Mathematics & Statistics

The results of the 83rd Putnam Competition have been released. William Han 26, Alan Li 24 and Derek Zhang 24 made it to the top 500 list, and their names are featured on the official Putnam website. The Amherst Putnam team was ranked 20 out of 456 institutions. Go Mammoths!

The National Science Foundation has awarded $500,000 to Professor Amy Wagaman (and co-PI Professor Lee Spector of Computer Science) to help the College acquire a high-performance computing (HPC) cluster to support research and training in the sciences. The system will be used to support leading edge faculty and student research in multiple departments across campus, and training students in use of the HPC technology will help prepare them to be the next generation of researchers in areas such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning. 

Karamatou Yacoubou Djima, Amherst College Assistant Professor of Mathematics, has been named an MAA-AWM Section Leturer for 2022-2024.  This Mathematical Association of America (MAA) program has been developed in partnership with the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM).  Professor Yacoubou Djima's lecture topics, to be delivered at MAA Sectional Meetings, include Heuristic Framework for Multi-Scale Testing of the Multi-Manifold Hypothesis and A brief tour of applied harmonic analysis: from Fourier series to machine learning.

Read more about the MAA-AWM Section Lectures here. 

Four Amherst students won Outstanding or Honorable Mention Poster Presentation Awards for posters on their research that they presented at the Joint Math Meetings January 2021:
 
Outstanding Poster Presentation
Andrew Tawfeek '21E, Noah Solomon '22, and Elizabeth Pratt '22
“Quantum Jacobi Forms and Sum of Tails Identities”
Advisor: Amanda Folsom (Amherst)
 
Honorable Mention Poster Presentation
Jonah Botvinick-Greenhouse '21 (with Aaron Kirtland, Washington University in St. Louis, and Megan Osborne, University of Scranton)
“An Unstructured Mesh Approach to Nonlinear Noise Reduction”
Advisor: Casey Johnson (Claremont Graduate University)
 
Congratulations to all of these students on their successful mathematics research!

Dan Velleman, Julian H. Gibbs '46 Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, is a 2020 recipient of the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) Paul R. Halmos-Lester R. Ford Award. This award recognizes authors of articles of expository excellence published in The American Mathematical Monthly. 

This is Prof. Velleman’s third time receiving this award, and marks the fifth time this award has been given to a faculty member in the Amherst Mathematics and Statistics Department in recent years: Tanya Leise, Brian Boyle Professor in Mathematics and Computer Science, won this award in 2008, and David Cox, William J. Walker Professor of Mathematics, Emeritus, won the award in 2012.

Congratulations to Professor Velleman!  More about the award and his winning article can be found here: https://www.maa.org/programs-and-communities/member-communities/maa-awards/writing-awards/paul-halmos-lester-ford-awards

At the Joint Math Meetings in January 2019, held in Baltimore, Prof Amanda Folsom was a featured speaker, talking on “Symmetry, Almost.” She highlighted advances over the past decade involving mock modular forms.

Statistics and Data Science (SDS) Fellows act as teaching assistants and also carry out research projects, for example, support for the sports analytics program, Institutional Research, or other parts of the college. Now in its fourth year, the SDS Fellows program is supported through the David and Jeanette Rosenblum Fund for Statistics Fellows, established by David Rosenblum ’92.

Amherst College recently hosted StatFest, a national conference that encourages underrepresented students to pursue statistics and data science careers. This year’s conference included 150 attendees, including 80 undergraduates, from 90 institutions around the country. It was also live-streamed to Purdue University in Indiana and Pomona College in California. Find out more in the story, At StatFest, Diversity is the Greatest Value.

Professor Nicholas Horton has been named a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in recognition of his “distinguished research contributions to statistical and data sciences, creativity in statistics education and professional service developing curriculum guidelines for statistical education and computing.”

The AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for Exposition was awarded to three mathematicians: David Cox (Amherst College), John Little (College of the Holy Cross), and Donal O'Shea (New College of Florida) "for their book Ideals, Varieties, and Algorithms, which has made algebraic geometry and computational commutative algebra accessible not just to mathematicians but to students and researchers in many fields."