Mathematics Department News

AMS Fellows Named
November 2012: The American Mathematical Society has recently launched the AMS Fellows program. Included in the inaugural class of AMS Fellows are 17 mathematicians (11 professors and 6 emeritus professors) from the UW Math Department: Sara Billey, Chris Burdzy, Ioana Dumitriu, Jerry Folland, Ramesh Gangolli, Robin Graham, Ralph Greenberg, Branko Grünbaum, Doug Lind, Ernie Michael, Steve Mitchell, Isaac Namioka, Bob Phelps, Boris Solomyak, Rekha Thomas, Gunther Uhlmann and James Zhang. Information about the AMS Fellows program and a complete list of the inaugural class may be found here.

Jim Morrow wins AWM Humphreys Award
August 2012: Jim Morrow is the recipient of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) 2013 Gweneth Humphreys Award. The award is given annually to a mathematics professor "who has encouraged female graduate students to pursue mathematical careers and/or the study of mathematics at the graduate level." See this AWM press release for more information.

Andrew Loveless receives Distinguished Teaching Award
June 2012: Congratulations to Andrew Loveless on receiving the UW Distinguished Teaching Award. Awardees are chosen on a variety of criteria such as innovation in the learning process, ability to engage and inspire original thinking in students, and innovations in course and curriculum design. Loveless joined the department as a Lecturer after completing his PhD at WSU in 2005, and was promoted to Senior Lecturer in 2010. The award was given in a ceremony on June 7th.

Gunther Uhlmann at Eastside Science Café on July 9th
June 2012: Gunther Uhlmann will be featured in the Pacific Science Center's Eastside Science Café on July 9th, which will be titled "Cloaking: Science Meets Science Fiction." The Science Café will take place at 7pm at the Wilde Rover Irish Pub in Kirkland. Science Cafés are free and open to all ages, with no science background required. Uhlmann's work on invisibility was recently featured in this UW Today article.

Jane Hung awarded 2012 UW Junior Medal and Dean's Medal
April 2012: Jane Hung has received both the UW Junior Medal and the Dean's Medal in the Natural Sciences. The UW awards the Junior Medal to the senior having the highest scholastic standing for their first three years of coursework. (See this article for more information.) The College of Arts & Sciences presents the undergraduate Dean's Medal annually to an outstanding student in each of its four divisions. Jane is a double major in Math and Physics, and has conducted research in Chemistry since her freshman year. She plans to pursue a PhD in Chemical Engineering at MIT.

Congratulations to 2012 NSF Graduate Fellows
April 2012: Winners of this year's recently announced National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships include Dylan Wilson, Milda Zizyte, and Sylvester Eriksson-Bique. Dylan and Milda are both UW Math majors who will graduate this year, Milda with a double major in Math and Computer Science. Sylvester will enter the department as a graduate student this autumn.
The NSF Graduate Fellowships recognize outstanding students in science, engineering, and mathematics. More information about the fellowships and the 2012 awardees may be found here.

NSF Highlight on the Zipper Algorithm
March 2012: The NSF has published a research highlight on the work of Don Marshall and Steffen Rohde concerning the zipper algorithm. The algorithm allows accurate computation of angle-preserving mappings commonly found in science and engineering and is related to models for such complex details as the shape of DNA molecules or how water percolates through soil.
For more information, see this article at Research.gov.

Matt Kahle and Karl Schwede Receive Sloan Research Fellowships
February 2012: Matt Kahle and Karl Schwede have each been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The two-year fellowship is awarded to researchers "in recognition of distinguished performance and unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field." Matt and Karl earned their PhDs with the UW Math Department in 2007 under Eric Babson and Christopher Hoffman, and in 2006 under Sándor Kovács, respectively.
See their homepages to learn more about Matt Kahle and Karl Schwede.

Matthew Badger Awarded NSF Postdoc
January 2012: Congratulations to Matthew Badger, who was recently awarded a prestigious NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship. Matthew earned his PhD at UW in 2011 under the supervision of Tatiana Toro and now studies geometric measure theory at Stony Brook University. He plans to use the fellowship to work with Chris Bishop and Raanan Schul at Stony Brook. His research will focus on questions at the interface of geometric measure theory and harmonic analysis.

UW Math Circle
January 2012: The UW Math Circle middle school outreach program, coordinated by Julia Pevtsova and supported by two grants from the NSF, has been profiled in the January edition of the College of Arts & Sciences' Perspectives.
Click here to view the article.

