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Duke University Math News May 13, 2012 • ♦ • SPRING 2012 EDITION • ♦ • MathDuke University News May 13, 2012 GRADUATION EDITION were held at Cornell University, the first in 1994 and Events the second in 2008. The program was organized by Tai Melcher (Vir- ginia) and Amber Puha (San Marcos) with Rick 27th ANNUAL GEOMETRY Durrett and Jonathan Mattingly taking care of the FESTIVAL local arrangements. The workshop will feature one hour talks by The Geometry Festival, hosted by Duke Univer- Janet Best (Ohio State), Alexandra Chronopoulou sity and UNC, was held in the Math/Physics Build- (UCSB), Cindy Greenwood (Arizona State), Alice ing from Friday, April 27, to Sunday, April 29, 2012. Guionnet (ENS Lyon), Kay Kirkpatrick (UIUC), About 75 participants from 25 universities attended Nevena Mari´c; (Missouri), Dana Randall (Geor- this event. gia Tech), Amandine V´eber (CMAP), Amy Ward The speakers this year were: (USC), and Jessica Zuniga (Duke). For more information visit the conference web page at - Simon Brendle (Stanford University) http://www.math.duke.edu/∼ rtd/wwp12/. ShiShi Luo, Sarah Schott, and Rachel Thomas, graduate - John Etnyre (Georgia Institute of Technology) students at the time, attended the 2008 confer- - Fernando Coda Marques (IMPA) ence at Cornell. See http://www.math.duke.edu/∼ rtd/wwp/photo08.html - Gordana Matic (University of Georgia) Alice Guionnet will present a Gergen Lecture on this visit. After many years at ENS in Lyon, Alice will be - Jan Metzger (Institute for Mathematics, Uni- moving to a faculty position at MIT in the Fall. Among versity of Potsdam) Alice's many honors are the Rollo Davidson prize in 2003, Loeve prize in 2009, and a lecture at the ICM - Yanir Rubinstein (Stanford University) in 2006. Her thesis written under the direction of Ger- ard Ben Arous concerned the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick - Valentino Tosatti (Columbia University) model of spin glasses. Much of her recent work concerns - Mu-Tao Wang (Columbia University) random matrices. See her book with G. Anderson and O. Zeitouni. A continuing grant from the National Science Gergen Lecture Foundation makes it possible for us to partially re- imburse the expenses of a large number of graduate On February 28, Jordan Ellenberg gave the 2011- students, post-docs and younger faculty who do not 12 Gergen Lecture on Stability and Arithmetic have access to travel funds from other sources. The Counting Problems. conference was organized by Hubert Bray and oth- Abstract: ers in the Duke and UNC mathematics departments. A big theme in contemporary number theory is \arithmetic statistics": what does Women in Probability the class group of a random number field The third Workshop for Women in Probability look like? What do the zeroes of a ran- will be held at Duke October 14-16, 2012. This is dom L-function look like? What does a the third conference of this series. The previous two random rational point on a variety look 1 Duke Math News May 13, 2012GRADUATION EDITION like? In this talk we will explain how in Math Physics 101. This is the department's an- arithmetic statistics problems over func- nual opportunity for students and faculty to meet tion fields are naturally tied to topologi- and chat in an informal setting over sandwiches and cal questions about stability for homology soda. groups of certain moduli spaces; in particu- At this event, students were recognized for their lar, we will explain how a stability theorem awards and contributions to the mathematical life of for Hurwitz spaces (moduli spaces of finite the department. All in the Duke math community branched covers of the line) can be used to and especially those who are graduating are encour- prove a version of the Cohen-Lenstra con- aged to attend. jectures over function fields. Melanie and Phil Matchett Wood First Math Slam @ Duke On Thursday December 1, 2011, DUMU featured Melanie Matchett Wood '03 with the undergraduate A Poetry Slam is when poets meet in a bar and alumni lecture The Chemistry of Primes. present their poetry to lovers of poetry. And a Math Slam is when mathematicians meet in an over- We are familiar with the prime num- crowded seminar room full of lovers of mathematics bers as those integers which cannot be fac- of all ages, career stages, and math specialties to tored into smaller integers, but if we con- present... their math! Every speaker gets 10 min- sider systems of numbers larger than the utes, a blackboard, a projector, and an audience ea- integers, the primes may indeed factor in ger to learn and be entertained at the same time. those larger systems. We discuss various Do you think you could do this? questions mathematicians ask about how The speakers of Duke's first Math Slam { Eliza- primes may factor in larger systems, talk beth Munch, Christopher Cornwell, David Herzog, about both classical results and current re- Alan Parry, and Dave Rose - showed that social be- search on the topic, and give a sense of the havior of apes resembles vineyards, described pain- kind of tools needed to tackle these ques- less surgery with topologically non-removable fibers, tions. explained why we should love probability, told us why dark matter matters, and untied other knotty Melanie was a two time medalist at the Interna- problems. tional Mathematical Olympiad, a Putnam Fellow, Much thanks goes to Carla Cederbaum who orga- Morgan Prize winner, and American Institute of nized this first Duke math slam. Math Fellow along with many other honors. Her Duke Math shirt has been retired and hangs in the math lounge. Undergraduate News Melanie and her husband Philip are each Assis- tant Professors of Mathematics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In addition to the undergrad- DUMU uate lecture, each gave a more technical seminar on The Duke University Math Union has sponsored their recent research results. They brought their 18 several notable events this year such as the Duke month daughter, Abelia with them. After the Un- Math Meet, the alumni undergraduate lecture, and dergraduate Lecture, a half dozen DUMU members several social events. Many thanks to graduating took Melanie, Philip and Abelia to Parizade for an president, Vivek Bhattacharya and the other grad- entertaining conversation. uating officer. We welcome TongTong Zhan as pres- Duke Math Meet ident for the upcoming year. Nearly 400 high school students from New Jersey Student-Faculty Math Party to Georgia participated in the annual Duke Math The math undergrad/faculty party was held Meet on Saturday, November 12. About 40 Duke Thursday afternoon from 3 until 4:30 on April 26 2 Duke Math News May 13, 2012GRADUATION EDITION students helped to make up and grade the prob- universities in the 62st W.L Putnam Competition. lems, purchase and distribute the awards, serve box Daniel finished near the top of the Honorable Men- lunches, and a myriad of other tasks. tions and Vivek and Michael Banaszek were among Senior Seung In Sohn from Thomas Jefferson was the top 4% of the 4440 participants. Ben Bellis, An- the highest scorer in the contest followed by Allen drew Hertzberg, and Leslie Lei ranked among the Yang of Cary Academy, Calvin Deng of NCSSM, top 500 and David Hemminger, Joe Keefer, Kath- David Stoner and Elliott Chartock of the Columbia leen Lan, and Eugene Rabinovich were among the Math Circle, and Brendan Fletcher of the Charlotte top 20% of the 4440 participants. Math Club. Harvard won the contest this year followed by The team from Columbia Math Circle took first Carnegie Mellon, Cal Tech, Stanford and MIT. The prize followed by a team from NCSSM, two teams median score was 0 and only 25% of participants from AAST and a team from Thomas Jefferson SST. scored 3 or more points. MCM ACM Programming Three Duke teams were among nearly 3,700 teams The ACM International Collegiate Programming of undergraduates from around the world to partici- Competition (ACM-ICPC) is an annual program- pate in the 2012 International Mathematics Contest ming competition involving several thousand teams in Modeling. Freshman Leslie Lei and Juniors Tian- from universities all over the world. This year, xiang Xiong and Dazhong (Chime) Xuan garnered a team from Duke University placed first out of a Meritorious (top 10%) ranking while the teams of over 160 teams in the Mid-Atlantic Regionals of the sophomores Aashiq Dheeraj, Xiaoyu (Mandy) Jiang ACM-ICPC, thereby qualifying for the World Fi- and Kathleen Lan and the team of freshmen David nals. The team of three, Joe Keefer (Math/Econ Hemminger, Logan Su, and Christy Vaughn received '12) and two graduate students from the Computer Honorable Mention for their solutions. Science Department along with Assistant Coach, Each Duke team derived a method to schedule 6 Siyang Chen (Math/CS '12), will travel to Warsaw, to 18 day trips along the Big Long River so as to Poland, this May for the finals to compete against maximize the wilderness experience and minimize about 100 other teams. Duke University has quali- the overlap with other groups. The teams used var- fied for the World Finals every year except one since ious combinatorial methods such as the asymmetric 1994. travelling salesman problem and genetic algorithms Datafest to arrive at an efficient means for scheduling the trips during the busy summer months. The inaugural DataFest was held this April. In this competition, teams of undergraduates work for Menger Prize 48 hours to analyze a large and complex dataset. The Menger Prize, named for renowned Austrian This year's theme was micro lending. Participants mathematician Karl Menger, is awarded to the stu- analyzed six years of data from Kiva.com on lenders, dents with the best score on the W.L.