# Welcome

### Upcoming Events

#### Number Theory

MONDAY Apr. 23, 02:30 PM Gen. Myers Hall 210

Title: Group determinants and non-abelian Lind measures.
Chris Pinner Kansas State University

#### Analysis Seminar

TUESDAY May. 01, 03:30 PM CW 131

Title: A weak reverse Hölder inequality for parabolic measure
Alyssa Genschaw University of Missouri - Columbia

### Recent News

March 2018

#### Sickweather CEO Graham Dodge to visit KState

October 2017

The NODE group at KState has invited Graham Dodge, Co-Founder and CEO of the popular Sickweather app, to visit Kansas State University on Friday October 13. Akin to a weather app that warns people about impending bad weather, the Sickweather app scans social networks for indicators of illnesses. "Every day millions of people update social media and health apps with reports about their health or the health of their loved ones," Dodge says. "Likewise, purchasing habits of over the counter medications are revealing how people diagnose and treat their own symptoms. As researchers develop new methods to collect and filter these reports, and turn them into real-time insights for disease surveillance, these novel data are increasingly used to forecast epidemics weeks and months into the future", Graham Dodge adds. As part of the day's activities, Dodge will give a talk titled "Predicting Disease Outbreaks with Novel Data" at 3:00 pm - 3:50 pm which will take place in Engineering Hall 1109.

#### Yijia Liu New M-Center Postdoc

October 2017

The Department of Mathematics welcomes M-Center PostDoc, Yijia Liu. More specifically, Yijia's research area is at the intersection of algebraic geometry and homological algebra. "I study the derived categories and their relation to classical questions in, for example, birational geometry and Hodge theory," Yijia says. "Recently I have been interested in developing the theory of filtrations of categories," he added. By joining the M-Center, Yijia hopes to learn more symplectic geometry and extend his work to the broader context of homological mirror symmetry.

#### Xiannan Li receives a Simons Foundation Grant

September 2017

Assistant Professor Xiannan Li received a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation Division for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. The grant provides a total of 42,000 USD for 5 years in travel and other research expenses. Xiannan Li works in analytic number theory, specializing in Prime Number Theory and L-functions. He plans to use this grant to continue joint research with collaborators in the US, Canada and the UK, and to support Number Theory in general at KSU.

#### K-State to host 2017 Midwest Geometry Conference

September 2017

The 2017 Midwest Geometry Conference will take place at Kansas State University November 17 - 19, 2017, with a related colloquium on November 16. The Conference will bring together geometers and geometrical analysists from the Midwest and beyond to share ideas and recent results. Topics represented at the conference may include minimal surfaces, curvature flows, isometric group actions, spaces with curvature bounded from below and geometric topology will also be represented. The conference is organized by: Dave Auckly, Ivan Blank, Catherine Searle and Shihshu Walter Wei.

#### M is for Math, Museum, and Manhattan, Kansas

September 2017

On Sunday September 24, 2017, from 2:30pm to 3:30pm, Associate Professor Natalia Rozhkovskaya, will present her new book "M is for Math, Museum, and Manhattan, Kansas" at the Marianna Kistler Beach Museum of Art. The book, addressed to a broad spectrum of readers, is the author's personal encounter and exploration of how mathematics can bring a new understanding to the fine arts.

The presentation will feature four speakers giving short public lectures about science, math, art, and history. The event, extending from 2pm to 4pm, will include math activities for the younger visitors, organized by the staff of the Beach Museum. For more information about the book and presentation, see the following link http://www.i70math.com/mmm.htm. Everyone is welcome to come, bring family and friends, and help support this vital aspect of the department's outreach commitment in the Manhattan community.

#### Scott Spencer New Mathematics Postdoc

September 2017

The Department of Mathematics welcomes Scott Spencer as a new postdoc. Scott received his PhD from Georgia Tech under the guidance of Professor Michael Lacey. His research is mainly in Harmonic Analysis. "I work in harmonic analysis and signal processing, particularly where these fields have applications to or from machine learning and probability," Spencer says. "It is very interesting when a deterministic problem can be almost solved, i.e. with high probability, by a random construction," Scott adds. More recently, Scott Spencer has been studying Boolean functions with certain sparse characteristics with the hope of applying his work in compressive sensing to learning Boolean functions.

#### Mikhail Mazin receives a Simons Foundation Grant

September 2017

Assistant Professor Mikhail Mazin received a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation Division for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. The grant provides a total of 42,000 USD for 5 years in travel and other research expenses. Mazin's work is in Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics, Geometric Representation Theory, and Algebraic Geometry. He plans to use this grant to support the Combinatorics Seminar in the mathematics department and to strengthen the relations between K-State and other research groups in combinatorics and representation theory.

#### Victor Turchin receives a Simons Foundation Grant

September 2017

Associate Professor Victor Turchin received a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation Division for Mathematics and the Physical Sciences. The grant provides a total of 42,000 USD for 5 years in travel and other research expenses. Turchin works at the interface of algebraic topology with several other fields including geometric topology, deformation heory, theory of operads, and topology of subspace arrangements. He plans to use this grant to continue joint research with his collaborators in Sweden, France, Switzerland, Canada, and Russia.