Performances of Truth Values: December 1 - 3
The Department is pleased to present three upcoming performances of Truth Values: One Girl's Romp through M.I.T.'s Male Math Maze (click for video), an award-winning solo show written and performed by Gioia De Cari. Performances will take place at the Ethnic Cultural Center Theater on December 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. For more information and to purchase tickets, see this link.

New faculty and postdocs
September 2011: The department is pleased to welcome this Autumn five new faculty and postdocs: Jonas Azzam, Acting Assistant Professor and RTG Postdoctoral Fellow (PhD, UCLA 2011), studies geometric measure theory, analysis on metric spaces, and harmonic analysis. Kenneth Chan, Acting Assistant Professor (PhD, University of New South Wales 2010) studies noncommutative algebra and algebraic geometry. Benjamin Lundell, Acting Assistant Professor (PhD, Cornell University 2011) studies number theory. Linh Vinh Tran, Acting Assistant Professor (PhD, Rutgers University 2011) studies probabilistic and additive combinatorics. Chelsea Walton, NSF Postdoctoral Fellow (PhD, University of Michigan 2011) studies noncommutative algebra and representation theory.

Survey ranks UW fifth worldwide in mathematics
June 2011: A survey conducted for the Times High Education magazine has ranked the University of Washington fifth in the world for mathematics. This ranking, based on 2001-2011 data provided by Thomson Reuters, includes the contributions of all of the UW mathematical sciences departments and of mathematically oriented faculty in other science and engineering departments. More information about the survey and its results may be found here.

Jacob Bobman awarded UW President's Medal for 2011
June 2011: Jacob Bobman has been selected as one of the two UW President's Medal winners for 2011. Jacob is a double major in Mathematics and Biochemistry. See this page for more information on this year's President's Medals.

Will Johnson awarded 2011 Dean's Medal
June 2011: Will Johnson is the winner of this year's Dean's Medal in the Natural Sciences. The College of Arts & Sciences presents the Dean's Medal awards annually to a single outstanding student in each of its four divisions. Will graduates this spring with degrees in Mathematics and Computer Science. He will pursue a PhD in Mathematics at UC Berkeley.

2011 Math Department undergraduate awards
June 2011: Outstanding undergraduate Mathematics and ACMS majors were honored with awards given at this year's Honors Luncheon on June 2nd. Each student was given a book reflecting their mathematical interests, along with a reward stipend. A full list of this year's awardees and their chosen books may be found here.

Gunther Uhlmann awarded the 2011 Kleinman Prize
April 2011: The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) has awarded Gunther Uhlmann the 2011 Kleinman Prize, which is given for "outstanding research, or other contributions, that bridge the gap between mathematics and applications." The award ceremony will take place at the ICIAM in Vancouver in July. See the SIAM website for more information and a list of previous recipients.

Congratulations to 2011 NSF Graduate Fellows
April 2011: Winners of the recently announced 2011 National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowships, which recognize outstanding graduate students in science, engineering, and mathematics, include Cris Negron, Richard Robinson, Will Johnson and Tia Lerud. Cris and Richard are current Mathematics PhD students, Will will graduate this year with a double major in Math and Computer Science, and Tia graduated last autumn with a double major in ACMS and Statistics. More information about the fellowships and the 2011 awardees may be found here.

Math majors receive Goldwater Scholarships
April 2011: Mathematics majors Mark Bun and Jane Hung have been awarded Goldwater Scholarships, given annually to foster and encourage excellence in science, mathematics, and engineering. Mark and Jane are both double majors; Mark is also a Computer Science major, and Jane is also a Physics major. More information about this prestigious scholarship and the nationwide list of 2011 awardees can be found here.

Krzysztof Burdzy to serve as editor of Annals of Probability
March 2011: Krzysztof Burdzy has been selected to serve as the editor of Annals of Probability, one of the two leading journals in the field. Burdzy's term as editor, which begins in January 2012, will last three years.

Gunther Uhlmann to deliver Einstein Lecture
February 2011: Gunther Uhlmann has been selected to present the 6th annual American Mathematical Society Einstein Public Lecture in Mathematics on March 17, 2012. "The lectures began in 2005, to celebrate the one-hundredth anniversary of Einstein's annus mirabilis. The year 1905 marked the publication by Albert Einstein in Germany of three fundamental papers that changed the course of twentieth-century physics." For further information from the AMS, including a list of previous Einstein lecturers, see the AMS website.

