To promote better communication between the Department of
Mathematical
Sciences and its alumni, we are developing this newsletter. It will
contain
news about our current and retired faculty, and news about our
graduates.
While we certainly know who graduated in each year, it is not so easy
to get
current information, so if you are one of our alumni, please get in
touch
and tell us about yourself. We'd like to know where you work now, what
your
position is, and we would like to make a link to your webpages if you
have
a website. Just to start the ball rolling, here is some current news
about our faculty and alumni.
Qiqing Yu taught two graduate courses this summer in China, one on "Survival Analysis" in Zhongshan University, and the other on "Data Analysis" in the South China Agriculture University.
Anton Schick gave an invited lecture "On Efficient Estimation in Time Series" at the Workshop on Frontiers of Statistics held at Princeton University, Princeton in May 18-20, 2006 in honor of Peter J. Bickel's 65th Birthday.
Thomas Zaslavsky gave several talks:
Shelemyahu Zacks participated in an international conference at Tel Aviv University, May 16 to May 20, 2006, in honor of his ex-student, Professor Uri Yechiali, who had retired. Prof. Zacks gave a paper on "Switching Capacities of an M/G/1 Queue."
Tom Head contributed the chapters on modern applications in the book "Automata Theory with Modern Applications - with contributions by Tom Head" by J.A. Anderson, (Cambridge U. Press, 2006).
Ross Geoghegan was a research guest at the University of Durham from July 13 through 28, 2006, during which he spoke on "Boundaries of Groups" at Durham and on "Associativity and Thompson's Group" at Edinburgh and Newcastle.
Christopher Hanusa was a visitor at the University of Bordeaux where he gave a seminar on "A Gessel-Viennot-Type Method for Cycle Systems in a Directed Graph".
Pedro Ontaneda was invited to give two talks titled "Harmonic maps, Ricci flow and negative curvature" and "Is the space of negatively curved metrics connected?" during the June, 2006, conference on Geometric Methods in Topology at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
Tom Farrell travelled extensively this summer giving a talk each at the University of Meunster in June and the University of Edinburgh in July, and a series of 4 talks during July and August at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.
A conference to celebrate the 60th birthday of Erik Pedersen, professor and chair in Mathematical Sciences, was held in June, 2006, at the University of Meunster. Pedersen then gave a talk "On the Hauptvermutung" at a conference celebrating the 70th birthday of another mathematician, C. T. C. Wall, in July, 2006, at the University of Edinburgh.
Ross Geoghegan attended the 2nd William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop on "Surface Groups in Low Dimensional Topology and Geometric Group Theory" at the Hamilton Mathematics Institute, Trinity College Dublin, September 28-30, 2006, and then gave a seminar lecture on "Associativity and Richard Thompson's group" at University College Dublin, on October 2, 2006.
Miguel Arcones was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute, which includes more than 2,000 individual elected members who are internationally recognized as leaders in the field of statistics. He also has been named to the forthcoming 2007 edition of Who's Who in America.
Fernando Guzman spoke on "Thompson's groups and associativity of binary operations" at the XIII Congress of the Regional School of Mathematics held September 11-15, 2006 at the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Pereira, Colombia.
A conference "Geometry, Topology, and their Interactions" was held in Morelia, Mexico, January 8th-13th, 2007, to honor the work of Tom Farrell and his collaborator Lowell Jones of SUNY-Stony Brook. Among the 25 speakers at the conference was Erik Pedersen.
Shelemyahu Zacks spoke at two honorary conferences in December of 2006. At a conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, December 18-20, in honor of Professor Ester Samuel-Cahn, Prof. Zacks spoke on "Distributions of Stopping Times for Compound Poisson Processes and Non-Linear Boundaries." At a conference at the University of Haifa, December 21, in honor of Professor Abram Kagan, Prof. Zacks spoke on "The Distribution of a stopping time for a sequential estimation of the log odds of Bernoulli trials, with fixed width confidence intervals."
Tom Head gave 12 hours of lectures during December 19-21, 2006, to a group of students from the European Union at The Fifth International Ph.D. School of Formal Languages and Applications, Roviri i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain. He spoke on "Higher Natural Numbers and Thue-Morse Words."
Alex Feingold gave a talk entitled ``A New Perspective on the Frenkel-Zhu Fusion Rule Theorem" at Davidson College, NC, March 3-4, 2007, at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, in the Special Session on Geometric and Combinatorial Methods in Representation Theory.
Tom Head, Luise-Charlotte Kappa and David Hanson retired this year. Prof. Head's last student, John Loftus, and Prof. Kappa's last student, Gabriela Mendoza, will defend their dissertations this summer.
We welcome a new faculty member, Xiangjin Xu, an analyst whose interests are in harmonic analysis on manifolds and nonlinear differential equations.
We also welcome two visiting professors, one who will be joining the faculty in the Fall, and one who will come in the Spring:
In January 2007, Erik Pedersen left our department to take up (perhaps temporarily) the position of chairman of the University of Copenhagen. Anton Schick has generously accepted the task of being our chairman.
