Math Update Summer 2020

College of Science and Technology

MATHEMATICS UPDATE SUMMER 2020

From the chairs

Taylor named Sloan Research Fellow

We hope that this edition of the newsletter finds you well and healthy. Looking back at the academic year that just ended and its avalanche of incredible challenges, we are humbled by the grit, professionalism, determination and collective wisdom of our faculty and students. Thank you all for pushing through stressful situations, for adapting to online teaching essentially overnight, and for tirelessly working on behalf of our students.

We will let the stories in the newsletter speak of the department’s professional activities and of the many successes we had this past year: new initiatives, grants, new national and university awards. Here we want to express the department’s commitment to building an inclusive and supporting academic community where Black Lives Matter. We count on every one of you as we work towards a more diverse, more equitable and a more inclusive department.

In the heart of a diverse city and part of a university that serves a diverse body of students, we are uniquely positioned to put thoughts into action. We should do more and we should do better to create positive change and to fight racism in all aspects of life, and especially in the academic environment. The road ahead is long and we need to keep each other accountable on this course.

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation named Assistant Professor Samuel Taylor a 2020 Sloan Research Fellow. The highly competitive honor identifies rising scientists who’ve made significant marks on their field and represent the next generation of leaders in the U.S. and Canada.

Since the award’s inception in the mid 1950s, five Temple faculty members have been named Sloan Research Fellows, including three faculty members from the Department of Mathematics.

“Having my research recognized at this level is a huge honor,” says Taylor, who joined the department in 2017 from a position at Yale University as Gibbs Assistant Professor. “Many of my mentors were themselves Sloan Fellows, so having this point of comparison to them at a similar career stage is extremely rewarding.”

Taylor’s research interests include geometric topology and geometric group theory, with a focus on hyperbolic geometry and dynamics. In particular, he has studied the geometry of fiber bundles as well as various statistical properties of geometrically significant groups.

“I like to find and exploit the geometry of whatever object I’m thinking about.

Sometimes that means studying the properties of the shortest loops on two dimensional spaces, and sometimes that means thinking about spaces of graphs and their symmetries,” explains Taylor, a Philadelphia-area native. “When a topic seems too hard for me to think about directly, I often like to think about what happens in the ‘typical’ case.”

The Sloan fellowship includes a $75,000 grant, which Taylor had planned to use for research travel this upcoming fall but is now hoping to do in early 2021.

“I also have a postdoc starting at Temple in the fall,” he says, “and the additional money can help fund her travel and research program as well.”

Irina Mitrea, Chair Brian Rider, Associate Chair

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Trio of 2019 graduates pursue prestigious PhDs Eric Albers, University of Illinois at Chicago At Temple, Albers was a student tutor, a classroom assistant and a departmental student ambassador who gave campus tours to prospective CST undergraduates. He also spent the summer of 2018 researching congruence surfaces at Indiana University and, guided by Professor Matthew Stover, spent his senior year researching the rigidity of Fuchsian group representations.

“Both research projects have really opened my eyes to the connection between geometry and dynamics,” says Albers.

“The first year of graduate school forces you to grow at an insane rate,” adds Albers. “It’s hard to comprehend the amount of math knowledge I’ve gained the past year, but the same could be said of my senior year, when I took graduate courses.”

Albers may pursue an academic and research career. His other option?

After interning next summer with the Milwaukee Brewers’ Baseball Research and Development Department, he could also make baseball analytics his focus.

Aidan Lorenz, Vanderbilt University While at Temple, Lorenz tutored math and physics courses at both the Student Success Center and the Resnick Academic Support Center for student athletes. In June and July 2018, he was a student researcher at Cornell University and, under Professor Vasily Dolgushev, for more than two years he studied shadows of the GrothendieckTeichmu̎ller group.

“As an undergraduate at Temple, you have the opportunity to take extra courses covering a lot of material that not everyone entering into a graduate program has seen,” says Lorenz, a Temple Honors Program participant who attended the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics in 2016. “And there’s a lot of opportunity outside of the classes to do undergraduate research.

“Working with Dr. Dolgushev was a pretty important experience for me,” says Lorenz. “He was very gracious with his time and a very patient teacher.”

