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Friends of Mathematics Newsletter Winter 2013

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Friends of Mathematics Newsletter Winter 2013 Friends of Mathematics Newsletter Winter 2013 Endowment Enriches Graduate Program he Department of Mathematics is honoring a late professor and Sciences have contributed additional funding to establish Twith a graduate enrichment program. something more permanent: the David Surowski Memorial Professor Dave Surowski was a strong advocate of the Endowment for the Enrichment of Graduate Mathematics. department’s graduate program. He served as the director of This will provide a range of opportunities for the graduate graduate studies from 1986 until his retirement in 2003, and he program and graduate students. For example, this fund will directed Ph.D. and master’s dissertations for be used to provide dissertation fellowships several students. After his retirement from so that students can have a semester or a K-State, Surowski spent seven years teaching year to focus on their dissertations, free from at the Shanghai American School in China, the commitments of teaching. The fund will where he was a very popular teacher. also be used for recruiting, graduate student He died in March 2011. conferences, graduate student travel to conferences, and scholarships. In his honor, his wife, Susan Zhang, and daughter, Laura Sapp, set up the David “Surowski always wanted to be able to support Surowski Memorial Fund. graduate students through scholarships and fellowships and to provide support for activities Recognizing the commitment Surowski gave such as travel,” said Professor Louis Pigno, head to graduate education, the Department of the Department of Mathematics. “This fund of Mathematics, through the Friends of will greatly enhance our graduate program. He Mathematics Fund, and the College of Arts would have been very proud of this.” Alum Rodnianski wins Fermat Prize He has held many visiting positions and received several awards for his research. Rodnianski was the Department of gor Rodnianski, 1999 Ph.D. graduate, was a co-recipient of the Mathematics 2010 Distinguished Alumnus. I2011 Fermat Prize for Mathematics Research. He received the award “for fundamental contributions to the study of equations of general relativity and the propagation of light in curved In Memoriam: Alexander Rosenberg space-times.” t is with great sorrow that the Department of Mathematics The Fermat Prize is awarded every two years by the Institut de announces the death on November 24 of Professor Alexander Mathématiques de Toulouse to one or more mathematicians I Rosenberg. Sasha, arguably the founder of the field of under the age of 45 in a field in which the famous noncommutative algebraic geometry, was much beloved mathematician Pierre de Fermat made decisive contributions. throughout the mathematical community and will be greatly The prize carries a cash award of 20,000 euros. missed. He is survived by his wife Tatiana and adult children After completing his Ph.D. under the direction of Professor Lev Maria and Leo. The department has already established a Kapitanski, Rodnianski was a professor at Princeton University memorial endowment in his name. A campus memorial service until moving to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in will be held early next semester. 2011. Department of Mathematics Friends of Mathematics Newsletter Winter 2013 New mathematics center opens on campus new center in the Department of Mathematics will focus Israel; University of Milan, Italy; and Chinese University, Hong A on a relatively new field in mathematics, joining leading Kong. universities around the world. The M-Center already has hit the ground running. The M-Center supports and promotes research in mathematical It has established a lecture series of distinguished researchers questions arising from string theory, in which mirror symmetry in the field, mentors several graduate students, and hosts a and tropical geometry play a central role. visiting assistant professorship program funded by K-State’s During the past 25 years, there has College of Arts and Sciences. The been intensive interaction between center mentors two postdoctoral string theory and geometry, which students: Garrett Alston from the has led to a creation of entirely new University of Wisconsin-Madison and mathematical areas. Zheng Hua from British Columbia. String theory has suggested that In 2011, the center co-organized conventional geometry emerges from three international research the quantum theory at certain limits. conferences in Calabria, Italy; Vienna, Then various string dualities give Austria; and Split, Croatia. equivalent but mathematically very The center also hosted a regional different descriptions of the same conference on mirror symmetry physical quantities. sponsored by the National Science Mirror Symmetry is the simplest but M-Center Research Staff Foundation held at K-State in fall mathematically best understood 2011. The conference is expected example of string duality. In particular it models the physical to rotate between K-State and UW-Madison, and it will co- duality between strong and weak interactions as the organize a research program at the Erwing Schroedinger mathematical duality between symplectic and algebraic Institute in Vienna in 2013. geometry (the toy model for which is the famous Fourier The National Science Foundation partially funds some of the transform). Furthermore it makes complicated non-linear activities organized by the center through a three-year, $1.5 objects into much simpler piecewise linear ones (this procedure million grant. is called tropicalization, and in a sense it is analogous to the taking of the QFT limit of String Theory). The future looks bright for the center. The M-Center was created under the leadership of its Director It is expected to expand rapidly in many areas, including Yan Soibelman with the aim to secure the prominent role graduate student and postdoctoral mentoring, a visiting played by the research of its members and establish new scholar program, and research and training activities, such as contacts and collaboration with other world centers. Those research seminars, workshops and conferences. include the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony The M-Center will continue to develop deep connections with Brook University in New York and the Center for Topology other research centers and university departments around the and Quantization of Moduli Spaces at Aarhus University in globe. Denmark. For more information, please visit: www.math.ksu.edu/ Research staff of the M-Center include (besides Professor research/m-center. Soibelman) Professors Ricardo Castano-Bernard, Ilia Zharkov, postdoc Zheng Hua and several graduate students interested in the subject of Mirror Symmetry and Tropical Geometry. In just its first year of existence, the M-Center has become a hub Q and A with Edward Frenkel, for a growing research network that includes young and senior mathematician and filmmaker collaborators from top U.S. universities, including the University of California, Berkeley; University of California, San Diego; dward Frenkel, this year’s Friends of Mathematics lecturer, Massachusetts Institute of Technology; and University of Miami. Eis a prolific mathematician of international repute. Frenkel is a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and he At the international level, research contacts of the M-Center has published nearly 100 articles in major journals. His work include the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, France; during the last two decades has contributed to the fields of University of Strasbourg and University of Paris, France; representation theory, algebraic geometry, mathematical University of Geneva, Switzerland; University of Vienna and physics, and in recent years, film. Frenkel is working on his Erwing Schroedinger Institute, Austria; Hebrew University, 2 Department of Mathematics second film to bring math to a general audience. He recently The question is, how do you even begin to talk to people talked with Sarah Reznikoff, assistant professor, about math about this? In my experience it is difficult to do directly. A lot and film. of people have a bad experience with math. I had this idea to Sarah Reznikoff: What was your upbringing like? try to convey math in a more artistic way. I was in Paris and met a filmmaker, Reine Graves, and we came up with this idea of Edward Frenkel: I grew up in Russia and went to school in making a short film about a mathematician who finds a formula Moscow. I did my Ph.D. at Harvard, and I stayed on at Harvard of love. It’s a fairy tale, if you will. It’s appealing to people at a as a junior fellow and associate professor. Then I moved to more emotional level. Some people get it, and some people Berkeley in 1997. don’t. It was a learning experience for sure. This was my way of SR: Have you been back to Russia at all? trying to convey math in a very unconventional and different way. And now I’m trying to do it in another way, with a second EF: No, my family followed me here. My parents, my sister and film and a book. family all live in the Boston area. SR: The first film was met with some critical acclaim, along with SR: What are you currently working on? some controversy. What do you make of some critics calling the EF: The Langlands program, which is — I’m slightly film sexist? exaggerating, maybe — a grand unified EF: First of all, I have to say that all of this theory in mathematics. It needs to be a came as a culture shock to me because theory that connects different branches of nobody has ever complained about my mathematics. It doesn’t explain everything mathematical work; it made me think more in math, but it points to some patterns about this very special place of mathematics, and phenomena that are very persistent. and the difference between math and art. (Robert) Langlands started it in 1967, and One of the main differences is that math his idea was to connect number theory is objective. There is only one truth, and with harmonic analysis, but since that time one can even say one path to the truth.
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