January 30, 2008
Dear friends of Georgia mathematics,
It is a pleasure to write to you again at the start of a new year. The Mathematics Department is busy as ever as the Spring semester gets into full swing.
At the moment we are in the midst of the hiring season, recruiting into two new positions at the Assistant Professor level for the coming fall. One of them represents a new wrinkle for us: responding to the Board of Regents’ mandate to increase and improve the production of qualified teachers, we are looking for an eager young mathematician who is willing to jump into the Department’s program to prepare students from the College of Education to teach mathematics in the Georgia schools. This program has been spearheaded by Professor Sybilla Beckmann, who has won wide renown as a key figure in the recent national trend of bona fide research mathematicians getting involved in mathematics education reform. We are excited at this opportunity to stay at the front of the pack for another generation.
The results of our last round of hiring in 2007 were excellent. In my letter last year I wrote already about the hiring of Jon Hanke and Mike Usher, who postponed their arrival in Athens for a year and will join us this coming Fall. Our third hire was Neil Lyall, who works in the area of harmonic analysis, specifically the very exciting applications of harmonic analysis to number theory that led to Terence Tao’s recent Fields Medal. Neil is a very promising young researcher, as well as a gifted and popular instructor in courses at all levels.
Highlighting the strength of our faculty as a whole, significant honors fell to several of our members. Distinguished Research Professor Dino Lorenzini gave a week-long advanced course at the workshop on “Geometrie et Arithmetique” in les Diablerets, Switzerland, in March (sharing the spotlight with the celebrated mathematician Jean-Pierre Serre, another lecturer at the same program). Professor Daniel Nakano gave the Shoemaker Distinguished Lecture Series at the University of Toledo in April 2007, and was also awarded the University of Georgia’s Distinguished Research Medal. Associate Professor Jason Cantarella won the Richard O. Russell Teaching Award, one of UGA’s highest instructional honors. To emphasize the significance of these achievements, Professors Nakano and Cantarella received their awards in front of 90,000 screaming fans at half-time of the homecoming football game this past Fall!
Another landmark for the Department was the all-time “departmental best” record of 18 graduate degrees awarded in 2007 (nine PhDs and nine Master’s degrees). Though we don’t expect to maintain this level of production, it is nevertheless a very positive sign of the maturity of the continuing improvement of our graduate program.
The Department has made an auspicious beginning in a new initiative to increase the level of involvement of our undergraduates in research. Some of our regular supervised research groups for first-year graduate students have expanded their membership to include some strong and eager undergraduates as well--- eight in all--- and we are contemplating ways to make this a more central part of the Mathematics major here. Last summer Professor Cantarella and I led two successful Research Experience for Undergraduates groups, with a focus on geometry, bringing in fifteen talented undergraduates from around the country. This coming summer the mathematical focus of the REU groups will shift to applied mathematics, with Assistant Professor Caner Kazanci leading a group on ecological modeling and Professor Ming-Jun Lai leading one on numerical analysis.
Lastly I would like to invite you once again to visit the Department whenever you can make it to Athens… but particularly during the upcoming James C. Cantrell Lectures on March 26, 27, and 28. This year’s speaker is Professor Bjorn Poonen of the University of California at Berkeley, a renowned number theorist; a common thread in his work is to take ideas that previously have been useful in theory, and to transform them into methods that can be used to solve down-to-earth problems. For more information on the lectures please go to
http://www.math.uga.edu/seminars_conferences/cantrell.html
And mark your calendars for the 2009 Cantrell Lectures, which Professor David Mumford has agreed to deliver. More details to come in my letter next year….
Best wishes,
Joe Fu
Professor and Head
P.S. Please take a few moments to fill out the UGA alumni questionnaire online at
http://www.math.uga.edu/~curr/alumni.html
--- and while you’re at it please consider making a financial contribution to the Department through the webpage
And of course you are always welcome to visit the Department whenever you are in Athens.
Best wishes,
Joe Fu
Professor and Head