Matthew Wynne, University of Washington For three years at Temple, Wynne tutored math and statistics courses at the Student Success Center. Guided by departmental faculty, including Professor Vasily Dolgushev, during his last two years he conducted undergraduate research that resulted in his co-authorship of a paper on deformations of noncommutative algebras that appeared in Communications in Algebra.

Those research experiences, he says, were key to both proving his math talents to himself and to being admitted into the University of Washington’s doctoral program. “The research tangibly showed me that there was interesting math to be done and that I was able to do it,” says Wynne. “Initially at Temple, I wasn’t sure I had the mathematical chops to do anything beyond an undergrad degree, so it was really cool to be able to write up my results and see them published.”

Newly Funded Grants Shiferaw Berhanu • Unique Continuation and Regularity of CR Mappings, NSF David Futer • Conference Proposal: Classical and Quantum Three-Manifold Topology, NSF • Hyperbolic Geometry: Effective, Quantum, and Coarse, Simons Foundation • Hyperbolic Manifolds and Their Groups, NSF Yury Grabovsky • Energy-driven instabilities in nonlinear elasticity and other questions from materials science, NSF Isaac Klapper • Determining how a Dynamic Microbiome Contributes to Cystic Fibrosis Lung Disease, NIH • Life on the Rocks: Chronic Subaerial Microbial Biofilms on Stone Monuments, NSF Irina Mitrea • Singular Integral Operators for Higher Order Elliptic Boundary Value Problems in Uniformly Rectifiable Domains, Simons Foundation • Singular Integral Operators for Higher-order Systems in Nonsmooth Domains, NSF Irina Mitrea and Maria Lorenz • Mathematical Confluences: A Partnership Between Temple University and Philadelphia High School for Girls, Mathematical Association of America Gillian Queisser • Collaboration Toward an Experimentally Validated Multiscale Model of rTMS, NIH Benjamin Seibold • Collaborative Research: Euler-Based TimeStepping with Optimal Stability and Accuracy for Partial Differential Equations, NSF • Flexible and Scalable Moment Method Simulations for Radiation Transport and Nuclear Medicine Applications, NSF Matthew Stover • Geometry, Topology, and Rank-1 Lattices, NSF • Temple University Graduate Student Conference in Algebra, Geometry and Topology, NSF Samuel J. Taylor • Conference: Young Geometric Group Theory VIII, NSF

Senior studies at Budapest Semesters

Mitrea awarded prestigious Simons Fellowship, named Carnell professor

Jacob Guynee, a rising senior mathematics major, spent last year’s fall semester at Budapest Semesters in Mathematics, a highly acclaimed study abroad program in Hungary.

“It was an amazing, incredible experience that was easily the best three or four months of my life,” says Guynee. “The classes and professors were excellent, and it was great to be able to travel with other American students to experience different cultures throughout Europe.

“The courses focused a lot on problem solving, rather than trying to get through as much material as possible,” he says.

“Now, whenever I approach a math problem, I have a little more intuition and feel more comfortable in solving them. It made my spring semester much easier.”

Guynee spent his last two summers before he entered Temple in Las Vegas developing code for an online mathematics curriculum provider and has also worked tutoring children, teens and adults for two different tutoring firms.

This fall, Guynee is beginning his senior year even though—thanks to credits he earned in high school and during summer courses—it is only his third year at Temple. He intends to take advantage of one of Temple’s 4+1 program during the following academic year by also earning a master’s degree.

This past academic year, Irina Mitrea, professor and chair of the Department of Mathematics, traveled to Europe to conduct collaborative research and lectured about her work thanks to the support of a prestigious Simons Foundation Fellowship.

Last fall, she spent most of her time at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, England. She also visited with students and scholars at the University of Birmingham, spent two weeks at Uppsala University in Sweden and visited the Simion Stoilow Institute of Mathematics of the Romanian Academy in Bucharest.

The COVID-19 pandemic, however, forced her to postpone planned spring trips to Madrid, Spain, and Brown University. Instead, she spent the spring semester working with collaborators at Baylor University.

“My experience, particularly my first-ever visit to Cambridge, was amazing, both mathematically and otherwise. The university has such a rich scientific history, and I was honored to receive a special fellowship from the institute for the duration of my visit.”