Prof. Schick has also been traveling this summer, and was in Germany for five weeks, from May 29 to July 2. Two of these weeks (June 3 till June 16) were spent at the the Mathematical Research Institute at Oberwolfach where he took part in the Research in Pairs Program with his long-time collaborator Wolfgang Wefelmeyer from the University of Cologne. The other time was spent at the University of Ulm where he a gave a colloquium talk (June 26) entitled "Residual-based empirical distribution functions".
Thomas Zaslavsky was on sabbatical in Spring 2007, and used the opportunity for extensive travel. He was in:
Dikran Karagueuezian is taking a leave of absence from our
department
to work in the ``real world" as a financial consultant for an
investment firm in
California. Although the job pays better than being a professor, Dikran
says he is
not really cut out for the corporate world, and expects to eventually
return to us,
where he can continue to pursue his mathematical research and teaching.
Alex Feingold will visit the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany July 30 - August 10, 2007, at the invitation of collaborator Hermann Nicolai (Director, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics). Afterwards, Feingold will briefly visit the Max Planck Mathematical Sciences Institute at Bonn, and then go to the first part of the XXXVIIth Paris Summer Institute on Black Holes, Black Rings and Modular Forms, at the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Ross Geoghegan sends the following information about his recent and planned mathematical activities.
Prof. Miguel Arcones gave an invited talk "Minimax estimators of the coverage probability of the impermissible error for a location family" to the 2007 Joint Statistical Meeting of the ASA/IMS at Salt Lake City, Utah, July 29-August 2, 2007. While there he also spoke with several of our graduate alumni.
Alex Feingold attended and presented a talk at the conference (organized by Natasha Jonoska and Masahico Saito) ``Knotting Mathematics and Art: A Conference in Low Dimensional Topology and Mathematical Art", November 1 - 4, 2007, at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. Prof. Feingold's talk was on ``Mathematics as Art: Links and Knots in space and on surfaces". One of his bronze sculptures ``Hypocycloid Trefoil" was part of the exhibition ``Rhythm of Structure: Beyond the Mathematics", curated by John Sims as part of the conference. Pictures of the pieces in the exhibition, and pictures taken at the conference can be seen by following the link: Knot Art Conference Pictures.
After returning from a very stimulating trip to Germany and Paris in August, Prof. Feingold completed the paper ``A New Perspective on the Frenkel-Zhu Fusion Rule Theorem" in collaboration with Prof. Stefan Fredenhagen (Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam, Germany). This happy collaboration came about after Feingold gave a talk based on the incomplete manuscript, and Fredenhagen made a suggestion on how the proof could be completed. Two months and many emails later, a complete proof and manuscript were produced as joint work, and the paper is currently submitted for publication. Another collaborative research project was also started in Potsdam between Feingold, Hermann Nicolai and Axel Kleinschmidt.
Tom Head, Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences, will attend the conference "Algorithmic Bioprocesses" held at the Lorentz Center at Leiden University, Dec. 3-9, 2007. This meeting will also celebrate the 65-th birthday of Professor Gzegorz Rozenberg, the founding director of the Leiden Center for Natural Computing and the founding editor of the journal, "Natural Computing". Head will present: 'Aqueous Computing: Out of the water and into the light' in which he resolves the aqueous technique of DNA-computing into a system which uses only light - no water, no DNA. He calls it 'PhotoComputing'. A proof of concept is given using a xerox machine as a parallel computer. The content of this talk will appear in the December issue of the journal "Parallel Processing Letters".
Tom Zaslavsky and Seyna Jo Bruskin were married on January 5, 2008 in Manhattan. A detailed announcement appears in the New York Times, and can be found through the following link: Zaslavsky-Bruskin Wedding.
Ross Geoghegan, Professor of Mathematics, spoke at the New York Group Theory Seminar on February 1. The title of his talk was "Modules over Groups of Isometries". This weekly seminar is held at the Graduate Center of CUNY.
Adrian Vasiu, who has been visiting Binghamton in Fall 2007, has accepted the position of Associate Professor with tenure in our department. We happily welcome our new colleague, and look forward to his friendship and strong contributions to our program for many years to come.
Miguel A. Arcones was invited to give a talk in the 32nd SIAM Southeastern-Atlantic Section Conference at Orlando, Florida, March 14-15, 2008. The title of the talk was "Minimax estimators of the coverage probability of the impermissible error for a location family".
Prof. Omar Saldarriaga, who earned his Ph.D. in 2004 under the direction of Alex Feingold, has been an Assistant Professor at William Patterson University in Wayne, NJ. He wrote a paper based on his thesis which was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Algebra. Omar and his wife, Diana, have one son, Sebastian. He has recently moved back to Colombia, South America.
Michael Weiner earned his Ph.D. in 1994 under the direction of Alex Feingold. He is currently a tenured associate professor at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University. Mike and his wife, Roberta, have one son, Joshua. In March, 2004, Mike received the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. The Atherton Award is a university-wide teaching award that is universally recognized as the highest honor available for excellence in teaching at Penn State University. Mike Weiner joined award winner Doug Brown as the second member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Penn State Altoona to win this prestigious teaching award.
