MATH

CONNections

A Newsletter from the UConn Department of Mathematics

Volume 8, Summer 2005

In This Issue (unsigned articles are by the editors)

From the Department Head	Miki Neumann
Alumni Relations Committee	Alan Stein
The Graduate Program	Manny Lerman
Undergraduate Mathematics at UConn	Jeff Tollefson
Actuarial Science Update	Dick London
Introducing the New Provost
Professional Master's Degree/Financial Mathematics	Jim Bridgeman
Center for Actuarial Studies and Risk Management
Q-Center News
Faculty News
New on the Scene
Alumni News
Post-Doctoral Program
International Workshop on Operator Theory
Another Look
Mathematics Club
Mathematics Awards Day
Department Web Site Redesigned	Alan Stein
Stu's Puzzle Corner	Stuart Sidney
Feedback
Math CONNections is on-line at www.math.uconn.edu

FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD

Miki Neumann

This was a very busy year in the life of our department in which we took some very important decisions for our future. We worked hard to recruit new faculty and graduate students. We taught some 11,000 students in our many undergraduate courses.

At the outset I want to thank our staff: Arcelia Bettencourt, our Undergraduate Secretary; Kevin Marinelli, our System Manager; Sharon McDermott, our Graduate Program Assistant; and Tammy Prentice, our Administrative Coordinator, for all their hard work and dedication. Without their efforts, the department could not have achieved so much this year.

In December 2004 we learned that we were to lose Karlheinz Gröchenig, a Full Professor and a very reputable mathematician, who has returned to his home country of Austria. An equally major loss was the retirement of Richard London, our Actuarial Science Director for the last seven years. He has done an outstanding job in advancing the program in our department and he was much loved by all the students whom he served. We wish much health and success to both Charly and Dick in the next phase of their lives.

The loss of these two excellent faculty was mitigated by the very successful recruiting year that we have had. We hired five new faculty members who will join us in Fall 2005. One is Professor Tara S. Holm, currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Berkeley (PhD MIT). Her areas of research are in geometry/topology. Next we hired Professor Joseph S. Miller, currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Indiana in Bloomington (PhD Cornell University). His area of expertise is mathematical logic. The third hire is Professor Kyu–Hwan Lee, who is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Toronto with a Ph.D. from the National University of Korea in Seoul. His specialty is number theory.

The remaining two hires were part of our new Mathematics Education Group. The decision to start such a group was made by the department earlier in the year. Its purpose is to further integrate our department into the goals and outreach of the University by assisting interested organizations within the State of Connecticut and the US as a whole in K–12 mathematics education. Two opportunities were presented to the department to hire faculty for the group, one through the Directorship of the Q–Center (see the article about the Q-Center later in this issue), the other through the Carnegie Teachers for a New Era (TNE) initiative. In each case, the person would belong to the department, but with 50% responsibilities outside the department. For the Director of the Q–Center we hired Professor Thomas Roby, an Associate Professor of Mathematics at the California State University/Hayward whose Ph.D. is from MIT. For the Carnegie TNE position we hired Professor Fabiana Cardetti, currently a postdoctoral fellow in our department (PhD Louisiana State).

Aside from the five new faculty mentioned above, there was one important addition to our department this year, in the person of the new Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs of the University of Connecticut -- Professor Peter J. Nicholls. More about the provost can be found in an article later in this newsletter. We also anticipate that nine of our postdoctoral fellows will continue with us in 2005-06.

Many members of our faculty have received grants and won awards since our last Newsletter. You may find the details under FACULTY NEWS in this issue.

I started this letter by saying what a busy year this has been. Perhaps one of the busiest areas in the department was its undergraduate program. Part of the push came as a result of the pilot project for overhauling our undergraduate program. In the academic year 2003-04, and at the request of the university, the entire department worked on a proposal called the Pilot Project. If successful, the university would boost our annual operations budget.

