COLORADO STATE
UNIVERSITY
SPRING 2012
Volume 5 Issue 2
D E P A R TM E N T
INSIDE THIS ISSUE:
TAVENER STARTS
NEW POST
1
TAVENER OXFORD
VISIT FALL 2011
2
GRANT AWARDS
3
4
CONFERENCE
HONORS LIEBLER
MATH GRADUATE
NUMBERS FOR
2011
4
FACULTY UPDATES
5
2011 GRADUATE
STUDENT UPDATE
6
GRADUATE AND
ALUMNI NEWS
BLAST FROM THE
7
8
SPECIAL RECOGNITION
Celebrating CSU
Milestones
A special All-University
gathering will be held in May
to honor faculty and staff
retirements and to recognize
those who have reached 10,
15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45
and 50 years of service and
dedication
to
CSU.
Congratulations to the
following individuals being
recognized from the CNS and
Dept of Mathematics:
James Sites
40 years of service
Rick Miranda
30 years of service
Georgeann Venis
25 years of service
Simone Clasen
10 years of service
Christie Franklin
10 years of service
O F
M AT HE MAT I CS
N E W SL E T T E R
PROFESSOR SIMON TAVENER BEGINS
POST AS ASSOCIATE DEAN OF
ACADEMICS FOR NATURAL SCIENCES
In May 2011, the College of Natural Sciences at Colorado
State University promoted mathematics professor and former
department chair Simon Tavener to Associate Dean of Academics.
Following a leave from campus in the fall of 2011, he returned to
resume his new assignment beginning January 3, 2012. Professor
Tavener was replaced by Professor Gerhard Dangelmayr, who
assumed his new department chair responsibilities June 1, 2012.
"Both Dr. Tavener and Dr. Dangelmayr are exceptional
scholars and experienced leaders in the college. I am pleased they
have accepted these new responsibilities,” said Jan Nerger, dean
of the college. “Each of them brings experience and vision that
will help advance the Department of Mathematics and the College
of Natural Sciences.”
Tavener joined Colorado State’s Department of Mathematics
in 2000 and was named chair in 2003. Tavener grew up in New Zealand and moved to the
US after receiving his D. Phil from the University of Oxford. After one year of
postdoctoral work at the Institute of Mathematics and its Applications at the University of
Minnesota, he spent 13 years as first a postdoctoral researcher, and then as an assistant and
associate professor at Penn State. Tavener’s current research focuses on numerical
techniques for the accurate computation of multiphysics problems. With a background in
engineering and physics as well as mathematics, Tavener has said he seeks ways to apply
mathematics to “something tangible.”
One of Tavener’s specialties has been interdisciplinary collaboration. Since 2007 (with
Mike Antolin from the Department of Biology) he has led a $900,000 grant from the
National Science Foundation to create an undergraduate research program to prepare a new
generation of biologists and mathematicians capable of interdisciplinary collaboration. In
2009, he was part of a Colorado State team awarded a $2.5 million National Science
Foundation grant to study transmission of chronic wasting disease. He is co-principal
investigator on a $500,000 award from the National Science Foundation to fund
undergraduate scholarships in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics or
STEM disciplines. With Don Estep, he recently received two new awards from the Idaho
National Laboratory, totaling $1.25 million to study multi-scale modeling of nuclear fuels
performance in the presence of uncertainty. Tavener spent five months in each of 2010 and
2011 as a visiting fellow at the Oxford Center for Collaborative Applied Mathematics.
Tavener was recently elected Secretary of SIAM (Society of Industrial and Applied
Mathematics) and started his term of office on January 1, 2012.
