Category: Alumni

Alum Jiwoong Jang and Hung Tran receive Best Paper Award

Jiwoong Jang, who got his PhD here in 2024, and his former advisor Hung Tran have received the Best Paper Award 2025 for their publication in Advances in Continuous and Discrete Models.  Their paper is entitled “Discrete coagulation–fragmentation equations with multiplicative coagulation kernel and constant fragmentation kernel”. Announcement here: https://link.springer.com/journal/13662/updates/27848448 Congratulations, Hung and Jiwoong!

Best Paper Winners Honored at ICCM

Two weeks ago, some of our UW Math alumni, postdocs, and faculty had their work honored at the International Congress of Chinese Mathematicians in Shanghai, China. Qiao He (former postdoc and VISP student), Chao Li, Yousheng Shi (former postdoc), and Tonghai Yang (professor) won the Best Paper Gold Award in Number Theory for their paper …

Alumna and New Asst Prof Rajula Srivastava wins Mirzakhani New Frontier Prize

Our new colleague Rajula Srivastava (coming this Fall) has won one of the 2025 Maryam Mirzakhani New Frontiers Prizes! Rajula is also a graduate of our department, having received her PhD in 2022 with Andreas Seeger. https://breakthroughprize.org/Laureates/3/L3981 https://www.mathematics.uni-bonn.de/en/news/rajula-srivastava-receives-the-maryam-mirzakhani-new-frontiers-prize Congratulations, Rajula!

Alumnus Mark Wilson is next editor of Notices of the AMS

Mark Wilson (Ph.D., 1995, Passman) is the next editor-in-chief of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.  He starts a 3 year term on January 1, 2025. Link: https://www.ams.org/news?news_id=7191 In addition, he has a new research monograph recently published, written jointly with Robin Pemantle (former faculty, 1991-2001) among other coauthors. Link https://www.cambridge.org/9781108836623 Mark notes that …

Rajula Srivastava (Ph.D., 2022) awarded 2023 AWM Dissertation Prize

VISP-MA Program celebrated the new semester and the Mid-autumn festival

On September 9th, the VISP-MA Program at the Department of Mathematics hosted an event celebrating the beginning of Fall 22 semester and the Mid-Autumn Festival, a traditional Chinese celebration. Taking place on the top floor of Van Fleck hall, new and current students as well as alumni of the mathematics VISP and masters programs were …

Raymond Damadian, BS, 1956, inventor of the MRI scanner, dies at age 86.

Dr. Raymond Damadian, who built the first magnetic resonance imaging scanner, which revolutionized doctors’ ability to diagnose cancer and other illnesses — but who, to his dismay, saw the Nobel Prize for the science behind it go to two others — died on Aug. 3 at his home in Woodbury, N.Y. He was 86. Since …

Math alum to speak to graduates at spring commencement

John Gottman, Ph.D., an alumnus of the UW–Madison, is world-renowned for his work on marital stability and divorce prediction. He will be awarded an honorary doctoral degree during spring commencement. As is the tradition for recipients of honorary doctoral degrees, he will speak at the ceremony for graduate students. Gottman earned a master’s degree in …

UW Alumnus Song Sun Wins New Frontier Award

UW Alumnus Song Sun (Ph.D., 2010, Xiu-Xiong Chen) has won a New Frontier Award from the Breakthrough Foundation for many groundbreaking contributions to complex differential geometry, including existence results for Kahler-Einstein metrics and connections with moduli questions and singularities.  Song Sun currently is at UC-Berkeley. Link:  https://breakthroughprize.org/News/60

Alumna becomes next President of MAA

Jennifer (Massey) Quinn, (Ph.D., 1993, Brualdi) has been elected as the next President of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA).  She is currently with the University of Washington Tacoma. She was elected president-elect and will begin her term Feb. 1, 2020, and will serve as president during 2021- 2022, and past president in 2023. Link: https://www.maa.org/election