Newsletter 2008

AfterMath

OSU Mathematics Department

Newsletter - 2008

Welcome to the newsletter pages of the Oklahoma State University Department of Mathematics. We intend this first on-line edition to mark the beginning of a fruitful on-line exchange with our alumni. Our 2007 newsletter has prompted some of you  to contact us with suggestions and inquiries about our projects and needs. We are thankful and pleased to hear from you.

During the last five years our department has gone through major changes. We have eight tenure-track faculty members! I must confess that it is difficult to keep up with the energy and enthusiasm of my young colleagues. Dale Alspach has written an article about the three Assistant Professors that joined us last year. (New Names and Faces)

The year 2008 has been a very good year for the topologists at OSU. Bus Jaco and Joseph Maher, together with researchers from OU, DePaul  and AIM,have been actively involved in a project intended to develop software that will assist in the  combinatorial description of   3-manifolds. As a result there has been no dull moment in our Topology group. Thirteen Topologists visited Stillwater this year. We are proud of the visits of Prof. Xiaobo Liu (Columbia University), Prof. Jesse Jhonson (Yale University), Prof. Tillman (Melbourne, Australia), Prof. Feng Luo (Rutgers University), Prof. Diane Hoffoss (U. San Diego),among other distinguished guests.

I am very happy to report a promising revival of out post-doctoral program. Kei Nakamura (University of California at Davis) and Loretta Bartolini (University of Melbourne)  have accepted our post-doctoral offers and will join us this August. We are excited about these appointments. Young talented mathematicians have lots to offer to our graduate and undergraduate programs.  Two of our former Post-doctoral fellows spent a month at OSU continuing research collaborations with our faculty; Juan-Ming Yuan (Providence University, Taiwan) is collaborating  with Jiahong Wu (OSU) and Salah Medhi (Paris X) is working with Roger Zierau (OSU).

Our faculty continues to perform at the highest scholarly level. The number of prestigious international invitations our faculty receives is evidence of the quality of our program. This summer, Madhi Asgari, Igor Pritsker and Raghuram will conduct research at different institutions in Germany. Madhi Asgari and Igor Pritsker are Humboldt Fellows, and Raghuram will visit the Max-Planck-Institute for Mathematics in Bonn. Birne Binegar will give a series of lectures at the Nakai Summer School, at the Chern Institute in China. Later in the year Roger Zierau will spend a month in Paris working on Representation Theory. Chris Francisco obtained funding for a team workshop at Banff International Research Station, Canada. Mathias Schulze was invited to spend two months in France, to work with mathematicians at Universite d'Angers. Jiahong Wu jointly with Peter Costantin (University of Chicago) and Diego Cordoba (IMFF, Spain) will spend part of their summer at AIM, working on a project that will address important open problems on the 3D- Euler equations.

Our faculty have had a presence in the US-mathematical world this year. Many have participated in AMS (American Mathematical Society) and MAA (Mathematical Association of America) meetings. Mathias Schulze has co-organized a special session on D-modules at the AMS-Bloomington meeting.

We also have great things to report about our graduate program, and Robert Myers will expand on my few remarks (From the Graduate Director). First of all I want to extend my congratulations to graduate student Netra Khanal who has written his first pre-print jointly with Juan-Ming Yuan (former OSU post-doc) and Jiahong Wu (OSU). Secondly, I want to point out that our educational activities go hand in hand with our research. This is apparent from the list and content of our Topics course offerings. In particular, this year Anthony Kable run an advanced graduate course on the Theory of Prehomogeneous vector spaces. This theory, which started in Japan, has been developed mainly in that country and in France. It is unique to have access to this kind of material in the USA.

It is critical that we recruit the strongest graduate students, and encourage and support them during their learning process. It is here where private support, on top of state-funding, allows us to be creative and competitive with peer institutions in Oklahoma and the Big 12!

    The department has made efforts to encourage interdisciplinary research activities. Weiping Li (OSU-MATH) together with Antonio Camar (OSU-Finance) and Tim Krehbeil (OSU- Finance) conducted collaborative research that resulted in a submitted paper. Doug Aichele (OSU-MATH) together with Michael Davis (OSU-Physiological Sciences) and Chris Royer (OSU-Physiological Sciences)  obtained funding to investigate dogs' performance. See Doug's article in this newsletter. (It's All About Dogs) Faculty in our department joint the Biochemistry faculty in a series of meetings intended to exchange expertise and develop collaborations.

The 70th annual meeting of the Oklahoma-Arkansas section of the MAA was held at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. At this meeting, John Duenckel and Michael Wood, both of whom are juniors at OSU majoring in Mathematics and Electrical Engineering, made presentations on their research. This research, under the guidance of Raghuram, is a computational search for interesting relations between the special values of the Riemann zeta function and the Dirichlet L-functions.

It is possible that many of you have heard of the textbook Functions and Change by Bruce Crauder, Benny Evans and Alan Noell. The book is in its third edition (very remarkable for a math. textbook) and the fourth edition is scheduled to appear early in 2009.

The National Center for Academic Transformation approved a proposal to redesign the delivery of College Algebra. The proposal was presented by a OSU team consisting of Gail Gates (Associate Vice-President of Undergraduate studies), Dale Alspach (Chair, Department of Mathematics), Dana Brunson (Senior System Engineer) and Cynthia Fransico (Lecturer). For details on the project see Dale's article  (Teaching College Algebra More Effectively)

I hope you find our articles and news of interest. Please visit our Alumni web-site and let us know about you.

Leticia Barchini, Professor.