Math Update Winter 2022

College of Science and Technology

MATHEMATICS UPDATE WINTER 2022

From the chairs In the middle of a challenging academic year that included in-person, hybrid and virtual learning we are grateful to our supportive mathematics community. We want to thank our faculty members who took on additional teaching that enabled the department to serve our thousands of students. We have heard both the successes and the frustrations, and this experience will allow us to learn and grow stronger as a department Faculty highlights include the impressive academic background of our newest faculty hire, number theorist Jaclyn Lang; Associate Professor Matthew Stover’s groundbreaking research regarding a completely geometric characterization of arithmeticity; Professor Shiferaw Berhanu’s appointments as an editor to two additional mathematical journals; and Associate Professor of Instruction Jeromy Sivek’s well deserved CST Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award.

This newsletter also highlights the extraordinary careers of some of our mathematics graduates, including pursuing a doctorate in math biology, working as a software engineer for Lockheed Martin and interning with the National Security Agency. You can also learn about the valuable contributions of undergraduate and graduate student tutors who work with Temple students in the department’s Mathematics Consulting Center.

We would love to hear from you and invite you to visit us whenever you can.

Irina Mitrea, Laura H. Carnell Professor and Chair Brian Rider, Professor and Associate Chair

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After postdoc research at top universities in Europe, number theorist Lang joins Temple Jaclyn Lang, who has spent the past five years doing postdoctoral work at some of Europe’s most prominent institutions, has joined the Mathematics Department as an assistant professor. Lang’s research focuses on p-adic methods to study Galois representations and modular forms, with applications to questions in algebraic number theory.

The summa cum laude Bryn Mawr College mathematics graduate, both a BS and MS, earned her doctorate in mathematics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 2016.

That same year, a Fulbright U.S. Student Grant and a National Science Foundation Mathematical Sciences Postdoctoral Research Fellowship enabled her to spend three years at Sorbonne Université Paris Nord sandwiched around a year at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Germany. The past year, she was a Titchmarsh Research Fellow at Oxford University—a decade after she earned the equivalent of a second master’s degree at Cambridge University.

“My time at the Max Planck Institute was really productive,” says Lang. “It was the genesis of my work with two other postdocs, Andrea Conti from the University of Luxembourg and Anna Medvedovsky from Boston University, on the algebraic nature of images of pseudorepresentations.” continues on page 4

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After nearly dropping math, Cameron Jacobs, CST ’21, hired by Lockheed Martin During her sophomore year, Cameron Jacobs was failing her theoretical linear algebra course when Professor Yury Grabovsky pulled her aside. “I’m concerned about your homework grade,” Grabovsky told her. “I want you to come to my office every week to make sure you’re on track and understand the higher-level thinking involved.”

So, twice a week Jacobs spent two hours with Grabovsky doing homework. “Without his help, I would probably have dropped my math major,” says Jacobs, who in May graduated with a BS in mathematics and a minor in computer science. Her GPA: 3.42.

“The math program was really rigorous,” she says. “When you are able to write problems out, it’s a magical experience.”

Jacobs is now a software engineer with Lockheed Martin in King of Prussia, Pa. “I’m learning so much and it’s such a welcoming environment,” she says. “My combination of mathematics and computer science gave me an advantage over a lot of other people to be able to land this job.

“People who study math are able to dig down and analyze problems better than people who are just straight computer science majors.”

PhD candidate interns with National Security Agency James Rosado, a 2022 doctoral candidate, spent 12 weeks this past summer collaborating with other National Security Agency Graduate Mathematics Program Summer Interns and NSA and Department of Defense employees at Fort Meade, Maryland. He and his colleagues developed algorithms to detect synthesized speech using bispectrum/topological data analysis, then briefed Gen. Paul M. Nakasone, the NSA director, on their results.

“It was a very rewarding experience learning how the NSA works and working with other graduate students while learning about their own research projects,” says Rosado.