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
Page 2
Professor Simon Tavener shares about his
Spring 2011 visit to Oxford University
I spent from August to December in Oxford on a fellowship from OCCAM, the Oxford Center for
Collaborative Applied Mathematics. During this time I mainly collaborated with faculty, postdoctoral
fellows and graduate students in the Computer Science department which includes a large group working in
Computational Biology. Many of my collaborations have extended over several years and it is nice to see
some of them finally coming to fruition. In particular, I hope that one of the graduate students I have been
working with will complete her D.Phil this semester and begin a postdoctoral appointment at University
College, London. I also took the opportunity to visit several other British universities and to participate in
the ENUMATH meeting in Leicester and a week-long workshop on the "Numerical Analysis of Multiscale
Problems and Stochastic Analysis" at the Johann Radon Institute for Computational and Applied
Mathematics (RICAM) in Linz, Austria. I plan to host a number of reciprocal visits from Oxford colleagues
during the next year.
The demands of such a stimulating mathematical and scientific environment as Oxford were relieved by
frequent visits to the Holywell Music Room, leisurely weekend walks in rural Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds
and racing for the Headington Road Runners in the Oxfordshire Mail and Chiltern Cross Country Leagues.
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
Page 3
DEPARTMENT GRANT AWARDS
September 11, 2011– January 12, 2012
PRIMARY-PI
CO-PI
Donald Estep
Simon Tavener
Donald Estep
Simon J. Tavener
Bruce Draper
Bruce Draper
Daniel Bates
Michael Kirby
Michael Kirby
Renzo Cavalieri
Renzo Cavalieri
Renzo Cavalieri
SPONSOR
TITLE
AMOUNT
TOTAL: $2,023,149
Idaho National
Laboratory
Uncertainty Analysis for
Multiscale Models of
Nuclear Fuel Performance
(Add’l funds)
Idaho National
Laboratory
Uncertainty Analysis for
Multiscale Models of
Nuclear Fuel Performance
(New Award)
NSF—National
Science Foundation
Collaborative Research:
A Posteriori Error Analysis
and Adaptivity for
Discontinuous Interface
Problems
Chris Peterson
Michael Kirby
J Ross Beveridge
DOD-ARPA
Advanced Research
Project Agency
Visual intelligence Through
Latent Geometry and
Selective Geometry
Chris Peterson
Michael Kirby
J Ross Beveridge
DOD-ARPA
Advanced Research
Project Agency
Visual intelligence Through
Latent Geometry and
Selective Geometry
None
NSF—National
Science Foundation
Preconditioning Analysis, and
Applications of
Numerical Algebraic
Geometry Methods
University of Yale
Predictive Modeling and
Controls of Sepis
Simon Tavener
Donald Estep
None
Chris Peterson
None
None
None
$170, 823
$874,264
$15,995
(New Award)
$237,452
(Add’l funds)
$35,000
(Add’l funds)
$306.969
(New Award)
$85,019
(New Award)
NSF—National
Science Foundation
ATD: Geometric and
Statistical Data Analysis on
Special Manifolds for Threat
Detection
(New Award)
NSF—National
Science Foundation
Western Algebraic Geometry
Seminar Five Year Plan
$57,260
(Add’l funds)
NSF—National
Science Foundation
Tautological Intersection
Theory On Moduli Spaces
(New Award)
NSF—National
Science Foundation
Tautological Intersection
Theory On Moduli Spaces
(New Award)
$126,978
$10,834.00
$102,555
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
Page 4
ALGEBRA COMBINATORICS CONFERENCE
IN MEMORY OF ROBERT A. LIEBLER
HELD IN NOVEMBER WELL ATTENDED
The conference Algebraic Combinatorics: In Memory of Bob Liebler was held
November 4 - 6, 2011. Department hosts for the conference were Alexander Hulpke and
Timothy Penttila. The following summary of the events was submitted by Dr. Penttila.
Robert Allen Liebler joined the Mathematics Department at Colorado State
University in 1972. He remained an active faculty member until his untimely death in
July 2009 at the age of 64, ending a 37 year career at Colorado State University. Since
the mid-1970's, he co-organized a multi-university algebraic combinatorics seminar that
still runs today as the Rocky Mountain Algebraic Combinatorics seminar. This is a joint
conference with Denver University, UC Boulder, UC Denver, University of Wyoming
and Colorado State University.