A renowned leader in her field of harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, Mitrea spent most of her fellowship time collaborating with mathematicians from around the world on research they have pursued for nearly 10 years. They were able to finish one research monograph and made significant progress on another.

“This work concerns partial differential equations which model physical phenomena, such as heat or fluid flow, elasticity or electromagnetism, and we are focusing on solving problems in domains whose boundaries are not smooth surfaces but they rather exhibit intricate have a lot of disparities irregularities and roughness,” she says.

Temple also named Mitrea a Laura H. Carnell Professor; she is the first female CST professor to be so named. “I am honored and humbled to have my work recognized this way, especially since the Carnell professorships are a tribute to the legacy of such a trailblazing female faculty member and Temple’s first dean,” she says.

FACULTY NEWS Professor Daniel Szyld was elected president of the International Linear Algebra Society (ILAS) and began serving his three-year term on March 1. “ILAS has a strong collaboration with the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics, and we hope to strengthen that relationship during my tenure as president,” says Szyld, who is a fellow of both organizations.

SABBATICALS Professor Daniel B. Szyld’s year-long 2019-20 sabbatical included collaborative research at the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque, New Mexico; the Technical University of Berlin; and at the University of Bologna. He also gave colloquia, lectures or seminars at these institutions, as well as at Tufts University, the Max Plank Institute in Magdeburg, Germany, and the Scuola

Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Finally, he also worked on a monograph SIAM will publish, “Metabolic Networks, Elementary Flux Modes, and Polyhedral Cones,” with Temple colleagues Isaac Klapper, professor, and Kai Zhao, adjunct assistant professor.

During his fall 2019 sabbatical, Professor Cristian E. Gutierrez lectured and conducted collaborative research in Europe at the universities of Paris-Orsay, Grenoble and Bern. The research focused on optimal transport, optics, Sobolev inequalities on cones and applications to PDEs.

ACCOLADE Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award Funded by Barry Arkles BA ’70, PhD ’76 Chem, member of CST Board of Visitors Meredith Hegg, assistant professor of instruction

Non Profit Organization U.S. Postage College of Science and Technology 1803 N. Broad Street 400 Carnell Hall Philadelphia, PA 19122

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For more news, go to math.temple.edu

Junior illustrates success of Sonia Kovalevsky Day As a sixth-grader, Anna Minasyan attended one of the first the Sonia Kovalevsky Days at Temple University. Sponsored by the Mathematics Department, the annual spring event attracts up to 75 middle school girls. Its purpose: to let girls know that they too can successfully pursue mathematics degrees and careers.

To illustrate how empowering the day can be, Minasyan is now a Temple University mathematics and computer science major who worked on SK Day last year. She also was planning to give back again by working with young girls during the 2020 SK Day prior to the COVID-19 campus shutdown.

Undaunted, however, the rising junior is looking forward to helping stage the event next spring. “Girls often aren’t encouraged to enter STEM fields in general, and math in particular,” says Minasyan, who is the president of the Temple student chapter of the Association for Women in Mathematics.

“Too often, people consider math to be boring and not useful.

So, it’s great to be able to spend a day showing young girls math is interesting, fun and has a multitude of applications.”

During last year’s event, she was impressed by how much more the girls were engrossed in math than when she attended. “They already knew a lot, and had looked up a lot of material online on their own,” she says. “It’s cool to see how the interest and engagement has increased.”

New PSM in high-performance computing for scientific applications The Mathematics Department introduced a new professional science master’s program in high-performance computing for scientific applications.

A blend of math and computer science, the 30-credit program is geared toward STEM graduates seeking to use high-performance computation as their primary research instrument in engineering, the life sciences and the physical sciences—whether that be in academia, government labs or industry.

The program’s co-directors are Professor Daniel Szyld and Associate Professor Benjamin Seibold, both Mathematics faculty.

The program is offered in conjunction with members of CST’s interdisciplinary high-performance computing group, which also includes biologists, chemists and physicists.

“The program is a blend of math and computer science,” says Brian Rider, the department’s associate chair, “and to be able to carry out large-scale computation calculations you not only need to be able to write and develop code but you also understand how these machines work in order to appropriately reconfigure the hardware.”

To learn more and to apply, go to cst.temple.edu/psm.