FROM THE DEPARTMENT HEAD

by Miki Neumann

Welcome to the seventh edition of Math CONNections. As I approach the end of my first year as Head of the Department, I owe a big debt of thanks to my predecessor, Prof. Chuck Vinsonhaler, who has given me so much support, encouragement, and good advice in my new position. Chuck has been on sabbatical in the Spring semester, a well-deserved break from the busy job of department head. I know that when he returns to his regular duties in the fall, he will play a big part in various future missions of the department, particularly those concerning education, both graduate and undergraduate.

As a new Head of Department, I should like to acknowledge here the dedication of our administrative staff, Arcelia Bettencourt, Sharon McDermott, and last but not least, Tammy Prentice, my personal assistant, for all their help in getting me settled into the new position and for making it possible for the department to run so smoothly during the year.

The past year has seen intense activity in our undergraduate program. At the beginning of the year we learned that the administration planned to initiate a pilot project for the renewal of the undergraduate program in two departments, History and Mathematics. The first step that we took was to appoint two undergraduate directors, Professor Andrew Haas and Professor Jeffrey Tollefson. Andy is responsible for our service mission to the university - we teach close to 4800 students each semester. Jeff is responsible for the studies for the major in mathematics. I assigned them the task of working together with the Undergraduate Program Committee and other programs in the University such as the Honors Program, the Institute of Teaching and Learning, and the Center for Undergraduate Education. Andy and Jeff did an outstanding job in spearheading the development of the proposal. If our proposal for the pilot study is accepted by the administration, it will increase the operating budget of the department, allowing us to fund many important projects.

It would be remiss for me not to mention David Gross, our Undergraduate Program Coordinator. In addition to serving on several educational committees of the University, David does outstanding work advising the many students who come to him for help.

I would like to emphasize two other very positive developments in our undergraduate program. First, let me mention the reviving of our Undergraduate Mathematics Club under the energetic guidance of Keith Conrad. The second is the very strong performance of our students who participated in the William Lowell Putnam International Mathematics Competition. They were trained by Professor Stuart Sidney, who is currently the President of UConn's chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Read about both activities inside.

Jeff Tollefson will describe elsewhere the detailed activities of the Undergraduate Program Committee, but I would like to return for a moment to the pilot project for the renewal of the undergraduate program. One of the several committees that we have decided to create is designed to strengthen the relationship between the department and its alumni. Let me just mention that this year we graduated 28 students with a BA or a BS in Mathematics and 36 students with a minor in Mathematics. Currently we send this newsletter to over 1800 alumni addresses. One of our major goals is to strengthen and increase the number of students majoring and minoring in math. We would especially like you, our alumni, to feel very comfortable in recommending our university and our department as a place to obtain a solid degree in mathematics. We feel that a way to achieve this level of comfort for you is through better knowledge of and stronger ties with our department. Therefore I call on you to volunteer to set up an alumni-faculty committee. If 5-10 of you will be ready to think of concrete ways to determine the activities of this committee, we will match you with faculty members who will be your partners on this mission.

In addition to our undergraduate teaching mission we are, as you know, a very active research department. A department that seeks to be strong in research needs a correspondingly strong graduate program. The last two recruitment seasons have shown a very positive turnaround in our situation. In recent years we have had fewer applicants from the Far East and from Eastern Europe, probably because of the opening up of their societies and markets, but the improved quality of our domestic applicants has more than compensated for this. Later in this letter, you will find a report from our superb Associate Head and Director of Graduate Studies, Manny Lerman. I would like to highlight here one activity of the graduate students and the Graduate Committee. For the first time, we applied for substantial sums to fund invitations to prospective students for a two-day stay on campus to meet with our faculty and our current graduate students. All 7 of the students who came for the visit accepted our offers to become graduate assistants in our department. Let me add that this year 4 students completed their studies towards the PhD degree in Mathematics and 5 completed studies towards the Master's degree in Mathematics.

Inside you will find a report on Regina Speicher, who won UConn's 2004 Outstanding Teaching Assistant Award as well as our department's Connie Strange Graduate Community Award. It is also a pleasure to recognize Minerva Catral for winning our department's Louis J. DeLuca Memorial Award for Outstanding Teaching Assistant. You will also read about the very active graduate student weekly Sigma Seminar run so well by our student Lance Miller.

To maintain the growth in the number of our undergraduate and graduate students we need a corresponding growth in the number of faculty and postdoctoral fellows. This year we have hired two new faculty members. One, Louis Lombardi, comes to us with much experience from the insurance/actuarial industries. He will replace Richard London, who has done an outstanding job as our Director of Actuarial Science, and who will be leaving us in 2005. A comprehensive report on the program, written by Richard London, can be found inside these pages.

The second person whom we hired is Ralph Kaufmann, who comes to us from Oklahoma State University in Stillwater. Ralph, who will be an Assistant Professor in Mathematics, earned his PhD from the University of Bonn, Germany, and did Postdoctoral work at the University of Southern California. His areas of expertise are geometry and topology. Ralph's wife will be teaching in the Physics Department. They are the proud parents of a very young baby.

In addition to the hiring of faculty, we also hired 6 new Postdoctoral Fellows. Three of our current Fellows will be leaving us, Edlira Shteto, Yasar Sozen, and Moritz Kassmann, and we wish them all the best in their new careers. The new Fellows are: Stephen Binns, James Borger, Dmitry Glotov, Jesse Ratzkin, Leonid Slavin, and Xudong Yao. They will contribute much to research and teaching in our department.

Receiving research grants from national agencies or awards for their teaching were Evarist Giné: (two year Department of Defense grant ), Reed Solomon (three year National Science Foundation grant ), Sarah Glaz (AAUP Excellence in Teaching Innovation award), Joe McKenna (Distinguished College or University Teaching Award of the Northeast Section of the MAA), and Miki Neumann (the Provost's Research Excellence Award for 2004). We salute them all. Their activity clearly enhances the reputation of our department.

The past year has seen a complete revamping of the computing and technological resources of the department. More on this is in the report by our Systems Director, Kevin Marinelli. We acknowledge the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Ross MacKinnon, for providing our department with some $200,000 for the renewal of our system, and we thank Kevin for all the hard work that he put in to install both the new system and all the new computers in the offices of our faculty and graduate students.

Finally, we have had a very active colloquium program this year. This included collaboration with the Computer Science and Engineering Department on the selection of several very distinguished speakers whose work straddles both areas. This brought us together with the faculty and students of those departments, which was very positive. A comprehensive report on our colloquium activity can be found in the write-up by our very energetic colloquium chair, Vadim Olshevsky.