With the submission of the proposal, several committees were set up to execute the suggestions made in the proposal and this year some of these committees have been able to work towards their realization. One of the foremost accomplishments of one of the committees was the establishment of a summer program of Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU). Under the directorship of Professors Kinetsu Abe and Joseph McKenna, nine students are working on projects in "Computational Topology and Geometry of Surfaces" and in "Differential Equations, Mechanics, and Computation," respectively. All their expenses will be paid by the program, which will last for six weeks. We hope that within one or two years, the program that we have launched will be funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF).

Two further committees set up to implement the pilot project have been working hard on improving and redesigning our calculus program on all levels. We have adopted a sequence of honors courses in mathematics that will cater to our most motivated students. Furthermore, for those interested, Professor Keith Conrad has run a very active Math Club which met weekly and where speakers from both inside and outside the university gave informative and entertaining talks.

Finally, we have constituted an Alumni Relations Committee, headed by Professor Alan Stein, because we are very eager to revive ties with our former students, and we are planning several events involving our alumni. You can find more about this in Professor's Stein's message in this newsletter and on the Department's Web pages, at www.math.uconn.edu.

Our graduate program, under the directorship of Professor Manuel Lerman, continued to gather strength. For the next academic year, we had applicants for TA positions with high credentials that we have not seen here before. To be candid, the best two or three of these students decided for various reasons not to attend UConn; nevertheless, the ten domestic and two foreign graduate students whom we did successfully recruit equaled in quality our best intake in previous years. (See Manny's article for information on the winners of this year's awards for excellence in graduate teaching and service to the graduate student community.) By summer's end we expect to have graduated at least three more students with a Ph.D. degree in Mathematics.

As we mentioned above, we were sad to part with Richard London, who has done an outstanding job as Director of the Actuarial Science Program for the last seven years. This year we have also welcomed the incoming Director, Louis Lombardi, who has already shown us how hard-working he is. Among his achievements for the year was securing $50,000 in scholarship funds from Mass Mutual, an amount that was matched by $25,000 in state funds. One of the highest priorities in our plans is to hire next year an additional full time faculty member in Actuarial Science so as to further cement the program. A more detailed description of the activity of our Actuarial Science Program can be found in Dick's report in this newsletter.

Our budding Professional Master's degree program in Applied Financial Mathematics conferred its first degree in summer 2004 and the number of applicants to the program keeps rising. See Jim Bridgeman's article in this issue for more about the program.

At the UConn Center for Actuarial Studies and Risk Management, students were engaged in some exciting interdisciplinary projects in 2004-05, under the direction of Jay Vadiveloo, who holds the title of Deloitte & Touche, LLP, Professor. More details can be found in the Center's report below.

DEPARTMENT EXPANDS EFFORTS TO KEEP IN TOUCH WITH ALUMNI

Alan Stein

Involved alumni are an important asset to any university and increased alumni activity has been a key ingredient in the expansion and modernization of the University of Connecticut.

The Mathematics Department recognizes that its alumni can be an asset not just to the University as a whole but to the Department and its students as well, so it has initiated an effort to increase the integration of former students into current activities, forming a new Alumni Relations Committee this past spring semester.

The charter members of the committee are Ron Blei, Jerry Leibowitz, Kevin Marinelli, Miki Neumann, Stu Sidney and Alan Stein (Chair). The committee has already set up a special area of the Department Web site, www.math.uconn.edu/alumni, with information for and about alumni. One section of the Web site contains current information about what Math alumni are doing now. Please let the department know what you're doing now so we can make your story available to your former classmates! Send your information to any of the committee members, or to the Department's Undergraduate Secretary, Arcelia Bettencourt (arcelia@math.uconn.edu). You can also just fill out a convenient online form on the Web site.

We'll be specially inviting alumni to participate in many of the Department's activities in the future along with planning programs exclusively for alumni. Let us know of any programs or events you'd be particularly interested in. The first invitation went out inviting alumni to the Awards Day festivities this past May; unfortunately, logistical and postal problems prevented the invitation from reaching many alumni in time.

The next program alumni are invited to is the Department's Fall Picnic, tentatively scheduled for Sunday, September 18, 2005. Details will be published on the Web site as they become available, but you can expect food, fun and friendly sports contests.

The Alumni Relations Committee anticipates sending out one letter to alumni each year in addition to this annual newsletter, with frequent communications throughout the year via E-mail. So please make sure the Department has your current E-mail address, and keep checking the alumni section of the Department's web site for current information.