#### Lino Amorim New Faculty Hire in Geometry

August 2017

The Department of Mathematics welcomes assistant professor Lino Amorim. Lino got his Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin and then was hired as a postdoc at the University of Oxford and at Boston University. His research area is Symplectic Geometry. "Most of my research revolves around the interactions between the geometric (Kuranishi spaces) and algebraic structures (A-infinity categories) that serve as foundations for the theory of Fukaya categories", Amorim says. "I am also interested in applications of these to other areas such as Mirror Symmetry and Hamiltonian Dynamics." More recently, professor Amorim started working on Derived Algebraic Geometry and its applications to the study of holomorphic symplectic manifolds.

#### Dinh-Liem Nguyen New Faculty Hire in Applied Mathematics

August 2017

The Department of Mathematics welcomes assistant professor Dinh-Liem Nguyen. After receiving his PhD in Mathematics from École Polytechnique in France, Dinh-Liem did a postdoc at University of Michigan, and more recently, at University of North Carolina Charlotte. His research area lies at the intersection of inverse problems and imaging, scattering theory and scientific computing. "The field of inverse problems has been one of the fastest growing areas in applied mathematics in the past two decades," Nguyen says. "I am currently working on efficient inversion methods for the inverse problems in scattering theory," he adds. "It is well-known that these inverse problems can be highly nonlinear and ill-posed, which poses substantial challenges in studying their inversion methods." Professor Nguyen is also interested in well-posedness questions and the numerical solution of the forward problems in scattering and wave propagation.

#### Two K-State teams compete in the 2017 Mathematical Contest in Modeling

June 2017

Two K-State teams competed in the 2017 Mathematical Contest in Modeling (MCM). This is an international contest in applied mathematics organized by COMAP, the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications, an award-winning non-profit organization whose mission is to improve mathematics education for students of all ages. Teams of up to three students spend a long weekend working on one of several problems in applied mathematics. In 2017 two teams from Kansas State University competed in this contest: a team composed of Danny Bramucci, Chase Cunningham, and Heather Heier which was given honorable mention; and a second team comprised of Nicholas Donohoue, Aaron Messerla, and Vincent Sylvester.

#### K-State Math Teacher Scholarship Program

May 2017

A new scholarship program is starting in Fall 2017 aimed at increasing K-State’s production of middle and high school math teachers for high need school districts. This is a joint effort between the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and the Department of Mathematics, and funding is provided by a grant from the National Science Foundation’s Robert Noyce Teacher Scholarship Program. For each of the next five years, six undergraduates in their final two years of study will receive a 18,000 USD scholarship, and one graduate student completing a Graduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning will receive a 20,000 USD scholarship. For each year of scholarship money received, a student will be required to teach two years in a high need school. In addition, three freshmen/sophomore math majors that are considering a career in teaching will receive a stipend of up to 3,200 USD to work in a teaching-related internship. Applications and additional information are available at http://coe.k-state.edu/kmtsp/. Students can contact Sherri Martinie (martinie@k-state.edu) or Craig Spencer (cvs@ksu.edu) with any questions.

#### Yan Soibelman named university distinguished professor

May 2017

Kansas State University is honoring Yan Soibelman as 2017 university distinguished professor, a lifetime title that is the highest honor the university bestows on its faculty members. Distinguished professors are appointed following a university-wide nomination and evaluation process conducted by the provost. Yan will receive a personalized plaque and medallion at the university's fall 2017 commencement ceremonies. Professor Soibelman is the director of the university's M-Center for Mirror Symmetry and Tropical Geometry. He researches algebra, deformation theory, algebraic geometry, topology, symplectic geometry, representation theory, non-commutative geometry, differential equations, mathematical physics and string theory.

#### K-State team takes first place in Kansas Collegiate Mathematics Competition

May 2017

On April 29, 2017, the Kansas State team comprised by students Daniel Bramucci, Nicholas Donohoue and Aaron Messerla, and coached by Professor Gabriel Kerr, took first place in the 12th edition of the Kansas Collegiate Mathematics Competition. Second place went to the KU team and third place to Fort Hays State. This year's KCMC was held in Lawrence, KS, on the campus of the University of Kansas, in conjunction with the 2017 Kansas MAA Section Meeting. This is a problem-solving contest open to undergraduates from colleges and universities in Kansas. As an example, here is a problem that was given last year: Two points are selected randomly in the interval [0,2]. What is the probability that they are within 1/3 of each other?

#### Reta McDermott recognized for her 35 years of service

April 2017

On April 26, 2017, Reta McDermott was recognized for her 35 years of service at the fortieth annual recognition ceremony organized by the University Support Staff Senate. Reta has been working in the Department of Mathematics since the summer of 1981. This year's keynote speaker at the ceremony was April Mason, Provost of Kansas State University. Reta was one of a dozen awardees university-wide that were being honored for this achievement. "Reta McDermott always displays the utmost professionalism in her work," Department Head Andrew Bennett notes, "She is a key to the smooth functioning of the office. We have been very fortunate to have her working for us for so long, and we look forward to her contributions for years to come."