Rosado earned a BS in electrical and computer engineering from Rutgers University and an MA in mathematics from Rowan University, where he has been an adjunct professor. He also taught for nine years at Clearview Regional High School in Mullica Hill, New Jersey.

“I really enjoyed teaching, but always wanted to earn a doctorate,” says Rosado, whose applied mathematics research at Temple focuses on computational neuroscience. “I am studying the way biological mechanisms function in the brain from a mathematical perspective.”

Rosado is also president of the university’s Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics chapter; has participated in the department’s teaching and mentoring program; and is a graduate student representative on the department’s Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee.

“My experience here has been exceptional,” says Rosado.

“Thanks to my professors, I have a much greater appreciation of the link between high-performance computing and mathematics, mathematical reasoning and problem-solving, and communicating mathematics.”

Shiferaw Berhanu appointed editor of two more math journals This year, Professor Shiferaw Berhanu has been appointed an editor of two more mathematics journals: Complex Variables and Elliptic Equations and the Houston Journal of Mathematics.

“It is an honor to be asked to edit these journals,” says Berhanu, a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society and the African Academy of Sciences.

In further recognition of his international research stature and experience, he is also an editor for the African Diaspora Journal of Mathematics and the Latin American Mathematics Series–UFSCar book subseries published by Springer. Last year, the president of the American Mathematical Society also appointed him to serve a three-year term on the three-member committee that selects the annual winner of the prestigious Stefan Bergman Prize.

Berhanu joined the Temple faculty in 1987 after earning his doctorate in mathematics from Rutgers University. The Ethiopian native is also the co-founder of the mathematics PhD program at Addis Ababa University, where he earned his BSc degree, and has designed doctorate programs for three other African universities.

Since 1995, his efforts also have enabled 18 Ethiopians to earn a PhD in mathematics from Temple University.

Matthew Stover and colleagues give a completely geometric characterization of arithmeticity For years, mathematicians have tried to give a completely geometric characterization of arithmeticity (arithmetic). Matthew Stover, an associate professor of mathematics who joined the Temple faculty in 2013, has pondered the question for 15 years, ever since he was a PhD student at the University of Texas at Austin.

This spring, in a paper published in the prestigious Annals of Mathematics, Stover and three colleagues gave the first such characterization using totally geodesic submanifolds—which are higher dimensional analogues of geodesics. One example: a two-dimensional plane in a three-dimensional Euclidean space, since it contains a straight line (which is geodesic) between any two points on the plane.

“To be able to give such a clean and precise geometric characterization of these arithmetic spaces is something I’ve always wanted to do,” says Stover, whose co-authors include professors Uri Bader of the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, David Fisher of Indiana University and Nicholas Miller of the University of California, Berkeley.

To reach their conclusion, Stover and his colleagues used tools that run the full spectrum of mathematics, including geometry, dynamical systems, measure theory, number theory and representation theory.

Building upon this research, two PhD students who he is advising, Khánh Le and Rebekah Palmer, have used knot theory to answer one of the follow-up questions triggered by Stover and his colleagues’ research: “Is there a finite-volume hyperbolic 3-manifold with exactly one totally geodesic surface?”

“In a remarkable paper that has been submitted for publication, they have given the strongest possible positive answer to this question,” says Stover, whose work is funded by a National Science Foundation grant.

“I’ve really enjoyed my students, and I truly appreciate the time and space I’ve been given to be able to do my research,” he says. “The Math Department environment has just been a really wonderful and supportive place to be a mathematician.”

Tory Richardson, CST ’20, pursuing PhD in math biology Victorya “Tory” Richardson has long been fascinated by mathematics, but it wasn’t until her sophomore year at Temple that she became interested in biology-related applied mathematics.

The result: this summer the Kansas City native began pursuing a doctorate in math biology at the University of Utah.

