skip to content
Honors and Awards

  • ANNOUNCEMENT OF THE SEVENTIETH ANNUAL WILLIAM LOWELL PUTNAM MATHEMATICAL COMPETITION

    Students who enjoy mathematics might like to participate in this year's Putnam competition. The national competitive examination will be given on Saturday 5 December, as usual in two parts: the first half (six problems) from 10 am to 1 pm, the second half (also six problems) from 3 pm to 6 pm. Here at UConn it will be administered in room 118 of the Mathematical Sciences Building.

    The Putnam exam consists of a dozen interesting and challenging problems. Typically, over 3,000 students from over 400 colleges and universities participate in the competition. Individual and team prizes are awarded nationally, and here at UConn we give prizes to our students who perform well on the Putnam.

    Some of the problems can be done with no post-secondary background whatsoever, but that doesn't make them easy, no matter how much math you've taken. At UConn most of us stay over the two-hour break between halves, chatting about the morning problems over pizza and soft drinks supplied by the Math Department. A good time is had by all; even those who eventually score few points enjoy coming to grips with some of the Putnam problems.

    All enrolled undergraduates who have not yet received a college degree and have not yet taken four Putnam exams are eligible. Interested students should sign up on a sign-up sheet that has been posted outside the Math Department receptionist's office (MSB 102) by Thursday 8 October 2008.

    There is much information available online about the competition and its history. In particular, many past exams and solutions can be found in the William Lowell Putnam Competition Archive. Also, late each year the results, problems and solutions of the previous December's competition are published in the American Mathematical Monthly, available in the Mathematics Department reading room.

    The following is quoted verbatim from this year's national Putnam announcement:

    Students who for religious reasons cannot take the examination at the scheduled hours may take the examination after sundown on December 5, upon request by the supervisor and approval of the Director. Such students must remain under the supervision of a faculty member, rabbi, or clergyman from the official starting time for that time zone on the day of the examination.

    Further information can be obtained from Professor S. J. Sidney, MSB 419b/c, 486-8380, sidney@math.uconn.edu. (September 2009)
  • Rich Bass has been awarded an NSF grant from the Probability Program for his proposal "Stochastic differential equations: potential theory and uniqueness". (July 2009)
  • Fabiana Cardetti, Tom deFranco (who has a joint appointment with the NEAG School of Education), and Chuck Vinsonhaler are the recipients of a $900,000 NSF grant jointly with Mike Alfano from the NEAG School of Education and Juliet Lee from the Department of Molecular and Cell Biology (MCB).

