News

Results: 291
Select from the following menus to filter the table.

A Duke team crushed more than 500 other schools in the NCAA tournament of the math world, known by mathletes as the Putnam, claiming a top ten finish in 2016 for the 22nd time since 1990. Alex Milu ’16, Tony Qiao ’17, Trung Can ’18 and Feng Gui ’18 scored higher than 90 percent of the 4,275 undergraduates who competed in this year’s event.  More than a dozen other Duke students also competed in this year’s contest.  The results of the 76th annual competition were announced this month. Read the rest of the… read more about Post-Game Roundup from the Brain Teaser Bowl »

For 96 hours this January, nearly 12500 teams around the world, including 480 from the US, competed in the annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling/Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling sponsored by COMAP. Six open-ended problems were posted at 8pm on Thursday evening and teams researched, created a model, wrote up their solutions and then submitted them to COMAP on the following Monday at 8pm.http://www.comap.com/undergraduate/contests/mcm/contests/2016/results/ The teams of Haoyang Gu, Yang Liu, Misty Sha and of… read more about Math Contest in Modeling »

Six students have been named 2016 PRUV Fellows and will work on a variety of research projects from algebraic geometry and number theory to modeling biological systems. They are Trung Can, Matthew Gherman, Feng Gui, Mendel Nguyen, Derrick Nowak and Alex Pieloch. Students will work with mentors for at least six weeks in the summer and will continue with Research Independent Study the following year. This is expected to lead to a Senior Thesis and Graduation with Distinction. https://sites.… read more about PRUV: Program for Research for Undergraduates »

The Duke Putnam team finished 10th among 577 colleges and universities in the 76th W.L Putnam Mathematical Competition. The student coach of the team, Alex Milu’15, received Honorable Mention (top 2%) and Trung Can ’18 also ranked among the top 100 of the 4275 students in the US and Canada who participated. Tony Qiao ’17 and Feng Gui ’18 ranked among the top 8% and David Geng ‘19 and Justin Luo’18 also ranked among top quarter. The contest was particularly… read more about Putnam Competition »

The Julia Dale winners for 2016 are Lindsey Brown, Bryan Liu and Paul Ziquan Yang. Each of these students excelled in upper level and graduate math courses and wrote an innovative senior thesis. Under the direction of Mike Reed and Bill Pardon, Brown used techniques of combinatorics and algebraic topology to extend the research of Carina Curto (Duke Ph.D. 2005) on sound localization in barn owls. She will attend the graduate program in applied mathematics at Harvard. Liu made advances in the program of… read more about Julia Dale Award »

The following graduating math majors have written their Senior Honors Theses on their math or math related research:  Lindsey Brown, Abstract Algebra and Neural Code for Sound Localization in Barn Owls with Mike Reed and Bill Pardon. She will study applied math at Harvard University  David Builes, Large Cardinals with Richard Hodel. He will attend the graduate program in philosophy at MIT and will study set theory at Harvard on the side.… read more about Graduation with Distinction »

  Duke undergraduates know professor Ingrid Daubechies as an instructor of multivariable calculus, but beyond Duke, she has become famous for her study of wavelets, or mathematical functions with the ability to enhance image compression technology.   Daubechies, a Belgian James B. Duke professor of mathematics and electrical and computer engineering, came to Duke in 2010 after being on faculty at Princeton University, and she served as the first female president of the International Mathematical Union from 2011… read more about Math Professor Ingrid Daubechies Makes Waves with Research »

Mathematical physicist Arlie Petters has been appointed Dean of Academic Affairs and Associate Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education, effective July 1. He will serve through June 2020. In the words of Valerie S. Ashby, Dean of Trinity College of Arts & Sciences : "Petters holds Trinity College appointments as professor of mathematics and physics and an appointment at Duke’s Fuqua School of Business as a professor of business administration. He succeeds Lee D. Baker, who is returning to the faculty as a professor of… read more about Appointment of Duke Mathematics Professor Arlie O. Petters as Dean of Academic Affairs »

A mathematical model from Duke University mathematicians suggests more can be done to protect people from the human papilloma virus.    HPV is associated with cervical cancer in women, but can also cause various cancers in men.   Duke mathematician Marc Ryser says the study suggests focusing limited public health dollars on vaccinating the large number of boys who have not had the shots. "The uptake in girls has stagnated and remains low, the uptake in boys, so the number of boys who get vaccinated… read more about Study: Vaccinating Boys Against HPV Could Prevent Cancer In Men and Women  »