THE GRADUATE PROGRAM, 2004-05

Manuel Lerman, Associate Head for Graduate Studies

The past year has been an exciting year for me, as we continued to witness the growth of our Ph.D. program and the successes of our students. As in every year, we began a week before fall classes with PhD prelims for continuing doctoral students and orientation for the incoming class. More students than ever took prelims, and the success rate was the highest it has ever been! We are beginning to see the fruits of the recruiting that has produced large classes of outstanding students for three consecutive years. The new students coming in for orientation were comparable in number and in their excellent qualifications to the large incoming class of the previous year, and many quickly became involved in the social fabric of graduate student life. They participated in the SIGMA Seminar, a weekly graduate student run seminar, and monthly movie nights combined with potluck dinners. Gorjan Alagic and Matt Jura were our two representatives to the University Graduate Student Council. Our more senior students also took an active role, and I would particularly like to note the contributions of Lance Miller, a first-year student who assumed the role of coordinating the SIGMA seminar, and Rachel Schwell, who coordinated the movie nights and potluck dinners, and all members of the TA Network.

One of the greatest pleasures inherent in coordinating the graduate program is to interact with large numbers of students, both on a professional and personal basis, and observe their maturation both as mathematicians and as responsible citizens. The Graduate Program Committee works closely with representatives elected by the graduate students, meeting with them on a regular basis, and trying to implement some of their suggestions for enhancing the program. There were no major innovations or suggestions made this year, and I would like to interpret this as a sign of a smoothly running program. Thanks go to Marc Corluy and Bob Wooster who served ably and conscientiously as the graduate student representatives for the past year.

We continued, for the second year, to set aside two days during which we invited some of our recruits to visit the department. These visits were funded partially through a grant from the UConn Graduate School, and partially by the Dean's office. The grants enabled us to bring in a group of recruited students to learn about our program first-hand. These students were also invited to attend some graduate courses and undergraduate courses being taught by TAs, speak to faculty members about their interests, and socialize with faculty and graduate students. Eight students accepted our offer to visit at that time, and four will be joining us in the fall. Other recruits visited at other times, many deciding to join our Graduate Program. We look forward to having another excellent entering cohort next year, a group of mathematically bright and very personable people.

We recognized contributions of three students who have distinguished themselves over the course of their graduate careers. Robert Wooster received the Louis J. DeLuca Award recognizing an outstanding TA, and Marc Corluy and Rachel Schwell shared the Constance Strange Graduate Community Service Award.

I would like to recognize these graduate students who received PhD degrees in 2004 or are expected to receive degrees this year: Minerva Catral, Alexander Lavrentiev, Ermek Nurkhaidarov, Krista O'Neill and Regina Speicher,

Many of the students who choose UConn for their graduate work do so because of the excellent support and training we offer to our teaching assistants, both while preparing to teach for the first time, and while they are teaching. It is our intention to reexamine these supports next year, and to try to enhance them. We hope to continue to be a model program in this area.

GRADUATE DEGREES GRANTED

Although a number of our students were close to finishing their doctoral work, no one in the Department satisfied all of the technical requirements in time to be awarded the PhD at the December 2004 or May 2005 commencement exercises. However, there were several Master's Degree Recipients in 2004-05.

Mathematics:

Joseph Andrasko Rachel Schwell

Brighid Boyle Phillip Cameron Sisson

Christopher Hamelin Emily Slater

Ellen Lavorato Thomas Michael Smith

Craig Miller Jaimie Stone

Abhijnan Rej Lisa Termine

Kristin Lee (Savage) Cekala Robert Wooster

Jian Zou

Applied Financial Mathematics: Hector Honvoh (August 2004)

Mathematics/Actuarial Science (with employer if known):

Hassan Ayoub Xianhui Lin (Travelers)

Ping Chen Chunhua Meng (Mercer)

Jianbo Deng (Hartford P & C) Lin Meng (Sun Financial)

Fengchen Du (Guardian Life) Wei Pan (Swiss Re)

