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Twelve PhDs awarded in 2002

There were twelve PhDs awarded in calendar year 2002. With their thesis advisor, current address, and thesis title, they are:

Bharali, Gautam (Advisor, A. Nagel),
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, On smooth peak-interpolation sets for weakly pseudoconvex domains.

Bloss, Matthew M. (Advisor, G. Benkart),
Mathematics Department, St Olaf College, Northfield MN, Partition algebras and permutation representations of wreath products.

Boylan, Matthew G. (Advisor, K. Ono),
VIGRE Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Mathematics, University of Illinois, Urbana, IL, Congruences for the Fourier coefficients of modular forms with applications.

Cookson, Timothy J. (Advisor, A. Miller),
Fields Institute for Research in Mathematical Sciences, Toronto, Ontario Canada, Independence from cardinal arithmetic and random x random forcing.

Garcia, Jorge (Advisor, T. Kurtz),
141 Avenida de los Arboles, #238, Thousand Oaks, CA 91360, A large deviation principle for stochastic integrals .

Gerber, Kenneth L. (Advisor, R. Brualdi),
Actuarial Analyst, Trustmark Insurance, 400 Field Dr, Lake Forest, IL, On the chromatic sum, strength, and weakness of graphs.

Hamblin, James E. (Advisor, M. Isaacs),
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, PA, On solvable groups satisfying the two-prime hypothesis.

Hwang, Seok (Advisor A. Tzavaras),
Assistant Professor of Mathematics, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, Kinetic decomposition of approximate solutions to conservation laws.

Li, Xiantao (Advisor, S. Jin),
Program In Applied & Computational Mathematics, Princeton U., Princeton NJ, Computation of the semiclassical limits of the Schrodinger equation and related problems.

Mazaheri, Mohsen (Advisor, T. Zariphopoulou),
Goldman Sachs & Co., 85 Broad St, New York NY, Valuation and robustness in stochastic volatility environments.

Uribe, Bernardo (Advisor, A. Adem),
Max Planck Institute, Bonn, Germany (until 7/1/03), (then) Postdoctoral Fellow, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor MI, Twisted k-theory and orbifold cohomology of the symmetric product.

Yang, Chan Woo (Advisor, A. Seeger),
Department of Mathematics, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore MD, L^p estimates for some classes of Radon transforms and oscillatory integral operators.

Our graduate students who expect to be awarded a PhD this year are getting many good offers. For instance, Emre Alkan has accepted a 3 year position as J. Doob Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Eric Mortenson has accepted a 3 year position as S. Chowla Research Assistant Professor at Penn State University. Both Emre and Eric are students of Ken Ono in number theory and will be going to universities which have strong number theory programs. Cheol-Hyun Cho, a student of Yong-Geun Oh, has accepted a 3-year postdoctoral position at Northwestern University, one of two postdocs for their special 2003-04 program on Geometry and Topology of String Theory.

Berit Nilsen wins Campus Capstone TA Award

A 2002 Campus-wide Capstone PhD Teaching Assistant Award has been awarded to Berit Givens Nilsen. These awards recognize PhD students who have performed as outstanding teaching assistants throughout their UW-Madison tenure.

Ms. Nilsen has been an important contributor to the department's teaching mission. She has done the usual TA-ing in calculus courses, has taught a ``satellite'' section of calculus, has been a TA coordinator working with new teaching assistants, has worked with new international teaching assistants, has worked with Steve Bauman in the Bradley Learning Community teaching residence-based calculus, has taught in the Wisconsin Emerging Scholars Program, has done important work in training TAs in the department, and has been a L&S Teaching Fellow. Berit has won every award our department gives to TAs! This Capstone award highlights Berit's teaching career at Wisconsin, She will be receiving the PhD this year and will be a valuable asset to any department lucky enough to attract her.

Comments from students in her classes included: ``Berit is an awesome TA. She is helpful and cares how we do in class'', ``I am so impressed with Berit's teaching skills; she really understands the material, is enthusiastic about math and devotes a lot of her time to make sure everyone understands the course'', and ``I love coming to my calc discussion! Berit is so enthusiastic about teaching, She loves it and it shows.''

Joaquin Cotrina named L & S Teaching Fellow

For 2002 Joaquin Cotrina was chosen to be an L&S Teaching Fellow. This program honors Teaching Assistants in the College who have excelled in teaching performance and who have contributed to the College's teaching mission in important ways. Fellows are awarded a $500 stipend and organize a workshop for incoming TAs in the College. Joaquin is a student of Pat Ahern working on complex variables.

Department Awards to Graduate Students

Our annual student awards ceremony was held in May 2002. Six graduate students were honored with Teaching Awards for their work as Teaching Assistants. They were Emre Alkan, Joshua Davis, Rob Ely, Jorge Garcia, Neil Lyall, and Scott Trigg. Two graduate students, Gautam Bharali and Joaquin Cotrina, were singled out for Sustained Teaching Awards. Andrew Raich was given a Sustained Excellence in Teaching Award & Service.

top Scott Trig, Xien Nguyen, Elisa Vasquez, Emre Alkan

bottom Andy Raich, Neil Lyall, Joaquin Cotrina, Joshua Davis

front right Jorge Garcia & son, Rob Ely

Elizabeth Hirschfelder Award to Three Graduate Women

This past year's recipients in the Mathematics Department of The Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder Award for Graduate Women are Jennifer Halfpap, Xuan Hien Nguyen, Elisa Vasquez. These scholarships are made possible by generous contributions of Elizabeth S. Hirschfelder [PhD 1930, M. Ingraham]. We are sad to report that Dr. Hirschfelder died recently (see the obituary section of this newsletter).

Jennifer Halfpap, a 1996 graduate of Ripon College is working on a thesis problem in analysis with Alex Nagel. She is interested in describing the regions to which CR functions defined on CR submanifolds can be extended as holomorphic functions. Currently she is considering this problem for a class of manifolds that can be approximated by certain model manifolds.

Xuan Hien Nguyen, a 2000 graduate of the Free University of Brussels is working with Sigurd Angenent studying the Dirichlet and Plateau problem for surfaces of prescribed mean curvature.

Elisa Vasquez, a 1999 graduate of Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, Colombia is working with Patrick Speissegger on applications of the Crofton's formula to o-minimal expansion of the reals. For instance, they have obtained a bound on the length of definable curves inside the unit square.