At the November conference, there were international attendees from as far afield as
Ireland and Belgium, with two invited speakers from Canadian universities, one from an American university
and one from NSA and included a number of Bob's collaborators. As well as the invited talks in the
afternoons, there were contributed talks in the three morning sessions. The topics covered ranged broadly
within combinatorics: from finite geometry, difference sets, applications to communications engineering,
connections with physics, and algebraici nvariants of geometries to loop theory.
Two non-mathematical highlights were the remembrances of Bob exchanged at the conference dinner on
the Friday night held at the Fort Collins Hilton, and the informal supper hosted in Bob's former home on
Peterson Street by his widow, Linda Hamilton, on Saturday evening. Some mathematical highlights grew out
of the discussions over meals and in the coffee breaks that are expected to lead to new papers in the near future on algebraic combinatorics as new collaborations were forged, an outcome of which I am sure Bob would
have been proud. The conference finished very aptly with a talk by Bob's former student, Ken Smith, on applying rational idempotents to obtain results on difference sets, which used a number of Bob's ideas, both published and unpublished.
We would like to thank the CSU department of mathematics for its financial support.
CSU Dept of Mathematics Graduates for SP2011 & FA2011
SPRING 2011
FALL 2011
GRADUATE PhD . . . 3
GRADUATE PhD . . . 3
GRADUATE MS . . . 0
GRADUATE MS . . . 0
UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS . . . 23
UNDERGRADUATE MAJORS . . . 23
UNDERGRADUATE MINORS . . . 48
UNDERGRADUATE MINORS . . . 48
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
Page 5
Faculty updates . . . .news items to share!
Dan Bates spent most of January-March 2011 visiting Institut Mittag-Leffler near Stockholm,
Sweden to participate in their semester-long program on Algebraic Geometry with a View toward
Applications. This gave Dan the opportunity to interact extensively with several collaborators. The
Institut is situated in a villa set on a hill near the Baltic Sea (very near the island home of Bjorn
Ulvaeus, of ABBA fame), making it one of the more attractive research institutes that Dan has
visited, despite the ubiquitous snow and ice. In addition to working with collaborators, Dan gave
several talks to various audiences, including a colloquium in the Lyon ENS Computer Science
department, a seminar for the Linkoping Automatic Control group, and a few talks in front of the resident IML
crowd, including many grad students and postdocs. Dan's family was able to accompany him on this trip and
managed to avoid freezing while enjoying the culture and sights in Stockholm, Oslo, and Lyon.
Don Estep continues to organize the SAMSI yearlong program in uncertainty quantification with
the support of SAMSI. Traveling to SAMSI every couple of weeks, the group is organizing four
workshops on nuclear fuel models, stochastic to deterministic models, models with random
domains, and the final closet conference to be held in the spring of 2012. In addition, Professor
Estep is the co-chair of the first bi-annual ASA, SIAM, USACM Conference on Uncertainty
Quantification slated for April 2012 in Raleigh, NC. Thus far, the conference has had such an
overwhelming response, the conference has been extended an additional day. Lastly, Professor
Estep has been appointed (founding) editor in chief of the SIAM/ASA Journal of Uncertainty Quantification, which
is the first ASA/SIAM journal.
Oleg Emanouilov spent the fall 2011 semester on sabbatical leave at the Department of
Mathematics at the University of Tokyo conducting the collaborative research on inverse problems
with Prof. M. Yamamoto.
James Liu spent the fall 2011 semester on sabbatical leave at Louisiana State
University in Baton Rouge conducting collaborative research with Dr. Sue Brenner
and Dr. Li-yeng Sung on novel finite element methods for Maxwell eigenvalue problems.
Jennifer Mueller is currently serving as Program Director of the SIAM Activity Group on Imaging
Science. The Activity Group brings together SIAM members and other scientists and engineers with an
interest in the mathematical and computational aspects of imaging and organizes the biennial SIAM
Conference on Imaging Science. The SIAM Conference on Imaging Science will be held May 20-22, 2012 in
Philadelphia. More information about the conference can be found at www.siam.org/meetings/is12.