Max Lieblich receives NSF CAREER grant
January 2011: The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a CAREER grant to Max Lieblich. The NSF awards these prestigious grants to "junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations." Lieblich will use the grant to fund mathematics outreach in the Pacific Northwest, a conference for new PhDs, and research done by himself and graduate students on the Brauer group in formal and algebraic geometry.

Gracie Ingermanson awarded UW Sophomore Medal
January 2011: Mathematics major Gracie Ingermanson has been awarded the UW Sophomore Medal. The University of Washington awards this medal to the outstanding junior based on his or her academic record for the previous academic year. See here for more information on Gracie and the other medalists.

Gunther Uhlmann receives AMS Bôcher Prize
January 2011: Gunther Uhlmann was awarded the Bôcher Prize by the American Mathematical Society "for his fundamental work on inverse problems and in particular for the solution to the Calderón problem in the papers 'The Calderón problem with partial data' (with Carlos E. Kenig and Johannes Sjöstrand, Annals of Math. (2) 165 (2007) no. 2, 567-591) and 'The Calderón problem with partial data in two dimensions' (with Oleg Yu. Imanuvilov and Masahiro Yamamoto, J. Amer Math. Soc. 23 (2010), no. 3, 655-691). The prize also recognizes Uhlmann's incisive work on boundary rigidity with L. Pestov and with P. Stefanov and on nonuniqueness (also known as cloaking) with A. Greenleaf, Y. Kurylev, and M. Lassas."

Nate Bottman awarded 2010 Dean's Medal and NSF Graduate Fellowship
May 2010: Nate Bottman, who will graduate next month with undergraduate degrees in both Mathematics and Russian, has added two more honors to his list of accolades. From within the UW, Nate was awarded the 2010 Dean's Medal from the College of Arts & Sciences. Nate is the seventh Mathematics major since 2002 to achieve this distinction. From outside the UW, Nate receives a National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship, which he will use to pursue a PhD in Mathematics at M.I.T.

Genia Vogman awarded Department of Energy Graduate Fellowship
May 2010: Congratulations to Genia Vogman, the recipient of a prestigious Department of Energy Graduate Fellowship. Genia will use the fellowship to pursue a PhD at the University of California, Berkeley.

2010 Math Department Undergraduate Awards
May 2010: Outstanding undergraduate Mathematics and ACMS majors were honored with awards given at the annual Honors Luncheon on May 27th. In addition to an award stipend, each student was given a book reflecting their mathematical interests. A full list of this year's awardees and their accompanying books may be found here.

UW student team Outstanding Winner in Mathematical Contest in Modeling
April 2010: A team of UW undergraduates has been declared Outstanding Winner in the 2010 MCM, putting them in the top nine out of 2,254 participating teams. The team consists of Mark Bun, Jerry Li, and Ian Zemke. Mark is a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science, Jerry is in the Early Entrance Program, and Ian is a Mathematics major. They are the eighth team from the UW to win this distinction in nine years. As in previous years, Jim Morrow was the faculty advisor. See here for complete MCM results, and this University Week article.

Mathematics faculty honored
April 2010: Congratulations to Gunther Uhlmann on his election as SIAM Fellow, and to Neal Koblitz on being awarded an honorary doctorate by the Vietnam Academy of Science and Technology.

Will Johnson earns Putnam Fellowship
March 2010: Will Johnson has earned a Putnam Fellowship after placing in the top five among 4,036 participants in the William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. No other UW student has achieved this honor since the competition's inception in 1938. Will is a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science. In addition to Will, four UW students, Nate Bottman, Steven Rutherford, Song Yisong, Keyun Tong, placed in the top 500 in the competition. For more information, see this link, the articles in University Week, Seattle Times and The Daily, and the editorial in the Seattle Times.

In honor of Paul Tseng
February 2010: Our colleague, Professor Paul Tseng, went missing on a kayaking trip on August 13, 2009. Conferences are being planned in his honor, to take place both in Seattle and Shanghai. See this page for more information.

Sloan Research Fellowship awarded to Max Lieblich
February 2010: Max Lieblich has been awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship. The fellowship, awarded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, seeks to "stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise." For more information, see this article in University Week.

NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships
February 2010: Jim Gill and Catherine Williams have been awarded NSF Postdoctoral Fellowships. Gill, who joined the department upon completing his PhD at Washington University in St. Louis in 2009, plans to use the fellowship to continue his work here for another three years. Williams completed her PhD in our department in 2008 under the supervision of Dan Pollack. She has since been at Stanford as a Samelson Fellow, and plans to use her NSF Postdoc at Columbia.

Julia Pevtsova awarded NSF CAREER grant
January 2010: Julia Pevtsova has received a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF awards these prestigious grants to "junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations." Some of the ways Pevtsova will use the CAREER grant include developing new connections between representation theory and algebraic geometry, advancing understanding of geometric and homological properties of representations of algebras, and expanding her outreach efforts.

Mark Bun and Will Johnson awarded UW Sophomore and Junior Medals
January 2010: Mark Bun and Will Johnson have been awarded the UW's Sophomore and Junior Medals. The University of Washington awards these medals to the junior and senior having the highest scholastic standing for the first two and three years of coursework, respectively. Mark is a double major in Mathematics and Computer Science. Will, already a Computer Science major, recently declared as a Mathematics major as well. Mark, Will, and the Freshman Medalist each credit Mathematics faculty as significant influences. Read more in this University Week article.

Finding solutions to thousand year old problem
November 2009: Graduate student Robert Bradshaw is part of an international group of mathematicians who have resolved the first one trillion cases of a thousand year old mathematics problem: Which whole numbers can be the area of a right-angled triangle whose sides are whole numbers or fractions? See the Unversity Week article and American Institute of Mathematics press release for further details.

Ralph Greenberg and Tatiana Toro invited speakers at ICM 2010
October 2009: UW Math faculty members Ralph Greenberg and Tatiana Toro have been invited to speak at the International Congress of Mathematicians to be held in Hyderabad in August 2010. A full list of the invited plenary and sectional speakers is available here.

Ioana Dumitriu awarded NSF CAREER grant
June 2009: Ioana Dumitriu has received a CAREER grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF awards these prestigious grants to "junior faculty who exemplify the role of teacher-scholars through outstanding research, excellent education and the integration of education and research within the context of the mission of their organizations."

2009 Math Department Undergraduate Awards
June 2009: Outstanding undergraduate Mathematics and ACMS majors were honored with awards given at the annual Honors Luncheon on May 28th. In addition to an award stipend, each student was given a book reflecting their mathematical interests. A full list of this year's awardees and their accompanying books may be found here.

Department receives Research Training Grant from NSF
May 2009: The Department has been awarded a Research Training Grant in Partial Differential Equations/Inverse Problems by the National Science Foundation. The award will, in particular, support the training of graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. Gunther Uhlmann, Robin Graham, Jim Morrow, Hart Smith and Tatiana Toro are the Principal Investigators of the RTG.

Neal Koblitz wins prize for Excellence
April 2009: Neal Koblitz was awarded a 2009 prize for Excellence in the Field of Mathematics by an international group of security experts for his work in cryptography. The award was given at the 2009 RSA Conference in San Diego. See this University Week article for more information about Koblitz's work.

Gunther Uhlmann named Fellow of American Academy of Arts & Sciences
April 2009: Gunther Uhlmann was elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences alongside 210 other leaders in the sciences, humanities, arts, business and public affairs. Uhlmann works on inverse problems--problems in which one attempts to determine the internal parameters of a medium by making measurements at the boundary or at the exterior of the medium. Another recent area of interest has been cloaking, which deals with the question of how to make objects invisible to electromagnetic waves, sound waves and other types of waves; an overview of this work can be found at the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics website.

Undergraduates excel in Putnam mathematical competition
April 2009: UW undergraduate students' performance in last Autumn's William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition are the best in recent memory, with students competing in both team and individual competitions. Out of 405 participating teams from the United States and Canada, the UW's team, which consisted of Nate Bottman, William Johnson, and Igor Tolkov, scored 15th. Eight UW students participated in the individual competition, with the top scores three going to William Johnson (who placed 6th among 3,627 participants), Nate Bottman, and Keyun Tong. Assistant Professors Ioana Dumitriu and Julia Pevtsova coached the teams.

Further information can be found in this article in University Week and the Putnam website.
 

