The Second Karl Menger Memorial Lecture will be given by Prof. Lloyd N. Trefethen of Oxford University, on Monday, April 14, 2008. The lecture will be part of a day-long celebration commemorating the life and work of Prof. Menger, including the presentation of the IIT Karl Menger Award for exceptional scholarship by a student. A complete schedule and links to past events can be seen here.

Upcoming Events

Upcoming events organized by our department (updated June 2007)

• Computational and Mathematical Methods in Science and Engineering, June 20-23, 2007 co-organized by Greg Fasshauer
• Midwest Numerical Analysis Day, June 23, 2007 organized by Greg Fasshauer
• ECCOMAS Thematic Conference on Meshless Methods, July 9-11, 2007 co-organized by Greg Fasshauer
• Turbulent Mixing and Beyond, International Workshop, August 18-26, 2007, The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics, Trieste, Italy. Snejana Abarji is the chairperson and coordinator.
• Hemanshu Kaul and Michael Pelsmajer are organizing the Special session on Graph Theory at the 2007 Fall AMS Central Section Meeting in Chicago, IL, October 5-6, 2007
• Conference on Credit Risk to be held on October 19-20, 2007, at the Gleacher Center in downtown Chicago, co-organized by Tom Bielecki. The conference is sponsored by the University of Chicago's Stevanovich Center for Financial Mathematics.
• Conference on Recent Advances in Mathematical Finance in Honor of Stanley R. Pliska, December 7-8, 2007, co-organized by Tom Bielecki, University of Illinois - Chicago. The conference is sponsored by UIC and Merrill Lynch.

Professor Hickernell, Associate Editor of Mathematics of Computation

Fred J. Hickernell, Professor and Chair of Applied Mathematics, has been appointed an Associate Editor of Mathematics of Computation, a journal of the American Mathematical Society for the four-year period February 2008 through January 2012. Mathematics of Computation, is one of the premier journals in computational mathematics. Prof. Hickernell will handle manuscripts related to his research expertise, which include high dimensional approximation and integration, Monte Carlo methods, and statistical computing. Since January 2005 Prof. Hickernell has also served as associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Numerical Analysis, published by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics.

Professor Fasshauer publishes a book with a CD-ROM

Associate Professor and Associate Chair Greg Fasshauer has recently published a book, Meshfree Approximation Methods with MATLAB(with CD-ROM).

Meshfree approximation methods are a relatively new area of research, and there are only a few books covering it at present. Whereas other works focus almost entirely on theoretical aspects or applications in the engineering field, this book provides the salient theoretical results needed for a basic understanding of meshfree approximation methods.

The emphasis here is on a hands-on approach that includes MATLAB routines for all basic operations. Meshfree approximation methods, such as radial basis function and moving least squares method, are discussed from a scattered data approximation and partial differential equations point of view. A good balance is supplied between the necessary theory and implementation in terms of many MATLAB programs, with examples and applications to illustrate key points. Used as class notes for graduate courses at Northwestern University, Illinois Institute of Technology, and Vanderbilt University, this book will appeal to both mathematics and engineering graduate students.

IIT Poster Competitions

IIT Research Day was held on Tuesday, April 24th, 2007. This included a poster competition, and two applied mathematics students won: Mike McCourt and Marta Bastrzyk took 1st and 2nd place, respectively, in the Undergraduate Division. On the previous Friday afternoon, April 20th, the first Applied Mathematics Student Poster Competition was held in the Engineering 1 Building. Posters were presented by both graduate and undergraduate students.

New Members of the Department

The Applied Mathematics Department at IIT welcomes its new members Igor Cialenco and Charles Tier.

Institute of Mathematical Statistics Names Hickernell Fellow

Professor and Chair Fred Hickernell was recently elected as a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.

Project NExT Fellow

Hemanshu Kaul was recently selected to be a Project NExT fellow for 2007-08. Professor Kaul works in the fields of Discrete Mathematics and Operations Research, and started at IIT in Fall 2006. His research interests lie in Combinatorics & Graph theory, Discrete Optimization, Discrete Geometry, and their interface with Probability.