  Mike Reed has been recognized by the graduated school for his excellence in mentoring. The Graduate School presents the Dean’s Awards for Excellence in Mentoring to recognize the considerable efforts and accomplishments of faculty and graduate students who consistently serve as effective mentors. Designed to allow the university community to identify faculty and graduate students who embody both the letter and spirit of mentoring, these awards are important examples of the university’s continuing efforts to cultivate… read more about Reed wins 2016 Dean’s Award »

For the 22th time since 1990, the Duke Putnam team placed among the top ten on the WL Putnam Mathematical Competition. Duke achieved 3 first place finishes, 2 seconds and 6 thirds. A total of 4275 students from 554 colleges and universities in Canada and the United States participated in the Competition. See more athttp://services.math.duke.edu/news/awards/competitions.html#putnam Alex Milu '15 achieved Honorable Mention (top 2%) and Trung Can '17 missed Honorable Mention by just one point.  Feng Gui '17 and Tony Qiao… read more about Duke Putnam Team »

Mike Reed was named a 2016 SIAM Fellow for his contributions to analysis and mathematical biology. SIAM, the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, only names 30 or so fellows each year. The honor represents sustained significant contributions to applied mathematics. For more information see here.   read more about Mike Reed named SIAM Fellow »

"A glamorous Hollywood star, a renegade composer, and the mathematical development of spread spectrum communications". abstract: During World War II, Hedy Lamarr, a striking Hollywood actress; together with George Antheil, a radical composer; invented and patented a secret signaling system for the remote control of torpedoes.  The ideas in this patent have since developed into one of the ingredients in modern digital wireless communications.  The unlikely biography of these two characters, along with some of the… read more about Hollywood, Mathematics, and Digital Communications »

Congratulations to Kevin Stubbs, Christy Vaughn, and  Anne Talkington who were all awarded NSF graduate fellowships this year. Kevin is a graduate student in the Duke Math department. Christy Vaughn was a Duke Mathematics Major who graduated in 2015. She is pursuing a PhD at Princeton in Applied Mathematics. Anne Talkington is a current senior who is double majoring in Mathematics and Biology. She plans to attend graduate school and pursue a PhD at the interface between the two.   read more about Graduate Fellowship Winners »

SWIM (Summer Workshop In Mathematics) is a 9-day workshop for female rising senior high school students interested in mathematics. All students currently in their junior year of high school are eligible to apply. Participants in the workshop will attend two mathematical courses, and in the afternoon work in groups on an exploration topic related to a course of their choice. Throughout the workshop students will meet undergraduate students, graduate students and faculty of the Department of Mathematics at Duke University.… read more about Duke Math Hosts SWIM: A Summer program for female rising senior high school students »

Possibilities for using geometry and topology to analyze statistical problems in biology raise a host of novel questions in geometry, probability, algebra, and combinatorics that demonstrate the power of biology to influence the future of pure mathematics. This is a tour through some biological explorations and their mathematical ramifications. Evolution sometimes results in discrete morphological differences among populations that diverge from a common source. This “saltation” can occur with features quantified by integers… read more about Fruit Flies and Moduli: Interactions between Biology and Mathematics »

That statement seems absurd, almost laughable to many mathematicians who are used to thinking that “science” means physics and chemistry, while biology is just classification, necessary perhaps for training doctors, but not really deep, intellectual, or mathematical. We are in the midst of a biological revolution whose roots lie in the 19th and first half of the twentieth century. In the past twenty-five years the pace of this revolution has accelerated and it has created an enormous biological research community. The… read more about Mathematical Biology is Good for Mathematics »

The Laplace award is given to the best student paper submitted to the Bayesian Statistical Science section at Joint Statistical Meetings. Ten students are chosen as competition winners and the best of the ten recieve the Laplace Award: http://community.amstat.org/sbss/awards Akihiko Nishimura explains his paper below: My algorithm is called 'geometrically tempered Hamiltonian Monte Carlo.' As the name suggests, it draws ideas from a variety of fields; Riemannian geometry, probability theory, numerical analysis, as well as… read more about Graduate Student Akihiko Nishimura Wins Laplace Award »

Team gerrymandering, led by Professor Jonathan Mattingly, feature their latest works in a new webpage: https://www.math.duke.edu/projects/gerrymandering/. Team gerrymandering is featured in a podcast on Relatively Prime: https://soundcloud.com/…/and-all-of-gerrys-mandering/s-pnvDm Mathematics and politics intersect in Big Data: https://bigdata.duke.edu/ne…/extra-effort-finishing-job-data Check them out!         read more about Team Gerrymandering »

At a dinner I attended some years ago, the distinguished differential geometer Eugenio Calabi volunteered to me his tongue-in-cheek distinction between pure and applied mathematicians. A pure mathematician, when stuck on the problem under study, often decides to narrow the problem further and so avoid the obstruction. An applied mathematician interprets being stuck as an indication that it is time to learn more mathematics and find better tools. For more see the following link... https://www.quantamagazine.org/… read more about Big Data’s Mathematical Mysteries Machine learning works spectacularly well, but mathematicians aren’t quite sure why.  »

In March 2015, it was announced by the Simons Foundation that Professor Lenhard (Lenny) Ng was awarded a Simons Fellowship for the 2015-2016 year (July 1, 2015 to June 30, 2016). He is among the 40 mathematicians in North America to earn the fellowship. It provides a semester-long leave from teaching and administrative duties for the purpose of advancing basic research. Professor Ng will be using it to extend a semester sabbatical leave from Duke to the full academic year. Professor Ng say "This enables me to travel more… read more about Lenhard Ng Wins Simons Award »

Prof. Ingrid Daubechies is one of the pioneers of applied mathematicians collaborating with artists, art historians and art conservators in the emerging inter-disciplinary field of math and art, leading projects aimed at applying advanced image processing and machine learning techniques to assist people in art analysis. Recently, a Photoshop plug-in tool that uses mathematical algorithms to allow art conservators to better analyze paintings using X-ray images was released at http://www.project-platypus.net/ . This tool… read more about Helping Art Conservators study X-ray Images of Paintings »

Colleen Robles received her PhD. from the University of British Columbia in 2003 under the supervision of David Bao (University of Houston) and Richard Froese. Following a post-doctoral position at the University of Rochester, she joined Texas A&M University. Robles has held visiting positions at the University of Utah and the Institute for Advanced Study. She is delighted to join the Duke faculty. Colleen Robles is a differential geometer. Her research interests have included Finsler geometry (which is a generalization… read more about New Faculty: Associate Professor Colleen Robles »

A research group led by Prof. Ingrid Daubechies, and recent Duke PhD. graduate, Dr. Tingran Gao, in collaboration with the Duke Department of Evolutionary Anthropology, combines computer graphics, geometry processing, and machine learning, to study the evolutionary history of primates based on quantified variations of the shapes of anatomical surfaces like teeth and bones. By minimizing an energy functional between two triangular meshes, they defined a distance for two digitized anatomical surfaces, which also comes with a… read more about Mapping Lemur Teeth »

Ingrid Daubechies has won the 2012 Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize for mathematics. Durham, NC - Northwestern University has named Ingrid Daubechies the 2012 recipient of the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in mathematics. The award recognizes Daubechies' passion as an educator and her work on wavelets, which help with data and image processing. The selection was announced April 17, 2012. Daubechies' research affects millions of consumer and technological products, including seismic exploration, audio and video coders,… read more about Daubechies Wins Nemmers Prize »

Eugene Rabinovich, a physics and mathematics double major, studies string theory with professor Ronen Plesser Durham, NC - Eugene Rabinovich, a Duke University junior, has been selected as a 2014 scholar by the Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship and Excellence in Education Program. Rabinovich is among 283 students awarded Goldwater Scholarships for the 2014-15 academic year. The one- and two-year scholarships go toward covering the cost of tuition, fees, books, room and board up to a maximum of $7,500 per year. The scholarship… read more about Rabinovich Named 2014 Goldwater Scholar »

New faculty member applies math to solve some of the hardest questions in science Durham, NC - As a mathematician, Jianfeng Lu appreciates the abstract beauty of theories and proofs. But he also sees his craft as a powerful, pragmatic tool for helping researchers solve their greatest scientific challenges. Lu, 29, joined Duke in the summer of 2012 as an assistant professor in the mathematics department. Trained as an applied mathematician, he helps scientists in chemistry, materials science and biology develop mathematical… read more about Jiangfeng Lu: The Mathematics of Materials and of the Body »

Durham, NC - Are you blaming those rising prices for airplane tickets on the mergers in the industry? Senior Jonathan Gao says you might be right but the economics of the ticket price isn't that straightforward. The economics and math major from Ellicott, Md., studies a field of economics called industrial organization, which looks at firms, sellers, product pricing and competition in various markets. His project specifically looks at how the prices of airplane tickets fluctuate after airline company mergers. Using data… read more about Jonathan Gao: What Do Mergers Mean for Prices? »