Virginia Math Bulletin, July 2017
Virginia Math Bulletin »
Presenting the fourth issue of the Department newsletter: 2017 Virginia Math Bulletin.
View from the Chair
This is the last summer of my term as Chair, and it is the last time I will be writing this column. Over the last several years, the Mathematics Department changed enormously. Even as universities across the country face significant challenges, both economic and social, our department has thrived. There are still many challenges that remain for both UVa and our department, but we are well-positioned to continue our progress. We have outstanding colleagues taking over as Chair. Zoran Grujic will serve as Interim Chair for one year, after which John Imbrie becomes Chair. John is on sabbatical next year at Princeton.
We were delighted to welcome five new tenure-track and tenured faculty last Fall: Julie Bergner, Francesco Di Plinio, Juraj Földes, Sara Maloni, and Jennifer Morse. We also welcomed two new postdocs, Axel Saenz-Rodriguez and Ramanujan Santharoubane. Please read about their work in the following pages. Since I’ve been at UVa we have hired twelve outstanding new faculty, who infuse the department with energy and new ideas. During this time we have also begun a significant transformation of the way we teach Calculus, moving to an inquiry-based learning model crafted for our own students. Paul Bourdon has headed up this change, and you will hear more about it in later newsletters.
In this issue we have a special article on the recent work of John Imbrie on the many-bodied localization problem in mathematical physics. His work has attracted considerable attention this last year. I hope you enjoy reading it as much as I did.
We were saddened by the passing this year of Emeritus Professor Gene Paige, whom I was lucky to get to know during my time here. He always brought good cheer and a calm demeanor to the department, and will be greatly missed. Don Ramirez announced his retirement after 50 years of teaching and research at UVa. Don’s institutional memory and stories about the department’s history will be irreplaceable. You can read more about Gene and Don in the newsletter.
The department continues to have many research visitors and activities, some centered on our Institute of Mathematics and the Virginia Math Lectures Series. We had two workshops during the year. The Seminar on Stochastic Processes (SSP) is a fixture in the probability community and the most important regular conference series for probabilists in North America. The 37th Seminar on Stochastic Processes was hosted at University of Virginia, 8-11 March 2017. In connection with our Virginia Mathematics Lecture by Benedict Gross which you can read about in this newsletter, we hosted a workshop “Elliptic Curves, Torsors and L-functions”.
I have been grateful for the support of our wonderful faculty, staff, students, our Dean’s office, our alumni, and our friends during my time as Chair. One of the greatest benefits of being Chair has been the pleasure of working with a great number of people committed to making our department better.
Marvin Rosenblum Professor of Mathematics
Continue reading in PDF
Last updated: Tuesday, July 11, 2017