Category: Faculty

Swimming microbes steer themselves into mathematical order

Saverio Spagnolie and Arthur Evans of UW–Madison, University of Michigan physicist Christopher Miles and mathematician Michael Shelley of the Flatiron Institute and New York University found that when the particles are confined to a thin sheet and allowed to expand into an empty fluid, the collective motion can be described by equations already used in entirely different …

Sloan Fellowships Awarded to Two Faculty

Two University of Wisconsin–Madison professors, Mihaela Ifrim and Botong Wang, have been named to 2019 Sloan Research Fellowships — prestigious and competitive awards given to promising young researchers in the early stages of their careers. “Sloan Research Fellows are the best young scientists working today,” says Adam F. Falk, president of the Alfred P. Sloan …

Erman, Sam, Ellenberg Mentions in the Bulletin of the AMS this month.

Two of the four articles published this month in the Bulletin of the American Mathematics Society have UW connections.  Daniel Erman and former faculty, Steven Sam, have an article titled “Cubics in 10 variables vs. cubics in 1000 variables: Uniformity phenomena for bounded degree polynomials”.  Jordan Ellenberg has been involved in work related to what …

The Wonderful World of Hagfish Slime

Hundreds of meters deep in the dark of the ocean, a shark glides toward what seems like a meal. It’s kind of ugly, eel-like and not particularly meaty, but still probably food. So the shark strikes. This is where the interaction of biology and physics gets mysterious — just as the shark finds its dinner …

Melanie Matchett Wood Elected to AMS Council

Melanie Matchett Wood has been elected to a 3 year term on the American Mathematical Society Council, starting in 2019.  The Council formulates and administers the scientific policies of the Society and acts in an advisory capacity to the Board of Trustees.  Congratulations, Melanie!

David Anderson Awarded Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor

Congratulations to David Anderson on being awarded as a Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor.  Candidates for the professorships possess unusual qualifications and promise, having been recognized nationally and internationally for the quality of their research.  Congratulations, David!

Melanie Matchett Wood explores the rank of elliptic curves in new model

Melanie Matchett Wood is one of a group of four researchers who have recently come out with a model that upends the conventional wisdom in their field. They have used intensive computational data to suggest that for decades, if not longer, prevailing opinion about a fundamental concept has been wrong. The model, which was posted online …

Tonghai Yang named as an 2019 Fellow of the AMS

Congratulations to Tonghai Yang, the newest member of our department to be named a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) for 2019. He was named For contributions to the theory of Shimura varieties, L-functions, automorphic forms, and complex multiplication. The Fellows of the AMS designation recognizes members who have made outstanding contributions to the …

Ellenberg Demonstrated Aaron Rodgers is the Superior QB

Jordan Ellenberg crunched the numbers, and he knows the answer. The author of “How Not to Be Wrong” and UW–Madison Mathematics Professor was featured on NBC Sports to prove who was superior: Aaron Rodgers or Tom Brady. Jordan demonstrated how he came to his conclusion that Aaron Rodgers was in fact the better QB. [Link: …

Ex-Prof Milewski Quoted on Quantum Experiment Developments

Oil droplets guided by “pilot waves” have failed to reproduce the results of the quantum double-slit experiment, crushing a century-old dream that there exists a single, concrete reality. Paul Milewski (1995-2011 at UW) was recently quoted regarding the developments. Link: https://www.quantamagazine.org/famous-experiment-dooms-pilot-wave-alternative-to-quantum-weirdness-20181011