Chenlong Gong (Sun Financial) Sudath Ranasinghe *

Nikolai Kovtunenko (Deloitte) Suppakit Sattayarath

Tommy Junyoung Kwak Yufeng Shen

Lingyun Li (LIMRA) Yilin Sun

Louis Chia-Wei Li (Travelers) Yeqing Yin

Yi Liao Shan Zhu (Pension Associates)

* Sudath is in the UConn PhD program

UNDERGRADUATE PROGRAM NEWS

Jeffrey L. Tollefson, Undergraduate Studies co-director

The Mathematics department is participating in a pilot project funded by the Provost and dedicated to the overall improvement of undergraduate education in mathematics. Below are some of our activities of this project that relate directly to mathematics majors.

Students will soon be able to use an online process to sign up as math majors. All features of this process will be automated: Advisor selection, advisor signature (electronic), submission of application, assignment of computer account, and more.

This summer Professors Kinetsu Abe and Joe McKenna are conducting a six week REU (research experience for undergraduates). This first year there are nine participants, four of whom are UCONN undergraduates. The program is presently financed by the pilot project with additional funding from the NSF. We will expand the REU program for next summer and seek outside funding to support future workshops.

Our mainstream calculus sequence, Math 115-116, has been redesigned for fall 2005. The new course will emphasize the fundamental concepts, logical reasoning, problem solving, collaborative work, and language skills (reading, writing and explaining mathematics). To achieve these goals we will introduce a new approach to teaching calculus and have selected a new textbook that shares our enthusiasm for this approach to teaching Calculus. More details can be found on the two course web pages: one for instructors and one for students.

Pending approval from the College and University Senate curriculum committees, we are implementing a comprehensive 4-year Honors Program in mathematics that will bring together the best freshmen each fall and provide them with a mathematical experience that is more structured and in-depth than anything currently available in the department. The foundation of this new honors program is a new 4-semester sequence: Advanced Calculus I, II, III, IV that will build a solid background in Calculus, Differential Equations and Linear Algebra, at a higher level than usually presented to freshman and sophomores. Upon completing the Advanced Calculus sequence students will be prepared for almost all of our more advanced offerings. To help attract students there will be a comprehensive honors web page this fall describing the new program.

This fall will also be the first semester for two new W courses for Mathematics majors: MATH 200-201W and MATH 202W. The first sequence is a writing supplement to the popular Undergraduate Math Seminar series sponsored by the Math Club. Students will select a topic each semester from one of the presentations, do some additional research and then write a paper on the selected topic. The second course is a writing supplement to the multivariable calculus course, MATH 210, in which the focus is on pedagogical issues related to MATH 210 (which students will take concurrently); we expect that many of the students in 202W will be Mathematics Education majors. These courses and the new MATH 291W, Technical Writing for Actuaries, are part of the University's new general education program of Writing in the Major.

They join our current W courses, MATH 242W, History of Mathematics, and MATH 292W, Senior Thesis in Mathematics.

ACTUARIAL SCIENCE UPDATE

Richard L. (Dick) London, FSA

Director of Actuarial Science

A. The Past Academic Year

We have just completed the 2004-05 academic year at the time of this writing. The program continues to be healthy in terms of total student enrollments (both undergraduate and graduate), the undergraduate scholarship program ($73,000 awarded to 27 students this year), summer internship opportunities (37 known placements, an all-time high), and full-time positions for our graduating students who have passed at least one of the SOA/CAS professional qualification exams.

Our core faculty group was expanded to six this year, with the additions of Louis J. Lombardi, FSA, and Dmitry Glotov, Ph.D. (as a new post-doctoral fellow). One consequence of having the extra person this past year was to allow us to offer the basic course in actuarial mathematics in separate sections for undergraduates (Math 287-288) and for graduate students (Math 387-388).

B. Future Faculty Changes

With my departure from the actuarial faculty group at this time, arrangements have been made to secure another adjunct for the upcoming 2005-06 academic year in order to be able to keep the separate offerings of Math 287-288 and Math 387-388. The new adjunct is Rachel C. Brown, FSA, formerly the Director of the Program in Actuarial Science at the University of Hartford. Professor Lombardi will be assuming my administrative duties here, as well as continuing to teach a full course load.