    The 5 year grant is the from the NSF Robert Noyce Scholarship Program. The purpose of the grant is to encourage math and science majors to go into teaching.
  • Mathematics Department graduate students, APR's and Postdocs have obtained the following positions for the academic year beginning in the fall of 2009.
    • Matthew Cecil: Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame, Indiana.
    • Yang Ho Choi: Tenure-track Assistant Professor at Kettering University in Michigan.
    • Lin Ge: Instructor at the Mississippi State University, Meridian Campus.
    • Matt Jura: Visiting Assistant Professor at Manhattan College, in the Bronx.
    • Tyler Markkanen: Tenure Track Assistant Professor at Saint Mary of the Wood College in Terre Haute, Indiana.
    • Russell Prime: Visiting Assistant Professor in the Mathematics Department at Clarkson University in Potsdam, New York.
    • Kristen Sellke: Tenure-track Assistant Professor at St Mary's University in Winona, Minnesota.
    • Robert Wooster: Assistant Professor at the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.
  • Milena Hering has been awarded the Oberwolfach Leibniz Fellowship to spend a total of 3 months, this summer and next, doing research at the Oberwolfach Mathematics Institute in Germany. (May 2009)
  • Christine McMeekin is receiving an Oaklawn Scholarship for 2009-2010.  This award is based on academic excellence and leadership. Read more about it on the Honors Program's web site. (April 2009)
  • Eleven undergraduate math majors were elected on April 7, 2009 to membership in Phi Beta Kappa, the nation's oldest honor society. The students are Yi-Jun Chen, Jason Michael Crowley, Ryan James Esplin, Eric John Forfa, Nicole Lynn Gottier, Caroline Truc Lam, Thomas D. Murawski, Russell G. Nash, Andrew Nelson Phillips, Joseph Alexander Pomianowski, and Linda Tran. They will be initiated into the Society on Sunday, May 3. (April 2009)
  • Professor David Gross will be receiving the UConn Early College Experience Program's "Faculty Coordinator Award for Excellence in Curriculum & Adjunct Faculty Development." (April 2009)
  • Professor Alvaro Lozano-Robledo won the 2009 Provost's Competition for his proposal "Math 1132Q Calculus II." (April 2009)
  • Professors David Gross and Jeffrey Tollefson won the 2009 Provost's Competition for their proposal "Math 1131Q Calculus I." (April 2009)
  • Oscar Levin has won the Institute of Teaching and Learning (ITL) Outstanding Graduate Teaching Award for 2009 in recognition of his deep commitment and wide range activities in the service of the Mathematics Department's teaching mission.
    The ITL Outstanding TA Award, established in 1999, is the highest teaching award conferred by the university on a graduate student. Oscar Levin is the third mathematics TA to receive this honor. The previous winners from our department were Regina Speicher in 2004, and Jason Molitierno in 2000. (April 2009)
  • Professor Stuart J. Sidney has been appointed as a member of the Connecticut Academy of Arts and Sciences (CAAS).
    The induction ceremony will be on Wednesday, April 22, 2009, at 4:00 pm., preceding the CAAS monthly meeting, with the location and program for the meeting yet to be announced. (March, 2009)
  • Professor Masha Gordina has been awarded the Ruth J. Michler Memorial Prize by the AWM - the Association for Women in Mathematics.
    This national prize, which awards its recipient a fellowship to spend a semester in the Mathematics Department in Cornell without teaching obligations, is a recognition of Masha's excellence in research and professional activities.
    On February 6, 2009, the AWM released this announcement.
    More details about the prize can be found at <www.awm-math.org/michlerprize.html> and an article published in the UConn Advance. (February 2009)
  • Professor Sarah Glaz will perform a poetry reading at the UConn Co-op Thursday, February 12 at 4:00 p.m. Professor Glaz will be reading from the poetry anthology Strange Attractors: Poems of Love and Mathematics, which she co-edited with JoAnne Growney. (January 2009)
  • Eugene Boman has won the MAA's Allendoerfer Award for the expository paper "Mom! There's an Asteroid in My Closet!" which appeared in the Mathematics Magazine April 2007 issue (Vol. 80, no. 2, pp. 104-111). The paper was written jointly with Richard Brazier and Derek Seiple.
    Eugene graduated from UConn in 1993 and was one of Izzi Koltracht's first Ph.D. students.
    He is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics at the Pennsylvania State University in Harrisburg. (January 2009)
  • Professor Emeritus Charles Vinsonhaler has been appointed Associate Director of the Teachers for a New Era (TNE) initiative. (November 2008)
  • Professor Tom Defranco has been appointed Dean of the Neag School of Education. His appointment will start on July 1, 2009.
  • The sixty-ninth annual William Lowell Putnam Mathematics Competition will be held Saturday, December 6 in MSB 118. For more information, click here or contact Professor Stuart Sidney.
  • Wolodymyr Madych is the recipient of the UConn Alumni Association 2008 Faculty Excellence Award in Research (Sciences). (August 2008)
  • Emiliano Valdez was notified that a proposal, in which he is one of seven Principal Investigators, will be funded by the Australian Research Council.
  • Joseph Pomianowski, an undergraduate student, has received an award from the University of Connecticut Humanities Institute to travel to Poland to research - under supervision of Stuart Sidney - the life of Stefan Banach.
  • Dmitriy Leykekhman will receive NSF funding for his research proposal "Discontinuous galerkin methods for optimal control problems governed by Advection-Diffusion Equations" for a period of three years. (July 2008)