Iuliana Oprea attended the 4th International Conference on “Bifurcations in Fluid Dynamics”
in Barcelona, Spain in July 2011. The symposium brought together researchers with mutual
interest in computational, experimental, and theoretical methods for the analysis of bifurcation
and instability phenomena in fluid dynamics. Hydrodynamic stability is of fundamental
importance in fluid dynamics and is a well-established subject of scientific investigation that
continues to attract great interest in the fluid mechanics community. Dr. Oprea also recently
received funding from CIMS along with 4 co-PIs: 1) Gerhard Dangelmayr in Mathematics at CSU;
2) Steven Fassnacht, Ecosystem Sciences and Sustainability (Watershed Science) and NREL at CSU; 3) Bill
Bauerle, Horticulture and Landscape Architecture at CSU; 4) Patrick Burns, Mechanical Engineering, VP of IT, and
Dean of Libraries at CSU. The title of their submission was “Snow Surface Dynamics and Environmental
Changes.”
Page 6
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
COLLLEGE OF NATURAL SCIENCES
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATIC
2011 GRADUATES
Name
Degree
Advisor
Thesis/Dissertation Title
After Graduation
Fall
2011
Hilary
Smallwood
MS
Jeff Achter
Endomorphisms of Abelian Varieties
over Finite Fields and Characteristic
Polynomials of Frobenius
PhD, Colorado State
University
Summer
2011
Nathaniel
Burch
PhD
Don Estep
Steve
Ihde
MS
Dan Bates
William
Newton
PhD
Don Estep
Probabilistic Foundation of Nonlocal DifSAMSI Postdoc, North Carolina
fusion and Formulation and Analysis for
State University
Elliptic Problems on Uncertain Domains
Preconditioning Polynomial Systems for
Homotopy Continuation Methods
PhD, Colorado State
University
A Posteriori Error Estimates for the
Poisson Problem on Closed,
Two-Dimensional Surfaces
PostDoc, Colorado State
University
Analysis and modeling of cells, cell
Vakhtang
behavior, and helical biological
Putkaradze
molecules
PostDoc, Colorado State
University
Spring
2011
Steven
Benoit
Byungsoo
Kim
Elisabeth
Malmskog
PhD
PhD
PhD
Constrained Dynamics of rolling balls
Vakhtang
and moving atoms
Putkaradze
Rachel
Pries
Automorphisms of a Family of Maximal
Curves
unknown
PostDoc, Wesleyan
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
Page 7
DEPARTMENT MATH CLUB
ATTENDS BOSTON JOINT MEETING
In January during winter break, The Math Club attended the AMS/MAA/SIAM Joint Meetings in Boston,
presenting their poster summarizing an optimization project for a high school calculus class. The project
looked at the arm length of a trebuchet and optimizing the distance an object could be launched. The
model was built at Steve Benoit's house with his tools and materials. The 12 inch trebuchet is shaped
like a CSU Ram and launches small wooden discs about 7 feet. There are future plans to build a 4-foot
larger version for a siege engine contest! Math Club Attendees: John Bloemker, Nick Kaufhold, Kyle
Strand, Daniel Skeen, Joshua Stone, Jason Jaekel, and Alison Serafin, with Hilary Freeman as acting
sponsor. Although unable to attend, Patrick Shipman is the Math Club faculty advisor.
DEPARTMENT OF MATHEMATICS NEWSLETTER
Page 8
BLAST FROM THE PAST
ALUMNI UPDATE
The Department Math Club Members, along with Hilary Freeman, recognized a number of familiar
faces while attending the AMS, MAA, SIAM Joint meeting in Boston. Thursday, January 5th
became CSU Grad Student Reunion at Woody’s Pizza. Attendees: Roger Thelwell, Melissa
Erdmann, Brigitte Lahme, Diane Davis, Trent Kull, Mary Pilgrim, Eric Nelson, Shawn Farnell, Elin
Smith, Sarah Hamilton, Megan Buzby, Jenna Tague, Cayla McBee, Ellen Ziliak, Justin Marks,