Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professors


Back, l.to r: Yiftach Barnea, Dan Knopf, Wojciech Wieczorek, Markus Banagl, Reed Solomon
Front, l.to r: Rajesh Kulkarni, Jan Bruinier, Charles McCoy

Eight new Van Vleck Assistant Professors arrived in Madison this year, the larger than usual number due to funding from the Department's NSF VIGRE grant (NSF-V), and from Ken Ono's Number Theory Foundation (NTF) and Packard Foundation (PF) Grants, and NSF Career Award (NSF-C).

Weizhu Bao
Weizhu Bao received the PhD from Tsinghua University in 1995 in the Mathematics of Computation. Since then he has held positions at Imperial College, Tsinghua University, and Georgia Institute of Technology. His research interests include computational fluid dynamics, finite element methods for nonlinear problems, and numerical methods for partial differential equations in unbounded domains.

Yiftach Barnea
Yiftach Barnea received the PhD in 1999 from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem with a thesis ``Pro-p groups and Lie Algebras" written under the guidance of Aner Shalev. He spent 1999-2000 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at MSRI (Berkeley). Yiftach's research interests are in pro-p groups, Lie algebras, Kac-Moody algebras, and finite p-groups.

Jan Bruinier
Jan Bruinier received the PhD in 1998 from the University of Heidelberg (Germany). After the PhD he was given an appointment at Heidelberg. His UW appointment is partly funded by the grants NTF, PF, and NSF-C. Very recently, Jan has been awarded a habilitation degree by the University of Heidelberg. Habilitation degrees are awarded, by German universities, to those researchers who have established a superb track record (sort of a ``super PhD''). It is quite unusual to be awarded such a degree only two years from the PhD. Dr. Bruinier's research interests are in number theory, in particular, Borcherds theory of infinite products in automorphic forms and modular forms.

Rebecca Field
Rebecca Field received the PhD from the University of Chicago in 2000. Her thesis ``On the Chow ring of the classifying space BSO(2n,C) was guided by Burt Totaro. She lists her research interests as interactions between algebraic cycles and group actions (and consequences in representation theory), and connections between algebraic geometry and algebraic topology. Rebecca is one of our VIGRE Van Vlecks being partially supported by our NSF-V grant.

Jeremy Lovejoy
Jeremy Lovejoy was co-advised by George Andrews and Ken Ono at Pennsylvania State University where he received the PhD in 2000. Jeremy is also a VIGRE Van Vleck partially supported by our NSF-V grant. He list his research interests as partitions and q-series, modular forms, and combinatorics. With Ken Ono, Jeremy recently has helped shed new light on Ramanujuan's congruences for the partition function (see the article on Ken Ono's PECASE Award).

Ernesto Lupercio

Ernesto Lupercio received the PhD from Stanford University in 1997 with a thesis ``New holomorphic versions of the Bott periodicity.'' He was an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan from 1997-2000, spending 1998 as a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, Germany. Ernesto lists his research interests as algebraic topology, loop groups, mathematical physics, and algebraic geometry.

Charles McCoy
Charles McCoy finished his PhD thesis in 2000 at the University of Notre Dame. His thesis ``Categoricity, dimension, and relativization'' was guided by Peter Cholak (PhD 1991, T. Millar and S. Lempp). Also a VIGRE Van Vleck being partially supported by our NSF-V grant, Charles has research interests in mathematical logic, computability theory, and model theory; much of his current works involves finding natural characterizations of certain computability-theoretic notions in models.

Wojciech Wieczorek
Wojciech Wieczorek received the PhD in 1995 from Michigan State University. His thesis ``Donaldson invariants and embedded 2-spheres'' was guided by Ronald Fintuschel. Before coming to Madison, Wojciech was a post-doctoral associate and instructor at the University of Georgia. His research interests include low dimensional topology and symplectic geometry, and Donaldson and Seiberg-Witten invariants,

Continuing Van Vlecks this year are Markus Banagl, Rajesh Kulkarni, and Bo Su. Continuing VIGRE Van Vlecks are Dan Knopf and Christopher Raymond.

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