  • Lisa Termine has been appointed to the position of Visiting Assistant Professor at Trinity College in Hartford. (April 2008)
  • Thomas DeFranco is the recipient of the 2008 AAUP Excellence Award in Teaching Innovation. (March 2008)
  • Alexander Teplyaev has been awarded a three year grant for research on "Random, Stochastic, and Self-similar Equations." The grant will be funded jointly by the Probability and Analysis Programs in the Division of Mathematical Sciences. (March 2008)
  • Postdoctoral Fellow Matthew Cecil was honored by the UConn Alpha Lambda Delta chapter as Instructor of the Year for 2007/08.
    The Alpha Lambda Delta is an honor society for first year students. (February 2008)
  • Evarist Gine has been chosen to receive one of the Provost's Research Excellence Awards this year. (February 2008)
  • Richard Bass has been designated a University of Connecticut Board of Trustees Distinguished Professor. (January 2008)
  • Vadim Olshevsky has been appointed to the editorial board of the journal of Linear and Multilinear Algbera for a period of five years. Olshevsky is also on the editorial board of four other publications: Linear Algebra and its Applications, Integral Equations and Operator Theory, ETNA - Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis, and the Birkhauser book series on Operator Theory: Advances and Applications. (December 2007)
  • Richard Bass has been appointed to be the next editor for the fields of Probability and Statistics of the prestigious journal Transactions and Memoirs of the AMS. His tenure as editor begins on February of 2008. (September 2007)
  • Alexander Teplyaev has been awarded in the prestigious Humboldt Foundation Fellowship to work on "Stochastic and self-similar equations" with Professor M. Rockner of the University of Bielefeld. The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables highly qualified, early-stageresearchers from abroad, who hold doctorates, to carry out research projectsof their own choice in Germany. (July 2007)
  • Sarah Glaz has been chosen by the Institute of Teaching and Learning as 2007-2008 University Teaching Fellow. (April 2007)
  • Louis Lombardi, Director of the Actuarial Science Program, has been chosen as the Honors Council Faculty Member of the Year for 2007. (April 2007)
  • Changfeng Gui is the recipient of the 2007 Provost Research Excellence Award. (April 2007)
  • Bill Abikoff received a grant from the Algebra, Number Theory, and Combinatorics Program at the NSF to support the Lars Ahlfors Centennial Celebration in Helsinki, Finland, on August 20-24, 2007. (March 2007)
  • Masha Gordina has been awarded a three year grant by the Probability Program, within the Division of Mathematical Sciences of NSF to work on her proposal "Infinite-dimensional stochastic analysis."(March 2007)
  • Miki Neumann, professor and head of the mathematics department, was named Distinguished Professor by the Board of Trustees on January 30, 2007.
  • The Mathematics Department will host the Abelian Groups and Modules over Commutative Rings Conference June 11-15, 2007. Sarah Glaz, Chuck Vinsonhaler and Bill Wickless were awarded a grant from the Mathematical Sciences Division of the NSA, for the organization of the conference.
  • Joe Miller has received a 3 year NSF grant from the Algebra, Number Theory,Combinatorics and Foundations Programs within the Division of Mathematical Sciences. Joe's proposed research is on "Randomness and Computability." (July 2006)
  • Keith Conrad and Reed Solomon have been awarded the 2005/06 Teaching Promise AAUP Excellence Award. (July 2006)
  • Richard Bass has been awarded a 3 year grant from the Probability and Statistics Program, within the Division of Mathematical Sciences in the NSF, to work on his proposal "Analysis of multidimensional processes." (July 2006)
  • Tara Holm has been awarded a three year grant by the Geometric Analysis Program, within the Division of Mathematical Sciences of NSF to work on her proposal "The Geometry, Topology, and Combinatorics of Hamiltonian Lie Group Actions." (July 2006)
  • Miki Neumann has been awarded a two year grant, beginning in 2007, by the Mathematical Sciences Program at the NSA for his proposal "Nonnegative Matrix Factorization, Applications, and the Inverse Eigenvalue Problem for Nonnegative Matrices." (June 2006)
  • Changfeng Gui has been selected to present an invited address at the 2006 Fall Sectional Meeting of the American Mathematical Society at Storrs, October 28-29, 2006. (February 2006)
  • Fabiana A. Cardetti and Thomas Roby won a Department of Higher Education Teacher Quality Partnership Grant, funded through the federal No Child Left Behind act. (January 2006)
  • The Office of Sponsored Programs approved the nomination of Paul-Jean Cahen, Professor at the University of Marseille, France for a Short Term Guest Professorship. The nomination was made by Sarah Glaz (January 2006).
    Prof. Cahen is a reknowned commutative algebraist in the area of Integer Valued Polynomials, former Vice President of the French Mathematical Society, former Head of Research Division of the Science Faculty of the University of Marseille. He is also involved in educational enterprises. The Short Term Guest Professorship nomination was supported jointly by the Mathematics Department and by the Neag School of Education. Cahen will be visiting for the Fall 2006 semester and will collaborate in research with Sarah Glaz and other people in the department with interest in that area. (January 2006)
  • Vadim Olshevsky was appointed to the Editorial Board of the Journal of Integral Equations and Operator Theory. He is also on the editorial boards of Linear Algebra and its Applications and the Electronic Transactions on Numerical Analysis (ETNA). (October 2005)
  • Kyu-Hwan Lee won the the Korean Mathematical Society Prize for excellent papers published in Korean Mathematical Journals. Kyu-Hwan will receive the award at the Korean Mathematical Society's annual meeting. (October 2005)
  • Alexander Teplyaev was awarded a 3 year NSF grant to pursue research on "Random, stochastic, and self-similar equations". (September 2005)
  • David Gross was recognized by the Center for Academic Programs. (September 2005)
  • Stuart J. Sidney was the recipient of the Alumni Association's 2005 Faculty Excellence Award in Teaching at the graduate level. The presentation will be made October 28, 2005, followed by a performance by UConn's Fine Arts students. (October 2005)
  • Changfeng Gui was awarded a 3 year NSF grant to pursue research on "Qualitative studies of some partial differential equations and systems." This is in continuation of an earlier grant. (May 2005)
  • Sarah Glaz won an award in the 2005 General Education Course Development Grant Competition for her proposal for a new course designed to provide a thorough preparation for science courses for students whose high school algebra background is not very strong. (May 2005)
  • James Hurley was awarded the the University of Connecticut High School Cooperative Faculty Coordinator Award for Excellence in Curriculum and Adjunct Faculty Development. Hurley is one of the first two recipients of this award. (April 2005)
  • Maria Gordina was awarded the prestigious Humboldt Foundation Fellowship to work on "Stochastic Analysis in Infinite Dimensions" with Professor M. Rockner of the University of Bielefeld and with Professor S. Albeverio of the University of Bonn. (March 2005)
    The Alexander von Humboldt Foundation enables highly qualified, early-stage researchers from abroad, who hold doctorates, to carry out research projects of their own choice in Germany .
  • Michael Neumann was awarded the Chancellor's Excellence in Research award for 2004-2005 and will be recognized for this achievement at the Undergraduate Commencement in May 2005.
  • Kinetsu Abe (Math), Thomas Peters (CSE and Math) and Alexander Russell (CSE and Math) were awarded an NSF grant "Computational Topology and Surface Approximation" for $255,000 for 3 years starting Sept 2004. This is a continuation of a grant which expired in Oct 2004.
  • Evarist Giné gave a Medallion Lecture at the joint 67th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and 6th World Congress of the Bernoulli Society, in Barcelona, Catalonia, on July 26-31, 2004. The IMS selects eight Medallion Lecturers every year, and the one-hour lectures are delivered at the IMS meetings held during that year. Another researcher with ties to our Department, Vladimir Koltchinskii of the University of New Mexico, gave a Medallion Lecture at the same meeting. Evarist was also the President of the Program Committee for the IX Congreso Latinoamericano de Probabilidad y Estadistica Matematica, held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in March 2004. In addition, Evarist was awarded a 2-year grant from the National Security Agency to work on his project, "Limit Theorems in Probability Theory and Applications," through February 2006.
  • Bill Abikoff was a speaker at the convocation ceremony for the recently formed Honors College at the Polytechnic University (Brooklyn, NY) in January 2004.
  • Yung S. Choi received the Chancellor's Excellence in Research award for 2003-2004 and was recognized for this achievement at the Graduate Commencement in May 2004.
  • Sarah Glaz received the 2004 UConn AAUP Excellence Award for Teaching Innovation. The award was presented at a ceremony at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford on April 14.
  • Joe McKenna received the Distinguished College or University Teaching Award of the Northeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America for 2004.
  • Reed Solomon was awarded a 3-year NSF grant for his proposal "Computability Theory, Reverse Mathematics and Countable Algebraic Structures."
  • Regina Speicher received the University's Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award for 2004.
  • On February 28, 2003, Professor Changfeng Gui received the Research Prize for 2002 of the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences. Changfeng was honored by the PIMS at the opening ceremonies for the Banff International Research Station for Mathematical Innovation and Discovery, in Alberta. Changfeng has a grant from the NSF, through June 2005, to work on a "Qualitative Study of Some Partial Differential Equations and Systems."
  • Maria Gordina was awarded a 3-year NSF grant for her proposal "Stochastic analysis in infinite dimensions."
  • In July 2001, Chancellor Petersen announced that four University faculty members had been chosen for the Chancellor's Research and Excellence Awards. We were especially pleased that two were mathematicians, Richard Bass and Joe McKenna. On Thursday, November 15, the Department celebrated with a special dual colloquium at which Rich spoke for 30 minutes about one area of mathematical research to which he has made many contributions and Joe gave a half hour overview of the development of the problems with which he has tangled. The awards were formally presented at the graduate commencement on May 19, 2002.
  • Manuel Lerman received the 1999 Research Excellence Award from the UConn Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. This university-wide award recognizes outstanding research contributions by UConn faculty members.
  • Richard Bass was an invited speaker at International Congress of Mathematicians, Zürich in 1994.
  • Richard Bass was elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics in 1989.