For three years, Richardson was an undergraduate researcher in Associate Professor of Biology Rob Kulanthinal’s Lab for Evolutionary Genetics, where, for example, she conducted computational analyses regarding the primary determinants of rapidly evolving male genes in great apes and fruit flies. “The connection between math and biology is kind of an untouched area of applied mathematics,” says Richardson, a four-year Honors Program and dean’s list student who also served as the department’s student advisor and advocate and a math tutor.

After graduating summa cum laude in May 2020, she spent a year working in both Kulanthinal’s lab and Associate Professor Nora Engel’s lab at Temple’s Fels Institute for Personalized Medicine. There, to study sex differences, she conducted computations on the results of wet lab analyses of mice embryos.

“After doing just computational biological research, it was great to see where the raw data comes from,” she says.

Eying a future academic research position at Utah, Richardson is focusing on molecular genetics.

Students tutor undergraduates at Mathematics Consulting Center Since fall 2016, the department’s Mathematics Consulting Center (MCC) has offered free math tutoring for a variety of classes to undergraduates, regardless of their major. The tutors are trained undergraduate and graduate students.

While the pandemic forced a switch to Zoom conferencing and reduced some student volume, pre-pandemic the MCC was offering tutoring services to an average of between 1,500 and 2,000 students during the fall semester and another 1,000 to 1,200 students during the spring semester, when fewer math courses are offered.

Normally, a total of a dozen undergraduate students (who have done well in their own classes) and graduate students tutor undergraduates from two to six hours each week.

“Some students feel more comfortable with another undergraduate who knows the material helping them,” says Marilena Downing, the assistant professor of instruction who directs the MCC. “The graduate student tutors, meanwhile, know the material very well and often have already taught courses themselves.”

The MCC is open daily, including weekends, with no appointment necessary.

Adds Downing: “I know that some of my own students who needed extra help have practically lived at the center when it’s open and have passed their courses.”

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Jeromy Sivek earns 2020 distinguished teaching award; two math faculty earn 2021 honors There’s little wonder why Jeromy Sivek, associate professor of instruction, was awarded the CST Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Award for 2020. He inspires undergraduate students, just as Eric Rawdon, his professor at Duquesne University, inspired him.

Asked by Rawdon to run knot theory research experiments on unused classroom computers, Sivek fell in love with math and wanted to do nothing else. “Paying it forward by advising undergraduates on their research projects has been one of my most rewarding efforts,” says Sivek, who joined Temple in 2014 after earning his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh. He studied there under Associate Professor Christopher Lennard, “a tenacious mathematician” who also encouraged Sivek’s efforts advising undergraduates.

His students’ most recent successes include virtual research presentations last spring at Temple and at the MAA EPaDel meeting: Gillian McGuire, CST ’21, now a student at Temple’s

Lang joins Temple continued from page 1

Lewis Katz School of Medicine, who wrote Python code to simulate and analyze ranked preference elections; and Julianna Sims, now a junior, who studied Benford’s Law and presented on the tools she developed to predict its appearance in functions.

In addition, Sivek, who also won the department’s 2019 Excellence in Teaching Award by a non-tenure track faculty, serves as a course coordinator in the calculus sequence. “We have all kinds of different students in our math classes,” he says, “and I’ve grown as a teacher by being more comfortable giving students control of the classroom to make it more about their learning rather than my text recitals.”

For 2021, Associate Professor Gillian Queisser was awarded the Dean’s Distinguished Excellence in Mentoring Award, and Professor Cristian Gutiérrez earned the Dean’s Distinguished Excellence in Research Award.

For the Bryn Mawr graduate, coming to Temple is somewhat of a homecoming.

Citing the influence of the late Professor Marvin Knopp, who taught at Temple between 1976 and 2011, Lang says, “Temple has historically been a center for number theory in Philadelphia, and with current number theorists on the faculty at Bryn Mawr, Swarthmore College and the University of Pennsylvania, I feel like there’s a lot of potential to create a strong regional number theory group here.

“I’m really looking forward to being at Temple,” she says. “It seems like an exciting place to be.”