Math 381 students help community partners solve problems
March 2009: How do you optimize production and maximize profits with limited space, while providing as many work hours as possible to employees? That was the challenge presented to a group of students in Math 381: Discrete Mathematical Modeling, a class offered by the UW Department of Mathematics. The students learned how to use mathematical modeling to solve real-world problems.

Read the full College of Arts & Sciences story here.

Chad Klumb awarded UW Sophomore Medal
February 2009: Mathematics major Chad Klumb has been awarded the UW's Sophomore Medal. Chad is now a two-time UW medalist, having won the Freshman Medal last year. The University of Washington awards the Freshman Medal to the sophomore having the highest scholastic standing for the first year of his or her course, and the Sophomore Medal to the junior having the highest scholastic standing for the first two years of his or her course.

Jeff Eaton awarded Dean's Medal for 2008
June 2008: The College of Arts & Sciences has named Jeff Eaton a Dean's Medalist for 2008. Jeff joins Kathy Temple (1999), Thomas Carlson (2002), Jeff Giansiracusa (2003), Terri Moore (2004), Eliana Hechter (2006), and Nick Reichert (2007) in a distinguished line of seven Mathematics majors who have received the Dean's Medal in the last ten years. Jeff will graduate from UW with Bachelor's Degrees in both Mathematics and Sociology, a Master's Degree in Statistics, and a minor in Music. After graduation he plans to pursue a PhD at Imperial College London as a Marshall Scholar.

2008 Mathematics Honors Luncheon
May 2008: The annual Mathematics Honors Luncheon was held at the UW Club on May 20th to recognize outstanding undergraduate Mathematics and ACMS majors. In addition to their award, each student was given a book reflecting their mathematical interests. A full list of this year's awardees and their accompanying books may be found here.

Mathematics students honored as UW medalists
April 2008: Mathematics students Chad Klumb and Ting-You Wang have been awarded the UW's Freshman Medal and Junior Medal respectively. These medals are awarded to students who have had the strongest academic record in their class for the previous year. For further details, see this article in University Week.

Nate Bottman wins Goldwater Scholarship
April 2008: Nate Bottman has been awarded a 2008 Goldwater Scholarship. This is but the latest in a series of honors Nate has earned. Information about the scholarship and a list of the 2008 scholars may be found here.

Ginger Warfield wins 2008 PIMS Education Prize
April 2008: Ginger Warfield has been awarded the 2008 PIMS Education Prize. This award is given yearly to a member of the PIMS community who has made a significant contribution to education in the mathematical sciences. Further information about PIMS and the Education Prize may be found here.

Chris Hoffman awarded AMS Centennial Fellowship
March 2008: Chris Hoffman was awarded an American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship. The primary selection criterion for the fellowship is the excellence of the candidate's research. For more information and a list of past awardees, see this link.

Jim Morrow receives 2008 Haimo Award from MAA
January 2008: Jim Morrow has received the 2008 Deborah and Franklin Tepper Haimo Award for Distinguished College or University Teaching of Mathematics from the Mathematical Association of America. Click here to read the award citation and Morrow's response.
Click here for a University Week profile of Jim Morrow.

SAGE wins prize in international software competition
December 2007: The open source software SAGE, based in our department and led by William Stein, has won first prize in the scientific software category of the 2007 Trophées du Libre. Further information can be found in an article by David Joyner and William Stein on the significance of open source software for mathematics, a UW news release, and the UW Daily article.

Jeff Eaton awarded Marshall Scholarship
November 2007: Jeff Eaton has been awarded a Marshall Scholarship to pursue a PhD in Infectious Disease Epidemiology at Imperial College in London. For his PhD he plans to develop mathematical models to understand the spread of infectious disease epidemics such as the HIV epidemic in sub-Saharan Africa.
Jeff entered the UW through the Academy for Young Scholars at age 16. His freshman year he was named the outstanding student in the Math 134/5/6 Honors Calculus course. He has participated in the Department's summer REU program, participated twice in the Mathematical Modeling Contest, and has been a facilitator the Math Fair program the Department runs at local elementary schools. He was a Gates Fellow during 2006-07, and spent the academic year working at a Demographic Surveillance Site in South Africa. Jeff plans to graduate in June 2008 with Bachelor's Degrees in Mathematics and Sociology, a Master's Degree in Statistics, and a minor in Music. See the UW Daily article for further information.