In anticipation of further retirements from the actuarial faculty group in the not-too-distant future, the Department has been authorized to advertise for another full-time hire in this specialty area.

C. Curriculum Changes

No significant curriculum changes were instituted in the 2004-05 academic year, although several are in the planning stages for the near future. (The details of this can be reported by Professor Lombardi in the following volume of this publication.)

In my article in last year's volume of MATH CONNections, the new SOA/CAS requirements now known as VEE were described. During the past year we were successful in obtaining approval for all of the relevant UConn courses, thereby enabling our students to complete their VEE professional qualification requirements during their academic years.

D. Accreditation of Actuarial Programs

A proposal that SOA undertake a project of accreditation of academic Actuarial Science programs was reported in last year's article. At the October 2004 meeting of the SOA Board of Governors, the proposal was approved and a committee was established to recommend the specific criteria for accreditation at various levels. (What has been agreed to thus far is that programs will be accredited under several descriptions, rather than an all-or-nothing structure of accredited or not.) In light of this, there is no doubt that the UConn program will be accredited at some level, yet to be determined. But it is unlikely that it will be accredited at the highest levels, unless certain faculty and/or curriculum upgrades are made.

Beyond this concept of general accreditation, SOA is also exploring the possibility of authorizing the very best of the academic actuarial programs to designate certain of their students as qualifying for exemption from the professional actuarial exams as a consequence of excellence in their academic course work. This second step in the accreditation process is still several years away, and will likely be granted only to programs which meet very rigorous standards with respect to curriculum and (especially) faculty qualifications.

Certainly the several programs accredited by SOA for designating students for exam exemptions will come to be regarded as the elite programs within the discipline, and will have significant advantages over other programs with respect to recruitment of top students, financial support from the profession and industry, and the ability to attract top faculty. Will the University of Connecticut, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and the Department of Mathematics be willing to do what will be necessary in order to have its program included among this elite group?

Time will tell.

[Editor's note: At its meeting on May 5, 2005, the faculty of the Department of Mathematics unanimously approved this statement of appreciation for Dick London's work over the past seven years.

* He is a superb teacher and has often taught extra classes on a voluntary basis.

* He is the author of three actuarial science texts.

* He has served on the Board of Governors of the Society of Actuaries.

* He has mentored and advised dozens of students every year, including graduate students and some with other official advisors; has worked diligently to find internships and permanent positions for actuarial students - about 35 found internships last summer!

* He has increased donations from 'Corporate Partners' to $80,000 per year.

* He hosted job fairs and in-house interviews for actuarial majors each fall, with dozens of companies participating.

* He supervised on-campus SOA and CAS exams twice a year, and provided voluntary review sessions for higher-level exams.

* He hosted 20th and 25th anniversary dinners for the actuarial alumni, with SOA President Steve Kellison a speaker at the 25th.

* Dick generated a genuine feeling of community for actuarial science majors, and his door was always open.]

PROVOST PETER NICHOLLS

Peter J. Nicholls joined the University as Provost and Executive Vice President for Academic Affairs, and the Mathematics Department as Professor, on March 1, 2005. He has extensive experience as a mathematician, an academic, and an academic administrator.

Nicholls grew up in Kent, England, and earned a Bachelor of Science degree in mathematics from Imperial College of the University of London and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in mathematics from Cambridge University. In 1971 he came to the United States as a Visiting Assistant Professor at Northern Illinois University. This evolved into a permanent position and later a full professorship, as well as a role as Associate Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and in 1984 Nicholls became a U.S. citizen. Dr. Nicholls left Northern Illinois to be Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Kansas State University, and then moved on to become Professor of Mathematics as well as Provost and Academic Vice President at Colorado State University. From CSU he has come to UConn.

Nicholls's mathematical research has focused on the study of discrete groups, Riemann surfaces and topological dynamics. He has published numerous scholarly articles and received research support from the National Science Foundation. He is also the author or co-author of three books. The Ergodic Theory of Discrete Groups (London Mathematical Society Lecture Notes #143) is an advanced monograph publishe