Remembering Karl Menger

The Inaugural Karl Menger Memorial Lecture was given by Prof. Karl Sigmund, University of Vienna, on the afternoon of Monday, April 9, 2007. The topic is ''Menger, Games and Morals''. Mike McCourt '07 won the IIT Karl Menger Award for exceptional scholarship by a student. More details here, including many former students' Memories of Karl Menger.

NSF Wins Prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship

Mike McCourt (fifth-year Applied Mathematics) has been awarded a prestigious National Science Foundation (NSF) Graduate Research Fellowship, one of approximately 1,000 such fellowships given annually. After graduating from IIT in May with a B.S. degree, Mike plans to use his fellowship in a PhD program in Applied Mathematics, likely at Brown University , focusing on numerical methods. NSF designed the fellowships to support graduate study in science, mathematics and engineering. They provide three years of financial support for studies leading to a research-based master's or doctoral degree.

A Camras scholar, McCourt also won the first IIT Karl Menger Award for scholarship by an Applied Mathematics student. He has been active in the school's Math Club, helped to organize a mathematics-related IPRO, and participated in a summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) in Hong Kong.

2007 ISMAA meeting and contest

Twelve students from the math club travelled to the 2007 Illinois MAA Meeting. They attended a great plenary session by Joseph Gallian, participated in a math competition, and fixed a flat tire on a rented 12-passenger van in under half an hour. IIT teams placed 2nd (Christos Miltillos, Laura Rodriguez-Mosquera, Jeffrey Stanford) and 3rd (Young Cho, Jongyon Kim, Jongmin Lim) overall this year---placing teams in the top five for the third straight year. The Math Club practices weekly and has an event about once a month.

Professor Kaul also attended the meeting. He gave an hour-long invited talk on Breaking Symmetries in Graphs.

2007 Julia Beveridge Award

Dr. Sue Sitton, Senior Lecturer of Applied Mathematics, won the 2007 Julia Beveridge Award for faculty. The award is named for an extraordinary woman who served as the librarian of Armour Mission and as the first registrar of Armour Institute. Beveridge was widely recognized for her contributions to the Armour Mission and for strong leadership.

George Mackey, 1916-2006

George Mackey, a highly influential Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University (as detailed in the August 2007 AMS Notices) recently passed away. He spent a year on the faculty at IIT, 1942-43.

Professor Li Teaching Award

Associate Professor Xiaofan Li received the 2006 CSL Excellence in Teaching award, presented by Dean McMorris during a luncheon on Friday, Nov. 17 in the MTCC.

Li brings the freshness of current applied mathematics to the classroom, said McMorris, with a focus on computational fluid dynamics. Routinely winning top student evaluations, Li also inspired one of the department´s top students to write, "Without question, Dr. Li has been a guiding and driving force for me."

Professor Duan NSF Grant

The National Science Foundation (NSF) has awarded a $500,000 collaborative grant to Professor Jinqiao "Jeffrey" Duan, Department of Applied Mathematics at IIT, along with researchers from Argonne National Laboratory, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, and the University of Miami. The grant will fund the team´s project, "A New Modeling Framework for Nonhydrostatic Simulations of Small-Scale Oceanic Processes." The ocean consists of layers of water masses with very little mixing across the layer interfaces. For the purposes of climate prediction, researchers are trying to recreate in laboratory models the small-scale oceanic processes that have much higher levels of vertical mixing than observed in the open ocean. But capturing such vertical mixing is challenging for the current ocean general circulation models, which rely on mathematical models and numerical resolutions unable to resolve these processes. More realistic representation of ocean physics in such models is urgently needed. Prof. Duan and his team propose to develop a new modeling framework based on modern multiscale turbulence modeling approaches, stochastic dynamical systems methods, and highly accurate numerical models. They will use a blend of mathematical, computational and geophysical expertise to solve the problem, and concurrently train students for research in interdisciplinary applied mathematics.

Professor/Dean McMorris and the IFCS

As President-Elect of the International Federation of Classification Societies (IFCS), CSL Dean (and Applied Mathematics Professor) Buck McMorris attended the 10th biennial conference held recently in Ljubljana, Slovenia. IFCS is a federation of societies in North America, Central America, Europe and Asia devoted to data analysis, clustering, and classification. Approximately 200 participants from around the world participated in Ljubljana. Proceedings are published in a volume published by Springer, Data Science and Classification (2006, ISBN:3-540-34425-2), covering such topics as the measurement of similarity and dissimilarity, methods for classification and clustering, network and graph analyses, analysis of symbolic data, and web mining.

Professors Hickernell and Fasshauer organize minisymposia

Professor and Chair Fred Hickernell organized a minisymposium on "Optimal Points and Shapes for Numerical Computation" at the recent Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics meeting in Boston. He also spoke on the topic.

In mathematical problems, it´s often necessary to sample the input function at a number of points and/or to divide the domain into a number of subdomain. The choices of points and shapes may significantly affect the accuracy of the solution. Hickernell´s symposium offered different perspectives on how to choose points and shapes when solving numerical problems.

Hickernell also was a member of the International Program Committee and organized a minisymposium with Applied Mathematics Associate Professor Greg Fasshauer for the 7th International Conference on Monte Carlo and Quasi-Monte Carlo Methods in Scientific Computing 2006 at Ulm University, Germany. The conference brought together experts in mathematics, computer science, statistics, finance, operations research, biology, chemistry, physics, graphics and engineering to discuss the latest developments in Monte Carlo and quasi-Monte Carlo methods and their applications.

Professor Ellis NSA Grant

Congratulations to Robert Ellis, who was recently awarded a research grant. The grant is a $25K National Security Agency Young Investigators Grant to study error-correcting and covering codes with linear error rates and noiseless feedback, closely related to so-called Renyi-Ulam liar games. These are information theoretic problems with application to data transmission and compression, fault testing, and batch testing.

Robert Ellis came to IIT in Fall 2005 after completing his Ph.D. at UC San Diego, then doing a postdoc at Texas A&M University. His primary research interests are in discrete applied mathematics.

IIT Undergraduates at REUs

Three IIT students participated in mathematics Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) in 2006. An article about the Hong Kong program appears in a recent SIAM newsletter, where you can see IIT student Mike McCourt pictured (second from right).

Introducing Professor Kaul

IIT welcomes new faculty member Hemanshu Kaul, who started in Fall 2006. Professor Kaul works in the fields of Discrete Mathematics and Operations Research. His research interests lie in Combinatorics & Graph theory, Discrete Optimization, Discrete Geometry, and their interface with Probability.

Graduate Student Travel Awards

Graduate students may apply for Student Travel Awards.

(Similar opportunities for graduate students are usually publicized internally, via the listserver.)

IIT undergraduates win ISMAA math contest

At the 2006 Illinois MAA Meeting, IIT teams took 1st place (Jonathan Beagley, Keith Campbell, Anthony Parillo), tied for 2nd place (Laura Rodriguez Masquera, Jeffrey Stanford, Christos Mitillos) with another team, and took 4th place (Elliot Barlow, Xuan Kang). 15 students in total attended that meeting. At the 2005 ISMAA meeting we participated in this competition and one of our teams took fourth place. The Math Club practices weekly and has an event about once a month.

Fall 2006 newsletter

The Fall 2006 newsletter can be seen here.

Professor/Dean McMorris in the news

Professor and College of Science and Letters Dean F.R. 'Buck' McMorris was consulted as a 'mathematical genius' on the odds of winning the lottery on CBS news. View the story here.

Associate Professor Bielecki co-organizes conference at UIC

Applied Mathematics Associate Professor Tomasz Bielecki is co-orgainizing a conference to honor University of Illinois-Chicago College of Business Administration Professor Stan Pliska. 'Professor Pliska has made seminal contributions to the area of mathematical finance,' said Bielecki. The conference will be held Dec. 7-8, 2007 on the UIC campus. For more information, please vist the conference website.