Nate Bottman adds Davidson Fellowship to his awards
August 2007: Nate Bottman has been named a Davidson Fellow. Other awards received by Nate during the past year include the UW Freshman Medal, an Outstanding Winner designation at the 2007 Mathematical Contest in Modeling as a member of a UW team, and a Math in Moscow Award from the American Mathematical Society. Here's a recent Seattle Post-Intelligencer article about Nate.

Zhenqing Chen elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics
August 2007: Zhenqing Chen was named Fellow of the IMS in recognition of his research on the Dirichlet form approach to Markov processes, reflected Brownian motion and stable processes. See the IMS press release for additional information.

Victor Klee (1925 - 2007)
August 2007: Vic Klee passed away on August 17, 2007 in Lakewood, Ohio. Klee was a distinguished member of our department for nearly 54 years. He will be sorely missed.
See this page for more information.

Ioana Dumitriu wins Leslie Fox Prize
June 2007: Ioana Dumitriu has won the 2007 Leslie Fox Prize in Numerical Analysis.  Information on this biennial competition, the prize and past winners may be found here.

Nick Reichert awarded Dean's Medal in the Natural Sciences for 2007
May 2007: The College of Arts & Sciences has named Nick Reichert the Dean's Medalist in the Natural Sciences for 2007. Nick joins Kathy Temple (1999), Thomas Carlson (2002), Jeff Giansiracusa (2003), Terri Moore (2004) and Eliana Hechter (2006) in a distinguished line of six Mathematics majors who have received the Dean's Medal in the last nine years. After graduating from UW with simultaneous Bachelor's and Master's degrees, Nick will attend the mathematics PhD program at Princeton University.

With two wins in 2007, UW Math has seven MCM wins in six years
March 2007: Two teams of UW undergraduates were declared Outstanding Winners in this year's Mathematical Contest in Modeling. The team of Sam Burden, Aaron Dilley, and Lukas Svec were Outstanding Winners, and also won the MAA Award. The team of Nate Bottman, Wes Essig, and Sam Whittle were Outstanding Winners. Of the 949 teams that participated in the MCM this year, 14 were designated Outstanding Winners. We have had seven Outstanding Winners in the last six years. Having been inspired by the standard set by Lance Armstrong in the Tour de France, do we now dare to turn to John Wooden's record? This year's results are available at 2007 MCM Results.
Click here for a related article in University Week.

Gunther Uhlmann's work on invisibility cloaking
January 2007: Every child's dream of becoming invisible leaped forward last year toward becoming a reality. A cloaking device has set the mathematical community buzzing about how to make invisibility not just possible, but practical. Invisibility cloaking and the contributions of Gunther Uhlmann to the mathematics of this area are the subject of an article in University Week.

Ginger Warfield receives Louise Hay Award
January 2007: Ginger Warfield has been awarded the 2007 Louise Hay Award. This award, given by the Association for Women in Mathematics, recognizes outstanding achievement in mathematics education. University Week has published a profile of Warfield in recognition of this award and her many contributions to education in mathematics.  Please see this page for the citation of the award and Warfield's response.

Eliana Hechter awarded the Dean's Medal in the Natural Sciences
May 2006: The College of Arts & Sciences has named Eliana Hechter the Dean's Medalist in the Natural Sciences for 2006. This marks the third time in four years that this honor has been awarded to a Mathematics major. Also a recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship (see below), Eliana will continue on to pursue a PhD at the University of Oxford.

Nick Reichert awarded Astronaut Scholarship
May 2006: Mathematics undergraduate Nick Reichert has been awarded an Astronaut Scholarship. The Astronaut Scholarship Foundation, established by the Mercury 7 astronauts, annually awards a fellowship to a student in each of 18 universities, including the University of Washington. Each institution selects two nominees in a university-wide competition, and the Foundation makes the final selection. Increasing Nick's honor is the fact that the Scholarship is seldom awarded to an undergraduate, nor to a student whose department name does not include the prefix "astro!"

Jim Morrow to receive Distinguished Teaching Award
May 2006: Professor Jim Morrow has been selected to receive the Distinguished Teaching Award of the Pacific Northwest section of the Mathematical Association of America. This adds to the list of awards that Professor Morrow has earned for educational excellence, including the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences Education Prize in 2005 and the University of Washington Distinguished Teaching Award in 2003.

