring together a community of combinatorists in the northeast, providing a relaxed atmosphere and a friendly environment conducive to fostering collaboration accross institutions and disciplines.
May 08, 2017
Modern Cryptography and Elliptic Curves: A Beginner’s Guide by Professor Thomas Shemanske will soon be published by the American Mathematical Society.
May 02, 2017
The Dartmouth Putnam team ranked 26th nationally in the prestigious William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Congratulations to team members James Drain '17, Jared Duker Lichtman '18, and Dong Won Kang '17!
April 25, 2017
A group of Dartmouth alumni, parents and friends visit Iceland in April 2017, accompanied by Professor Dorothy Wallace who gave a talk on the probability of eruption of the volcano Katla. This photo is taken at the place where the mid-Atlantic ridge rises out of the sea.
April 13, 2017
Jared Duker Lichtman '18 was recently selected as a Barry Goldwater Scholar.
Jared is among three Dartmouth undergraduates who received the prestigious scholarship this year.
April 03, 2017
Caren Diefenderfer '73, among the first class of women at Dartmouth, an active member of the MAA and NNN, and recent recipient of the Haimo Award for Distinguished Teaching died on March 31, a significant loss to the community.
March 28, 2017
Prof. Dorothy Wallace gave a talk at the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2017 in Atlanta on the consequences of rising temperatures for malaria vector abundance. Her work is joint with several authors, two of which are Dartmouth undergraduates Jacob Savos and Ann Dunham.
March 28, 2017
Prof. Dorothy Wallace gave a talk at the 2017 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta on a model of cancer tumor growth. Among her many collaborators are numerous undergraduates: Paula Chen, Michelle Chen, Milan Huynh, Evan Rheingold, Ann Dunham, Sophia Jiang, Celeste Rodriguez, Molly Carpenter, Rachel Chang and Yixuan He.
March 28, 2017
Prof. Dorothy Wallace gave a talk at the 2017 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta on the extensive preparation for teaching that is part of the graduate program in Mathematics.
March 22, 2017
Professor Dorothy Wallace participated in a panel at the 2017 Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta on "Women and scholarly publishing in mathematics".
March 10, 2017
Professor Dan Rockmore and Sarunas Burdulis have joined volunteer efforts at Climate Mirror and ArchiveTeam to backup all U.S. government data, including climate datasets. Climate Mirror at Dartmouth
February 15, 2017
Professor Dan Rockmore has helped to curate “Picturing Math,” an exhibit of aquatints on display in the Metropolitan Museum. The title of the collection is Concinnitas, a word used by the Renaissance philosopher Leon Battista Alberti to describe the balance of number, outline, and position he thought characterized a beautiful work of art.
January 02, 2017
The Dartmouth writes about Professor Feng Fu’s research on combining evolutionary game theory models with empirical data to improve our understanding of real-world cooperation problems, such as climate change, vaccine compliance and antibiotics overuse.
Mathematics at Dartmouth
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