Also tenured associate professors at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University, are Victor Brunsden (Ph.D. 1995 under the direction of Thomas Farrell)) and Karl Lorensen ( Ph.D. 1997 under the direction of Peter Hilton).
Xiaodong (Sheldon) Wang earned his Ph.D. in 1997 under the direction of Shelemyahu Zacks. He is currently working as a statistician for Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, Clinical Affairs Department, Raritan, NJ/. He and his wife, Huiling Li, have two children, Emily and Kevin.
Hanxiang Peng (Ph.D. 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) has received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi to be effective this fall. He will be visiting Prof. Schick for two weeks this summer to work on some ongoing projects.
Jeff Forrester (Ph.D. 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) spent several years at Vanderbilt University as a research assistant. Last year he joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, as a visiting faculty member. Starting this fall he will continue his employment there in a tenure-track position. Dickinson College is a small liberal arts school located in south central Pennsylvania (about 2½ hours from Binghamton) with a full time faculty of 6 mathematics and 4 computer science professors.
Natasha Jonoska (PhD 1993 under the direction of Tom Head) has the title Professor of Mathematics at the University of South Florida. The international community for research in DNA-Computing initiated in 2000 an annual award, the Yellow Tulip Award, for contributions to DNA computing. Natasha was presented with this award for the year 2007. In addition to writing numerous papers in dynamical systems, formal language theory, and wet lab technology of DNA, she has co-edited two distinguished volumes: Nanotechnology: Science and Computation, Springer-Verlag (2006) and Aspects of Molecular Computing, Springer LNCS (2004). She was also an organizer for Knotting Mathematics and Art: A Conference in Low Dimensional Topology and Mathematical Art, University of South Florida, Tampa, Nov. 1-4, 2007. Natasha will present a talk on ``RNA-Guided DNA Rearrangements and Virtual Knots" at a conference on Algorithmic Bioprocesses, Dec. 3-7, 2007, in the Lorentz Center, Leiden University. Her former advisor, Tom Head, will also give a talk on ``Aqueous Computing: Out of the Water and into the Light".
John Harrison (PhD 1993 under the direction of Tom Head) has the title Associate Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science at Wilkes University. John served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Professional Studies from 2000-2004. He continues to contribute to the undergraduate and graduate programs in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computer Information Sciences. He continues his research activities and has has published several papers in formal language theory.
Arthur Weinberger (PhD 1998 under the direction of Tom Head) now has an advanced position at Google in California. PhD thesis, Reducing Fuzzy Algebra to Classical Algebra, was published in its entirety as the first research paper in the inaugural issue of the new journal: New Mathematics and Natural Computing, Vol.1 No.1 (2005). Since completing his PhD he has worked in aspects of industrial, computational, and statistical mathematics.
Elizabeth (Laun) Goode (PhD 1999 under the direction of Tom Head) has the title of Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Towson University. She continues to contribute to the undergraduate and graduate programs in Mathematics. She continues to be active in research in formal languages & DNA and has initiated students into publications via joint activities.
Dan Clouse (PhD 2002 under the direction of Fernando Guzman) has been working for the Department of Defense at Ft. Meade, MD. He is married to Rebecca Clouse, who is a PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. They live in Annapolis, MD. Dan sometimes visits Prof. Guzman to pursue some research topics.
Jichang Du (PhD, Fall 2007 under the direction of Anton Schick) has taken a position as Senior Biostatistician with the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in the Philadelphia area.
Hanxiang Peng (PhD 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) has been awarded an NSF Grant for his proposal entitled "Theil-Sen Estimators in Semiparametric Mixed Models".
William J. Hopper (PhD 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) is working as a Statistician in the Research and Development Department of Church & Dwight Co., Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey.
Xueqin Wang (PhD 2003 under the direction of Qiqing Yu) is a full professor in the school of mathematics and computational science, Sun Yat-Sen University, P. R. China. He holds a joint position as a full professor of Bioinformatics in the Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-Sen University. He is also the principal investigator of the Lab of Statistical Genetics. Before joining the faculty of Sun Yat-Sen University, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Collaborative Center for Statistics in Science, Yale University School of Medicine. Thanks to Prof. Hanxiang Peng (Email: mmpeng@olemiss.edu) for sending us this news.
Jennifer (Every) Sassano, Mathematics Coordinator, Dominican College, 470 Western Highway, Orangeburg, NY 10962, (Email: Jennifer.sassano@dc.edu), was a graduate student in our department in 1989-91. She left to relocate and ended up finishing her doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has been a full-time faculty member at Dominican College in Rockland County, NY, for the past 16 years and she is now the Coordinator Of Mathematics.
Bronlyn Wassink defended her Ph.D. thesis, written under the direction of Matt Brin, on April 11, 2008. Next year she will have a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at Utica College in Utica, NY.