Biesel, Eaton awarded Goldwater Scholarship
March 2006: Owen Biesel and Jeff Eaton have both received the 2006 Goldwater Scholarship.  Owen, majoring in Mathematics and Physics, and Jeff, majoring in Mathematics, Statistics, and Sociology, along with former recipients Anna Schneider (2005), Noah Giansiracusa (2004), and Eliana Hechter (2004) comprise the five Mathematics students currently at the UW to earn this prestigious scholarship.

Eliana Hechter awarded Rhodes Scholarship
November 2005:Mathematics major Eliana Hechter has been awarded a Rhodes Scholarship for graduate study at the University of Oxford. Eliana plans to pursue a PhD (or DPhil in Oxford-speak) in mathematics at Oxford.

Eliana entered the University of Washington at the age of 14 through the Early Entrance Program. She took the accelerated honors sequences Math 134/5/6 and Math 334/5/6 in her first and third year at UW. She is taking the year-long graduate level courses in algebra and real analysis during her senior year. She participated in the department's Research Experiences for Undergradutes program last summer, supported by a Phelps Fellowship. She is currently doing research on the dynamics of cell division, and working on her senior thesis in homological algebra with John Palmieri. Eliana received a Goldwater Scholarship in 2004; just a week ago she was selected for a Marshall Scholarship, which she will decline in favor of the Rhodes Scholarship. Click here for a recent Associated Press article about Eliana Hechter and her achievements.

Article by President Emmert: We Did the Math
September 2005: The Department of Mathematics is the subject of the lead article by UW President Mark Emmert in the September issue of Columns, the University of Washington Alumni Magazine. Click here to read the article: We Did the Math.

Jim Morrow receives two new awards: PIMS Education Prize, and College of Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professorship
May 2005: Jim Morrow has been awarded a College of Arts and Sciences Alumni Distinguished Professorship for the 2005-06 academic year.
Morrow has also received the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) Education Prize, the goal of which is to recognize those who have "played a major role in encouraging activities which enhance public awareness and appreciation of mathematics, as well as fostering communication amongst the various groups and organizations concerned."

Math Department challenges Lance: Fifth MCM win in four years
March 2005: A team of undergraduates has continued our streak in the Mathematical Contest in Modeling. The team of Ryan Bressler, Braxton Osting and Christina Polwarth were designated Outstanding Winners in the 2005 contest and also received the INFORMS Award. We now have five Outstanding Winners in the last four years in a bold challenge to the standard set by Lance Armstrong on the Tour de France. The results are available at 2005 MCM Results.

Math Department wins 2005 Brotman Award
March 2005: The Department of Mathematics has been selected to receive the 2005 Brotman Award for Instructional Excellence. The Brotman Award is the University's undergraduate teaching excellence award for departments and other instructional units. The Math Department has been praised for a range of accomplishments including its reform of precalculus and calculus instruction, the introduction of the ACMS major in collaboration with the other mathematical science departments, the reform and expansion of the Mathematics undergraduate degree program, as well as the successes the students in these programs. General information about the Brotman Award may be found here.

Branko Grünbaum Awarded Steele Prize by AMS
January 2005: Branko Grünbaum was awarded the 2005 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Mathematical Exposition. Presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Steele Prize is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics.

Grünbaum was honored for his book, Convex Polytopes. The prize citation states: "[This book] has served both as a standard reference and as an inspiration for three and a half decades of research in the theory of polytopes. That theory is currently very active and enjoys connections with many other areas of mathematics, including optimization, computational algebra, algebraic geometry, and representation theory. Much of the development that led to the present, thriving state of polytope theory owes its existence to this book, which served as a source of information for workers in the field and as a source of inspiration for them to enter the field. Despite the passage of time, Convex Polytopes retains its value both as an exposition of the theory and as a reference work. Springer-Verlag's decision to issue a second edition in 2003, consisting of Grünbaum's original text plus notes by Volker Kaibel, Victor Klee, and Guenter Ziegler to describe newer developments, will extend the book's influence to future generations of mathematicians."

UW awarded VIGRE Grant
April 2004: UW Departments of Mathematics, Applied Mathematics and Statistics are to be awarded a second five-year VIGRE grant by the National Science Foundation in order to expand the work we have been doing under a current VIGRE grant. The grant will fund undergraduate research, graduate fellowships and postdoctoral fellowships to facilitate vertical integration, integration across departments, as well as increased cooperation with the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS).