Department News from previous years
-
Brandeis Putnam team places 21st in the country!
- Bong Lian receives Guggenheim Fellowship.
Out of 515 institutions in the USA and Canada participating in the 2004 Putnam mathematics competition, Brandeis University placed 21st. In a difficult exam (only 100 students got a score of 50 or higher, and only 10 a score of 80 or higher) our team did quite well: The students from Brandeis with a positive score (out of 120 points possible) were David Diamondstone (34), Jonathan Mizrahi (30), Gregory Igusa (27), Jingjing Huang (22), and Richard Frank (10). The students were coached by Professor Harry Tamvakis.
Professor Bong Lian was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for the year 2003-2004 to support his studies in mirror symmetry, geometry, and arithmetic.
- Brandeis Putnam team places 20th in the country!
- Dmitry Kleinbock promoted to Associate Professor.
- Ruth Charney joins Mathematics Department.
- Brandeis Putnam team places 11th in the country!
- Fred Diamond promoted to Full Professor. Associate Professor Fred Diamond has been promoted to Professor, effective Fall, 2002.
- Laurent Berger receives Clay Liftoff grant Laurent Berger has been appointed by the Clay Mathematics Institute as a Liftoff mathemtician for the summer of 2002. Laurent wrote his thesis,
- Kyle Petersen receives Mass Media Fellowship.
Kyle Petersen has been awarded a Mass Media Science and Engineering Fellowship from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). From the AAAS website:
This highly competitive program strengthens the connections between scientists and journalists by placing advanced science students in newsrooms across the country.
Kyle will be working at radio station KUNC-FM in Colorado, an NPR affiliate. - Bong Lian promoted to Full Professor.
Associate Professor Bong Lian has been promoted to Professor, effective Fall, 2001.
-
Saso Strle receives Liftoff grant
-
Saso Strle has been appointed by the Clay Mathematics Institute as a Liftoff mathemtician for the period June 1-July 15, 2001. Mathematics departments of leading universities nominate selected finishing graduate students to participate in CMI's summer Liftoff program. Saso is now a Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University.
Dmitry Kleinbock wins Sloan award
-
Assistant Professor Dmitry Kleinbock has been awarded a prestigious Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship beginning Fall, 2001. These awards are intended to enhance the careers of the very best young faculty members in specified fields of science. Currently 100 grants are awarded annually in six fields: chemistry, computer science, economics, mathematics, neuroscience, and physics.
Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond , and Richard Taylor have proven the full Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture!
- Ivars Peterson's MathTrek. Curving Beyond Fermat, Science News Online (11/20/99) Click here
- Darmon, H. A proof of the full Shimura-Taniyama-Weil conjecture is announced.
Notices of the American Mathematical Society 46 (December 1999) 1397. Click here - Real player version of an NPR weekend edition story: Click here
-
Susan Parker wins 1999-2000 Louis Dembitz Brandeis prize for Excellence in Teaching.
-
Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching presented by Irving R. Epstein (From the Brandeis Review, Spring 2000)
Introductory calculus is an initiation rite experienced by hundreds of our first year students. Making sure that it is not too painful---and that most of them succeed---is a difficult task. We have been fortunate that the oversight of the introductory calculus program is in the hands of one our own graduates who also happens to be a formidable teacher who brings many special gifts to this important program and to her own students in the courses that she teaches.
Professor Susan Parker began teaching at Brandeis while she was still in graduate school; while a graduate she helped to design the program that trains our TAs to teach calculus, she got herself hired as the first director of that program, and then went on to complete her Ph.D. in 1993. She joins Marc Brettler, the winner of the Walzer Award for Teaching in 1991, as the only other Brandeis alum to be the recipient of one of these coveted prizes.
As one of her eloquent students once said, in response to whether he would nominate her for a teaching award, "whoever can make math interesting for three hours a week to a non-math major deserves an award, because she's just great and I Iove her!!! Isn't that enuff (sic.) ?" While that might not be quite enough, many of her other students have cited her for being "fantastic... excellent... amazing... helpful... available... going beyond the call of duty." Because she is always willing to meet with students and to extend herself to them, one remarked that we should probably add "student counselor" to her title. Like some of us she also has weaknesses, as one of her recommenders noted, her "main weakness is that she is only human. She can't do everything and sometimes she tries to do too much." Finally, as one of her students said, "her skill as a lecturer create(s) a great class. She should win more teaching awards." We have only one for her, the Louis Dembitz Brandeis Prize for Excellence in Teaching.
Previous Graduate Student Teaching Prize Winners.
In Appreciation for Dedication and Skill in the Teaching of Mathematics.
- 2003-2004: Georgi Gospodinov
- 2002-2003: Ophir Feldman and Vaibhav Gadre
- 2001-2002: Emrah Paksoy
- 2000-2001: Stefan Friedl
- 1999-2000: Pallavi S. Jayawant, Bruce U. Romano
- 1998-1999: Saso Strle
- 1997-1998: Pedro Teixeira
Out of 479 institutions in the USA and Canada participating in the 2003 Putnam mathematics competition, Brandeis University placed 20th. In a difficult exam (less than 50% of those taking the exam scored more than 1 point!) our team did quite well: Anton Geraschenko (score 24), Gregory Igusa (score 14), and David Diamondstone (score 40). Other Brandeis students earning top scores were Jonathan Mizrahi (score 29) and Lacramioara Bintu (score 11).
Assistant Professor Dmitry Kleinbock has been promoted to Associate Professor with tenure, effective Fall 2004.
The department welcomes Professor Ruth Charney (back) to Brandeis. Professor Charney specializes in geometric group theory, a field lying at the interface between algebra and topology. She received her B.A. from Brandeis (class of 1972), her Ph.D. from Princeton, and has previously held positions at UC Berkeley, Yale, and Ohio State University.
Out of 476 institutions in the USA and Canada participating in the 2002 Putnam mathematics competition, Brandeis University placed 11th. This is by far our best team score ever. Our team members had phenomenal scores: Out of 3,349 contestants where the median score was 3 out of 120: Anton Geraschenko: score 59 (rank 71.5) Gregory Igusa: score 50 (rank 127.5) David Diamondstone: score 37 (rank 276) Themistoklis Mastorides: score 11 (rank 1113.5) Lacramioara Bintu: score 11 (rank 1113.5)
Limits of absolutely crystalline representations,under the supervision of Fred Diamond. He will be a Benjamin Pierce Instructor at Harvard University starting in the fall of 2002.
(from the MSRI website): A famous conjecture, hinted at by Taniyama, and formulated precisely by Shimura and others, asserts that every elliptic curve over the rational numbers is "modular''. This has been a strong motivating force for 30 years of intense work in arithmetic algebraic geometry.
Fundamental work of Andrew Wiles and Richard Taylor established the conjecture for a large class of elliptic curves. Wiles combined these results with a theorem of Ribet, and work of many others, to prove Fermat's Last Theorem.
Christophe Breuil, Brian Conrad, Fred Diamond, and Richard Taylor are preparing a paper that proves the modularity conjecture for all elliptic curves. The argument follows the general outline of the work of Wiles and Taylor, though there are many technical details.
Here are some more web references: