Newsletter 2024
Department of Mathematics Newsletter
For Students, Friends, and Alumni
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Fall 2024 Edition
Notes from Math Department Chair, David Hartenstine
Welcome to the first edition of a revived Math Department newsletter, part of an updated and expanded department website! Our department manager, Josh Cochran, deserves particular thanks for leading this effort to communicate the activities and accomplishments of the Math Department’s faculty, students, and alumni to current and former students, staff and faculty and all friends of the department. I hope you enjoy reading it!
From left to right: Professor Kimihiro Noguchi and Professor David Hartenstine on a scenic hike after attending a recent conference in Alaska.
As usual, 2023-24 was a busy one in the department.
We were delighted to welcome several new faculty members this past year: Professor Liz Chen, Professor Zhen Chao, Nicole Patel, a recent graduate of our MS program, who has returned to the department as an instructor, and Doug Faust and Andrei Pavlichenko who are making contributions to Western’s cybersecurity program by teaching math classes in Poulsbo and Kirkland respectively.
The year got off to an exciting start when the Math Department hosted the 4th Biennial Meeting of the Pacific Northwest Section of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Local organizing of this meeting was headed by Tilmann Glimm, along with his WWU colleagues Yuan Pei, Tjalling Ypma, and Jianying Zhang. Our campus is a wonderful setting for meetings like this. Over 150 mathematicians from the region and beyond participated in this meeting. Click here to learn more about this SIAM meeting.
Rick Barnard, Rebecca Borowski, Yuan Pei, and Katie Rupe were all granted tenure and promoted to the rank of Associate Professor. Mariana Smit Vega Garcia was promoted to Full Professor. Congratulations once again to all of them!
Three long-term colleagues, all of whom were in the department when I arrived in 2004, joined the ranks of emeritus faculty. Edoh Amiran, Janet Mock, and Greg Schwartz will all be greatly missed, but we were also excited for them as they moved into new phases of their lives.
To our alumni, we always love hearing from you or seeing you when you visit campus! You are welcome to drop by anytime or send us a quick note letting us know what you’ve been up to. Seriously, it is always a highlight of my day when I see or hear from former students. This newsletter profiles two of our alumni, and in the future, we would like to highlight more. Please contact us to let us know what you have been up to after graduating from WWU!
Through new state funding, we made improvements to our first-year mathematics courses, most notably by reducing class sizes in some of our key first-year math classes and thus allowing for more personalized instruction. Each year, these classes are taken by thousands of students in all programs across the university and are a central part of our mission. This coming year we will make additional improvements to our first-year mathematics program, all designed to better support student learning and enhance the student experience.
It was wonderful to see professors in the department awarded competitive external grants and prestigious fellowships in recognition of their research. Andy Berget was awarded a Simons Foundation fellowship which will allow him to extend his sabbatical next year. He was also selected as member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, where he will spend some of his upcoming sabbatical. The National Science Foundation awarded a three-year grant to Jeffrey Meier. This grant will support his work his research into knot theory and the 4-sphere and will also provide funded research opportunities for Western undergraduates. Mariana Smit Vega Garcia was also awarded an NSF grant, which will support her work on free boundary problems, support undergraduate research and fund a workshop focused on first-generation college students interested in mathematics. She was also selected as this year’s Karen EDGE Fellow. This fellowship provides funding for research and travel. This fellowship was established by a donation from renowned mathematician Karen Uhlenbeck. Click here for more information about the program. Arpad Benyi is the inaugural recipient of the AMS-Simons Research Enhancement Grant for Primarily Undergraduate Institution Faculty for the period 2023-2026.
Our department’s Student Ambassador planned and hosted several events designed to build community in the department and bring students and faculty together. Her efforts were much appreciated and led to tangible improvements. Student clubs were also actively engaged this past year.
In recent years, our students have become more active in research and working with faculty outside of the classroom on a variety of projects in a range of mathematical and statistical fields. This very welcome trend continued this past year. Students attended conferences such as the Joint Mathematics Meetings, Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics, and those of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics to present their research. Several students were co-authors on research articles with department faculty. One of our current students, Mayla Ward, is profiled elsewhere in this newsletter.
As usual, the Great Puzzle Hunt brought fun and excitement to campus and online this past April as teams from around the world competed to solve a variety of mind-bending puzzles. Retired professor Millie Johnson is the founder and the director of the Great Puzzle Hunt. She works with a large team including many current and former Western students. The 9th annual Great Puzzle Hunt will be on April 26, 2025, so mark your calendars!
Give Day was also in April and this year was the best year ever for donations to the department! Those donations help support student scholarships, student and faculty travel to conferences, bringing visiting mathematicians to campus, and various other departmental activities and needs. We are deeply grateful for all gifts to the department. If you are interested in making a gift to the Math Department, click here.
On a personal note, it is hard for me to believe that I recently completed a four-year term as department chair. While this job can be (and has been) challenging at times, I enjoy those challenges and am frequently amazed by the accomplishments by our students and faculty. I haven’t been bored for a single second since I started in this role in June 2020. As we frequently say in the department office, “never a dull moment!” (probably our second most common phrase, right behind “do you all see that dog in Red Square?”). I was honored and humbled to receive the support of the department for a second term and am looking forward to continuing to serve the department and our students into what is certain to be another interesting, inspiring, and fun year.
Allie Buckley's presentation: Strings, Cheese, Pi, Tau, and Radians: Building Conceptual Understanding of Circles
Beenish Iqbal's presentation: Enliven Your Geometry Lessons with Art!
NCTM
In February, 7 mathematics education students attended the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics Regional Conference in Seattle along with faculty members Liz Chen and Rebecca Borowski. The students attended sessions on best practices for teaching and learning mathematics, networked with practicing teachers, and explored the variety of products and services available for teachers via the exhibit hall. Two students, Beenish Iqbal and Allie Buckley, also co-presented at the conference. Beenish shared ideas for integrating art into geometry lessons, and Allie shared an activity using cheese to develop understanding of concepts like pi and tau while exploring circles. The entire WWU cohort enjoyed making connections between what they’ve learned in their methods courses to what current teachers and researchers are sharing with the broader field. We can’t wait for these preservice teachers to have their own classrooms!
NCUWM
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln annually hosts the Nebraska Conference for Undergraduate Women in Mathematics (NCUWM). For many years, we have been able to send a group of undergraduate women majoring in math to attend and present their research at this conference. Women are underrepresented in math and sciences, so providing our women math majors the opportunity to attend this conference allows them to meet new role models, gain insider knowledge, and the opportunity for new research and collaboration.
“This trip helped expand my understanding of mathematics and the diverse community that studies it. It has encouraged me to continue my studies in both new and familiar disciplines and has connected me to a network of friends and mentors to encourage me in my education and future career as a mathematician.”
Mayla Ward
Math and Data Sciences student
“This trip provided me with lots of new connections and excellent insight into my future both in industry and potentially in pursuing higher education. I received some wonderful advice from both professionals and other students about where my next steps might take me on my journey into my career. This would not have been possible without the generosity of WWU’s donors providing me the opportunity to attend this conference.”
Ashley Berkman
Math and Computer Science student
WOHESC
In March, WWU Mathematics Student Kayshish Pichette-Cline presented at the Washington/Oregon Higher Education Sustainability Conference (WOHESC) along with Northwest Indian College (NWIC) Mathematics Faculty Matteo Tamburini. Their poster presentation shared how faculty and students at NWIC have been working together to incorporate elements of their culture – including beading, weaving, and other traditional crafts – into curriculum content for courses from Algebra to Calculus. We can’t wait to see more of this work, and we are excited about Kayshish’s future in mathematics and education!
“This trip has allowed me to better understand the community of mathematicians as well as practice presenting my research. This helped with my research because I got feedback on it before we submit to a journal. I also found that my view of mathematics itself has changed due to the exposure to a broader set of topics and ideas from the conference.”
Nicholas Chandler
Math and Computer Science student
JMM
The Joint Mathematics Meeting (JMM) is the largest mathematics meeting in the world. This year's conference was located in San Francisco. We were able to fully fund the travel expenses for three students to attend and present their research.
RAW Stats Club
The RAW Stats club, a student club aimed at discussing student research and academic programs related to statistics, had another successful year in the 2023-2024 academic year. During the year, the club had five officers (Jeffrey Smith in Fall 2023, Winter 2024, and Spring 2024, Stuart Kuehne and Jothi Ramesh in Fall 2023, and Sydney Campbell in Spring 2024), and we organized a number of events such as student research presentation events and info sessions related to REU (research experiences for undergraduates), grad school, and various Statistics and Data Science-related majors offered in the Math and Computer Science Departments. These events were all highly successful, as about ten to twenty students attended each event on average. These events went smoothly with the help of Tori Martin and Melissa Gaines in the Math Office, who helped the club with ordering pizzas, booking rooms, posting information on the department website, and putting up posters in the hallway.
RAW Stats officers and contributors.
Math Club @ Western (MC@W)
Last year witnessed the rise of a re-vamped Math Club at Western. Students worked to draft a constitution for the club, and incorporation with Associated Students as an official WWU student club is expected in the fall of 2024. The year kicked off with a boisterous social event where students crafted their own playing boards and squared off in contests of Tic-Tac-Toe: Big Eats Small; discussions ranged from proper safety protocol with scissors to the nuances of finite game theory. We had a special faculty lecture by Prof. Andy Berget, who gave a fascinating account of the combinatorics of Eulerian numbers, which count the number of permutations with a given number of ascents and descents. The year concluded with a panel discussion about applying for graduate school in mathematics that was attended by undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty alike. Stay tuned for upcoming MC@W events this year!
Student Spotlight: Mayla Ward
WWU senior Math and Data Science major Mayla Ward and Professor of Statistics Kimihiro Noguchi recently published their research on mathematical statistics, a rare achievement for undergraduate students in mathematics.
The paper, “Asymptotic optimality of the square-root transformation on the gamma distribution using the Kullback–Leibler information number criterion,” was published in the July edition of Statistics & Probability Letters.
Achieving publication as an undergraduate is uncommon because of the rigor and knowledge required for the highly theoretical mathematical proofs, Noguchi said.
“It is rare because the hurdle for doing new research in mathematics is high,” he said. “Producing novel mathematical results which are publishable in professional peer-reviewed journals usually requires PhD-level knowledge in mathematics, so finding a suitable new research topic for undergraduates which leads to publication is very hard.”
Noguchi was awarded the Arlan Norman Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Student Mentoring last year, and he attributes Ward’s excellent work as part of the reason he secured that award.
Ward’s research focused on how to best transform the gamma distribution so that it becomes approximately symmetrical in shape. The gamma distribution is commonly found in datasets from research in environmental science, meteorology, medical research, finance and engineering. This distribution appears skewed, which makes it difficult for researchers to determine the statistical significance of their data.
Ward showed that the square-root transformation is the best tool to transform gamma-distributed data under a certain condition because it becomes closest to two common symmetric distributions when scale parameters are fixed. These transformations can be applied for various practical uses, including in computer simulations of queuing processes to optimize telecommunications, project management and traffic control.
The derivations Ward made involved using different manipulations and substitutions to reduce the equations of the hypothesized solutions and often involved long hours of expanding, substituting, simplifying and repeating.
Click here to view the full article "Crunching Numbers: WWU undergrad Mayla Ward publishes new research on mathematical statistics" Written by Mikayla King.
Maureen Sturgeon
I majored in Mathematics and minored in Computer Science
I graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 2016
I'm currently working remotely as a Software Engineer at AllTrails
My advice to current students is to try out internships during the summer. This will give you a better idea of the types of career options you'll have after you graduate, and it allows you to make professional connections. It may also influence what classes you take in the following year(s).
I have so many fond memories of my time at WWU, I loved the small classes, I met one of my best friends and I got to explore the cute town and delicious food!
I currently live in Seattle and enjoy getting outdoors with my little dog Ellie.
Murray Pendergrass
I majored in Mathematics and graduated with a Bachelor of Science in 2017 and Master of Science in 2018
After leaving Western, I worked as a consulting actuarial analyst for Milliman in Seattle, WA for the Seattle Life practice. In 2019 I joined LAPA (Life Annuity Predictive Analytics) as an actuarial data scientist. In 2021 I joined Trupanion, a pet health insurance company based out of Seattle, WA, as an actuary where I developed new product pricing. In 2023 I started work with NDN Collective, developing infrastructure for their Community Care Team that provides medical trainings for indigenous communities. I am currently working as a mountain guide and climbing instructor while taking coursework in Machine Learning.
My advice for current students is to study pure mathematics if you are passionate about pure mathematics. To maximize post-graduate employment opportunities, also consider taking some courses more on the applied side. There are many career paths for graduates in areas involving statistics, applied math, actuarial science, and machine learning. But at the end of the day follow your heart. Explore these fields now and see what might be a good fit, don’t wait until graduation to figure out your next step.
My fondest memory of WWU was perhaps the day I changed my major from business to math. For the next few years Bond Hall became my home. Math is such an interesting and wonderful playground that I never expected to fall in love with, but now looking back I couldn’t imagine myself having studied anything else. I was also fortunate to be surrounded by good community within the department during my time at Western.
The WWU Great Puzzle Hunt returns for the ninth year on Saturday, April 26, 2025. As a FUN, POPULAR, full-day, team puzzle solving event, where teams compete in solving a variety of puzzles either virtually or in-person on WWU campus, anyone from anywhere in the world may participate. It’s FREE, with FOOD, MUSIC, PRIZES, & MORE! COSTUMES ARE ENCOURAGED
A Day at the WWU Great Puzzle Hunt or What Might an In-Person Participant Experience?
Arriving at Red Square, you will hear music and see CROWDS of people checking in, some dressed in team costumes. Once you have checked in, and affixed your wristband, you head over to the refreshment area and join other teams excited to get started. After introductory announcements and a rules refresher, you’ll hear the countdown to START when the crowd scatters! As a registered team, you are connected to the Great Puzzle Hunt Game platform, whose screen appears on your smart phone or laptop. Choose the Puzzle Station location for your first puzzle (Humanities, SMATE, Arntsen, PAC).
CLUE 1: Each Puzzle Station location hints at the subject area of that puzzle.
CLUE 2: Choose a versatile team (broad interests). Each team member has perhaps different strengths to share.
CLUE 3: You are encouraged to use the internet as an aid and since you remembered to check the Great Puzzle Hunt website prior to the event, you know
CLUE 4: how the scoring works and you brought your gear from What should I have on hand? (e.g., scissors, tape, holepunch, graph paper, etc.) The list changes each year. OK, grab a banana, a muffin, and coffee/tea/cocoa and let’s go!
CLUE 5: See sample puzzles on the Great Puzzle Hunt website.
Teams can solve puzzles in any order. Suppose your first puzzle is at the Humanities Puzzle Station where you might need to use legal moves of chess pieces on a board to spell names of famous authors whose books include a chess theme. How many hints did you need for this puzzle? Yes, there are hints – See scoring. Did you solve it? If not, no worries, you will be given the codewords. Save them! You need them for the META-PUZZLE! Next, your team might travel to the PAC Puzzle Station to find a puzzle built around the names of 1920s silent movie stars to decode words of wisdom from the Jazz Age. Whew. Those were challenging puzzles! It’s time to take a break and grab some refreshments back in Red Square!
Your team is refreshed and rested and heads to the SMATE Puzzle Station where you might be making bank shots on a graph paper pool table to produce a geometric path that leads you to discover interesting history about professional pool. Now head over to the Arntzen Puzzle Station where you might need to learn about Econ! In order to solve this puzzle, you need to match flags to various countries and advance on a boardwalk based on making strategic trades of lumber, gold, wheat, and oil. Remember, the internet is your friend!
Finally, go to any Puzzle Station and pick up the META-PUZZLE. This puzzle requires you to connect the four main puzzles. Luckily, you saved all the code words found throughout the day. You will need them!
The game platform has allowed you to follow your progress as you go. You see that other teams struggled with some puzzles that maybe your team solved. On the other hand, you see teams that solved puzzles that your team found difficult or just couldn’t figure out. At this point, everyone converges on Red Square to compare notes, see the leaderboard, and watch the awards ceremony (there are fun prizes for top scoring teams, best team names, and best team costumes!). Kudos if you tried all the puzzles and had fun with friends!
So, why The WWU Great Puzzle Hunt? Other than a fun day of puzzling and problem solving with friends, it aims to accomplish something more, best described by our mission statement:
Our goal is to mobilize minds, highlight connections between different fields, and break down imagined barriers to STEM fields by building puzzles that require versatility, persistence, patience, and teamwork to solve. While it is at its core a competitive event, we aim to make it fun and accessible to everyone. We support critical thinking, teamwork, technology, and encourage inclusion.
Thanks to sponsors, the WWU Great Puzzle Hunt is FREE, but donations are gratefully accepted to keep the event accessible to all. You can also support the Hunt by purchasing apparel with the annual beautiful design (coming January 2025 to website). There is a tremendous amount of time and love that goes into making this event happen. Millie Johnson, event Director, could not run this event without the support of the Department of Mathematics, CSE, and her wonderful WWU Alumni team who work throughout the year to make the GPH better: graphics designer Wendy Aguilar; developers Noah Strong, Richard Golding, and Raiden van Bronkhorst; co-puzzler Zac Pontrantolfi; and major supporter and volunteer lead Kim Ragsdale. Additionally, Millie would like to thank the Campus Associated Student Great Puzzle Hunt Club, the WWU Associated Students, and sponsors listed on the event webpage.
Got a team? Want to volunteer? Got questions? Contact: Millie@wwu.edu
Save the Date: Saturday, April 26, 2025
Arlan Norman Award for Excellence in Student Mentoring
Kimihiro Noguchi
Statistics Professor Kimihiro Noguchi joined the Math Department in 2014 and has supervised more than 30 students on theoretical, computational, and applied statistics projects. In 2019, Noguchi and two undergraduate students, Patrick Carroll and Alexander Kuhn, created the student club RAW Stats (Research Assembly at Western: Statistics), which brings together students and faculty to discuss research projects and career opportunities in statistics. His undergraduate and graduate research students have successfully published peer-reviewed papers in highly respected journals, including Behavior Research Methods, Environmetrics, Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, Journal of Forecasting, and The American Statistician. In addition, they regularly present their research at regional, national, and international conferences, including the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting, Joint Statistical Meetings, and Joint Mathematics Meetings. Furthermore, a few groups of his students won the Undergraduate Class Project Competition, a paper competition sponsored by the American Statistical Association and the Consortium for the Advancement of Undergraduate Statistics Education.
Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award
Mariana Smit Vega Garcia
Associate Professor Mariana Smit Vega Garcia teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses in the Mathematics Department. After doing her bachelor’s and master’s at the Universidade de São Paulo in Brazil, she received her Ph.D. in Mathematics from Purdue University.
Smit Vega Garcia’s research interests include partial differential equations, which are the language of modern physics, and more recently, combinatorics. In addition to research and teaching, she has organized numerous professional meetings, including a workshop at WWU for undergraduate students who are interested in mathematics.
She is also committed to increasing diversity, equity, and inclusion, working actively with the Association for Women in Mathematics, the Society for Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics & Native Americans in Science, and the LatinX mathematics community. Her teaching is focused on building partnerships with her students and is dedicated to inclusivity.
After many years of service, we were sad to say farewell to Edoh Amiran, Janet Mock, and Greg Schwartz, but happy to see them enjoy a well-deserved retirement. We are also delighted to share that they have all been awarded Emeritus status which means they will continue to remain connected to the Math Department and WWU.
We asked Greg Schwartz to share a bit about himself and to reflect back on his time at WWU:
How long did you teach at WWU?
I taught for 26 years as an adjunct faculty member, but before that, I earned both a BA in Ed and an MS in mathematics at WWU.
Best or fondest memory from your time here?
My fondest memories as a student are of the excellent instruction that I received from the likes of Tom Read, Jerry Johnson, John Woll, Edoh Amiran, Tjalling Ypma, and Norm Lindquist (among others). As a teacher, I have many fond memories of interactions with students, but I also appreciated the playful banter with all of the folks who comprise the Math Department at WWU. It was a great place to work.
What have you been up to since retirement and any upcoming plans?
My wife Miriam (also recently retired) and I have been working in the garden as well as tending to home repairs that have been waiting for our attention. I hear that it is mandatory to travel during retirement, so we intend to start off by visiting the British Isles and Norway in the near future.
Anything else you'd like to share?
I would like to encourage my colleagues to continue sharing the beauty of mathematics with their students...helping them to see math as more than just numbers and rules.
Where are you from?
I’ve received Chinese education from birth to the master’s program. I feel lucky to obtain my PhD at Purdue University and then come to work at Western.
Educational background/history?
I’ve got my bachelor’s and master’s degrees in English linguistics and literature. Motivated by a strong interest in mathematics teacher education, I pursued my PhD in mathematics education.
Area of expertise or special interest in mathematics?
I investigate 1) K-12 preservice teachers’ teaching practices, especially concerning questioning skills used to probe and promote students’ conceptual understanding; 2) preservice teachers’ mathematical thinking, particularly concerning the effects of instructional tasks, tools, and language on their conceptual understanding; and 3) mathematics teacher educators' professional development.
Personal hobbies/interests?
I love yoga, jogging, and hiking. This fall, a challenge for me is to learn swimming.
Anything else you'd like to share?
I am seeking thoughtful undergraduates to work with me on math education research. Email me if you want to know more about the opportunities to analyzing student work and writing conference papers.
Where are you from?
I am originally from China.
Educational background/history?
I completed undergraduate studies at Hunan University of Science and Technology before earning my Ph.D. in 2020 from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. I then worked as a postdoctoral assistant professor at the University of Michigan before joining Western.
Area of expertise or special interest in mathematics?
My research interests include the numerical solution of partial differential equations, numerical linear algebra, high-performance computing, and mathematical modeling related to biology, chemistry, and physics.
Personal hobbies/interests?
Outside of my academic work, I enjoy hiking and running.
Where are you from?
I am from San Clemente, California.
Educational background/history?
I got my B.S. in Applied Mathematics from UCLA and my M.S. In Mathematics from Western.
Area of expertise or special interest in mathematics?
My masters project investigated mathematical methods for measuring gerrymandering. In terms of teaching, I have found that I really enjoy teaching calculus.
Personal hobbies/interests?
I like to run, hike, knit and crochet, bake, and read.
Also joining the department, Douglas Faust and Andrei Pavlichenko joined Western's Cybersecurity program and began teaching at WWU's satellite locations in Poulsbo and Kirkland.
Event organization
I co-organized the conference “PDE in Moab: Advances in Theory and Applications,” which happened in June 2024. Together with my co-organizers (Mark Allen and Blair Davey), we applied for an NSF grant to fund this conference. This grant was funded, DMS 2350128, and we were awarded $35,875.
I also co-organized the conference “Geometry of Measures and Free Boundary Regularity: A conference in honor of Tatiana Toro,” which took place in July 2024 at the University of Washington. Together with my co-organizers (Matthew Badger, Stefan Steinerberger and Bobby Wilson), we applied for an NSF grant to fund this conference. We were awarded the grant, DMS 2403698, for $50,000. The conference featured 4 mini-courses and 34 talks.
I also co-organized (with Mark Allen) the special session “Lower dimensional free boundary problems” in the “Free Boundary Problems: Theory and Applications” conference. This is the major conference in my research field and takes place every two years. It happened in September of 2024 in my native Brazil.
In 2023, I co-organized the “AWM STEM Symposia” at the SACNAS yearly NDISTEM Conference. SACNAS stands for “Society for the Advancement of Chicanos/Hispanics and Native Americans in Science,” and AWM stands for “Association for Women in Mathematics.” This section served to reinforce collaborations between these groups of underrepresented scientists.
Funded by my NSF standard Analysis grant (DMS 2054282) I organized “Jumpstart 2023,” a Math workshop for undergraduates interested in Math, focused on first-generation students, which took place at Western in August of 2023.
The 16 participating undergraduate students attended two mini-courses, followed by time to work on related problems with a grad student in the Math department (Sara Stout). They also attended talks given by the experts from around the world and had dedicated time with the speakers to learn about different career options for mathematics majors: research-intensive universities, teaching-intensive universities, national laboratories, and industry.
Research papers
In the 2023-2024 academic year, I published four papers:
- B. Davey & M. Smit Vega Garcia, Variable-coefficient parabolic theory as a high-dimensional limit of elliptic theory, Calc. Var. 63, 40 (2024).
- M. Allen & M. Smit Vega Garcia, Two-phase almost minimizers for a fractional free boundary problem, Nonlinear Differ. Equ. Appl. 31, 45 (2024).
- R. Kirby, M. Smit Vega Garcia & B. E. Tenner, Pinnacle sets of signed permutations, Discrete Mathematics, Volume 346, Issue 7, 2023. This paper is the beginning of my work on combinatorics, branching out from my main area of research in analysis.
- M. Smit Vega Garcia, An overview of Almost Minimizers of Bernoulli-Type Func- tionals, A3N2M: Approximation, Applications, and Analysis of Nonlocal, Nonlinear Models, Proceedings of the 50th John H. Barrett Memorial Lectures, IMA Volumes in Mathematics and its Applications, volume 165, 2023, Springer.
In the 2023-2024 academic year I also submitted the following 3 additional papers:
- M. Smit Vega Garcia & S. Steinerberger, An Almgren monotonicity formula for discrete harmonic functions, arXiv:2311.11887.2023
- N. González, P. E. Harris, G. R. Kirby, M. Smit Vega Garcia & B. E. Tenner, Mesas of Stirling permutations, arXiv:2306.12158, my second paper in combinatorics.
- M. Smit Vega Garcia, Almgren-type monotonicity formulas, 2024.
Selected talks:
In the 2023-2024 academic year, I gave research talks at the conferences “New trends in Nonlinear PDEs, Physics and Geometry,” which took place at the Universidad de Granada, Spain, at the “Workshop in Analysis,” which took place at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, at the conference “Intersections in probability, partial differential equations and harmonic analysis,” in Guanajuato, México, and the conference “Almost minimizers of a lower-dimensional free boundary problem, Regularity Theory for Free Boundary and Geometric Variational Problems III,” which took place in Levico, Italy.
I also gave a talk focused on undergraduate and graduate students at the AWM Speaker Series at the University of Washington. The title was called "What connects the melting of ice, a Brazilian favorite dish, and walls?”
Award and Fellowship Received
In 2023 I received the Peter J. Elich Excellence in Teaching Award. One such award is given per year to a faculty member from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences or the College of Science and Engineering, recognizing their exemplary teaching practices.
In 2024 I was selected as the Karen EDGE fellow. The Karen EDGE Fellowship Program was established with a gift from Karen Uhlenbeck on the occasion of her 2019 Abel Prize. The Fellowship is designed to support and enhance the research programs and collaborations of mid-career mathematicians who are members of an underrepresented minority group.
Other:
In July 2023, I spent two weeks at the Simons Laufer Mathematical Sciences Institute (SLMath, formerly MSRI). I was funded by the Summer Research in Mathematics program to work with a collaborator in Berkeley and advance our projects.
In 2024, I was also an AWM Essay Contest judge. This contest aims to increase awareness of women’s ongoing contributions to the mathematical sciences. Students submit biographies of contemporary women mathematicians and statisticians in academic, industrial, and government careers.
I am serving in the AWM MathFest Committee (2023-2026).
A catalog of knotted surfaces
Since 2023, Prof. Jeffrey Meier has been working with Western undergraduates Jack Maxon and Astraea Rollins to create a catalog of knotted surfaces in four-dimensional space. Just as a circle can be embedded in three-dimensional space as a knotted curve, a two-dimensional surface can be embedded in four-dimensional space so that it is knotted. Every knotted surface can be described by a tri-plane diagram, a triple of tangles that is easier to visualize and study than the knotted surface. Jack and Astraea have created computer programs to generate tangles and tri-plane diagrams and test when they correspond to knotted surfaces. Tri-plane diagrams can be sorted based on how many crossings they have, leading to a catalog of knotted surfaces organized by crossing number. The picture below is a 6-crossing tri-plane diagram for a knotted sphere known as the 2-twist spun trefoil. This tri-plane diagram was produced by the computer program created by Jack and Astraea and was a huge surprise: Before this work, this knotted sphere was thought to have crossing number at least 15! This work was supported by NSF Grant DMS-2006029, and during the summer of 2024, Jack Maxon received a Jarvis Memorial Summer Research Award to support his involvement. These findings will be prepared for publication during the 2024-2025 academic year.
Roller-coaster unknotting number
In the spring of 2024, Prof. Jeffrey Meier and Western graduate student Lowell Davis began studying a new knot invariant that they dubbed the roller-coaster unknotting number. The roller-coaster algorithm for unknotting a knot goes like this: Start at any point on the diagram of a knot and move along the diagram in either direction. Every time you come to a crossing, if it is the first time you have visited the crossing and if you are traversing the under-strand of the crossing, then change the crossing. The resulting diagram will be a diagram of the trivial knot! While taking MATH 563: Geometric Topology, Lowell noticed that this algorithm results in making an optimal number of crossing changes when applied to torus knots. Their proof gives an elegant upper-bound on the unknotting number for torus knots, which is known to be sharp by seminal work of Kronheimer and Mrowka in the field of gauge theory and four-manifolds. This proof motivated a more extensive project to determine which knots have the property that the roller-coaster algorithm results in the optimal number of crossing changes. As an exercise, you can try to show that the roller-coaster algorithm can be applied to the knot shown below such that only 3 crossings are changed. Jeffrey and Lowell conjecture that, for alternating knot diagrams, the optimal value is the ceiling of the crossing number divided by 4. This work will be submitted for publication and available on arXiv.org in the fall of 2024.
My Research Group
Professor Kimihiro Noguchi’s research group was highly productive in the 2023-2024 academic year. From his research group, seven undergraduates successfully gave ten oral and poster presentations at various professional research conferences on statistical modeling, statistical inference, and mathematical statistics. These conferences include the SIAM PNW Conference (Nick Chandler, Austin Coulter, Spencer Hunt, Stuart Kuehne, and Jeffrey Smith), AGU Fall Meeting (Jeffrey Smith), Joint Mathematics Meetings (Nick Chandler), Pacific Inland Mathematics Undergraduate Conference (Nick Chandler, Jeffrey Smith, and Mayla Ward), and WWU Scholars Week (Nick Chandler, Caleb Fuemmeler, and Jeffrey Smith). Josh Cochran in the Math Office kindly helped them with arranging transportations and hotels for these conferences. In addition to the conference presentations, Mayla Ward successfully published her first paper on mathematical statistics in Statistics & Probability Letters, a highly regarded peer-reviewed statistics and probability journal. Her research demonstrates a new mathematical justification for making the gamma distribution symmetric by the square root transformation using the idea of relative entropy.
My Recent Conference in Alaska
Professors David Hartenstine and Kimihiro Noguchi recently attended the PNW-MAA Conference in June 2024. The conference was held at the University of Alaska Anchorage, a beautiful campus in the suburban area of Anchorage. Because the campus is surrounded by nature, they briefly sighted a baby moose on campus, and other conference attendees also sighted moose and bears in the neighborhood. On the first day of the conference, they joined a tour with other conference attendees to experience the beautiful scenery of Alaska by hiking on the Flattop Mountain Trail. At the conference, Professor Noguchi gave a presentation on generalizing the empirical rule, a useful rule-of-thumb which connects the idea of standard deviation and probability for the normal distribution. His presentation was based on a research project conducted by his former undergraduate collaborator Rachael Goodwin, and the presentation was well received.
Awarded Fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study
Professor Andrew Berget was awarded a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in the School of Mathematics for the fall of 2024. This prestigious membership allows for focused research and the free and open exchange of ideas among an international community of scholars at one of the foremost centers for intellectual inquiry.
During his stay, Professor Berget will be part of the Special Year on Algebraic and Geometric Combinatorics and will continue his study of the positivity properties of matroids. He is very excited for his time at the Institute.
Each year, IAS welcomes more than 250 of the most promising post-doctoral researchers and distinguished scholars from around the world to advance fundamental discovery as part of an interdisciplinary and collaborative environment. Visiting scholars are selected through a highly competitive process for their bold ideas, innovative methods, and deep research questions by the permanent Faculty—each of whom are preeminent leaders in their fields. Past IAS Faculty include, Albert Einstein, Erwin Panofsky, John von Neumann, Hetty Goldman, George Kennan, and J. Robert Oppenheimer.
Located in Princeton, NJ, the Institute for Advanced Study was established in 1930. Today, research at IAS is conducted across four Schools—Historical Studies, Mathematics, Natural Sciences, and Social Science—to push the boundaries of human knowledge.
Among past and present scholars, there have been 35 Nobel Laureates, 44 of the 62 Fields Medalists, and 23 of the 27 Abel Prize Laureates, as well as MacArthur and Guggenheim fellows, winners of the Turing Award and the Wolf, Holberg, Kluge, and Pulitzer Prizes.
The past year has been truly exceptional for me, marked by the opportunity to join Western in the picturesque coastal city of Bellingham as a new faculty of the Mathematics Department. It has been a profound honor to meet and collaborate with such outstanding colleagues and students.
Throughout this year, I have been dedicated to enhancing my teaching skills. I actively participated in Teaching and Learning Cooperative Workshops and observed my colleagues' classes, gaining valuable insights and integrating new teaching techniques into my own classroom.
Simultaneously, some progress has been made in my research. My focus lies in computational mathematics and numerical analysis, particularly on the Poisson-Nernst-Planck equations. Over the past year, my collaborators and I have applied boundary element methods, finite element methods, and deep learning to advance solutions for ion channel simulations within these equations. This work not only expands theoretical understanding but also enhances the efficiency of traditional numerical methods. Our findings have been published in the Journal of Computational Electronics under the title "Integral Equation Method for the 1D Steady-State Poisson-Nernst-Planck Equations." Additionally, "A PNP Ion Channel Deep Learning Solver with Local Neural Network and Finite Element Input Data" has been submitted to Machine Learning: Science and Technology.
In numerical linear algebra, I have collaborated on developing two innovative iterative methods to solve complex symmetric linear systems, published in Mathematics as "Two Block Splitting Iteration Methods for Solving Complex Symmetric Linear Systems from Complex Helmholtz Equation."
In PDE theory, our research team has introduced a pivotal unit decomposition in modulation space, achieving dispersive estimates for the kinetic transport equation, detailed in Filomat under "Dispersive Estimates for Kinetic Transport Equation in Modulation Spaces."
Beyond academia, I am actively engaged in organizing academic events and presenting my work, including special sessions at the 2024 Spring Central Sectional Meeting, Joint Mathematics Meeting 2024, and the 4th Biennial Meeting of the SIAM Pacific Northwest Section, and SIAM conference on the life science (LS24),. Presenting at these conferences has fostered enriching discussions and potential collaborations with researchers worldwide.
Outside of work, I remain active running and hiking, completing three marathons this past year. Additionally, I organize a weekly 5 to 10 km children's hiking trip every Saturday morning, which has grown to include over 30 members. I invite anyone interested to join us in exploring and appreciating the stunning landscapes of Washington.
Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics
We hosted the 4th Biennial Meeting of the SIAM PNW Section on our campus in Bellingham from Oct 13-15. There were 160 participants from all over the Pacific Northwest and beyond. The local organizing committee consisted of T. Glimm (chair), Y. Pei, T. Ypma and J. Zhang. Several students volunteered their time to help make the event a big success: Noah Jensen, Drake Wilson, Sky Hester, Daniel Gruszka, Harrison Toppen-Rya, Anuk Centellas, Oleh Yeromenko and Katie Lane. T. Glimm and Z. Chao also organized the mini-symposium “Mathematical Modeling and Simulation of Cell Behavior and Regulation.” Several Western students presented posters of their work (N. Chandler, A. Coulter, D. Gruszka, J. Smith, S. Kuehne). We got funding from NSF and PIMS.
Research Papers
I have published two papers with students. Daniel Gruszka’s Research Assistantship was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation. He built and analyzed a Lattice-Gas Cellular Automaton model of cell aggregation. Rosie Una’s publication came out of her honors thesis, where she analyzed a Cellular Potts Model. Her work was supported in part by a 2022 Jarvis summer scholarship.
- Glimm T and Gruszka D 2024. Modeling the interplay of oscillatory synchronization and aggregation via cell–cell adhesion. Nonlinearity 37 035016 DOI 10.1088/1361-6544/ad237a
- Una R, Glimm T. 2024. A Cellular Potts Model of the interplay of synchronization and aggregation. PeerJ 12:e16974 https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16974
Joint Mathematics Meeting
Z. Chao, T. Glimm, and A. Sarkar all attended the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meeting in January 2024 in San Francisco. They all gave talks on their research and also found time to have dinner together!
Call for Alumni Updates
We would love to hear from our former students! Please email us about any updates on where you work, any advanced degrees earned, and anything else you would like to share. Let us know if we can include you in the alumni section of our newsletter. Please include a photo of yourself as well.
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Credits
Newsletter by Josh Cochran
Editors: David Hartenstine
Contributors: David Hartenstine, Rebecca Borowski, Mayla Ward, Ashley Berkman, Nicholas Chandler, Kimi Noguchi, Jeffrey Meier, Mikayla King, Millie Johnson, Greg Schwartz, Lizhen Chen, Zhen Chao, Nicole Patel, Mariana Smit Vega Garcia, Andrew Berget, Tilmann Glimm