A new study adds to a growing conversation on the best way to treat women with stage 0 breast cancer http://time.com/4151717/dcis-breast-cancer-active-surveillance/ read more about Who Can Delay Breast Cancer Treatment? A New Math Model Adds Clues »
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? »
Durham, NC - When he wasn't boxing at a local gym in Durham and playing intramural soccer, senior Hunter Nisonoff spent his summer researching potential HIV vaccines in Bruce Donald’s lab. Nisonoff, a math major and global health and chemistry minor from Emerson, N.J., is working on two projects: one project is based in theory and the other focuses on applications of the theory. His mentor, Bruce Donald, is the James B. Duke professor of computer science and chemistry. His first project, funded by the Dean’s Summer Research… read more about Hunter Nisonoff: Student Research Explores Designs for New HIV Vaccines »
As a four-year-old, Lillian Pierce remembers watching her mother balance her checkbook and realizing that the numbers juxtaposed on the page were, in a sense, communicating with each other. “My mother explained that the numbers told her what to write down next. It was remarkable to me that those symbols could talk to each other -- that they had specific relationships, and that it was possible to learn what those relationships were in order to play this game called long division.” Today, Pierce, a 34-year-old mathematician… read more about Lillian Pierce: A Head for Pure Mathematics »
Researchers are building complex mathematical models to understand cancer's evolution and how to treat it. Durham, NC - Two Duke researchers are focusing on the deadly mathematics behind the mutated genes and damaged cells that drive cancer. "Cancer is the end result of an accumulation of genetic mutations," says Rick Durrett, a professor of mathematics at Duke. "It can be boiled down into a series of probabilities of whether or not a cell will become mutated, whether the cell will get the correct combination of… read more about Factoring in the Deadly Math of Cancer »
With math equations that analyze brush strokes, new discoveries about the world's greatest art are possible. It took X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and a painting algorithm to reveal the hidden portrait of a peasant underneath the painting of Vincent Van Gogh’s “Patch of Grass.” And that feat, accomplished in 2008, was just the beginning. Art history and mathematics may seem an unlikely combination, but math techniques in image analysis is transforming the way art historians and conservationists do their work. Algorithms… read more about Van Gogh and the Algorithm: How Math Can Save Art »
A common prejudice holds that women can't match the strength of men in mathematics. But for more than three decades, Belgian physicist/mathematician Ingrid Daubechies has been proving the prejudice wrong – and using maths to make a better world. As a little girl, Ingrid Daubechies felt she was always a bit different from her friends. Before the age of 6, she was already familiar with complex mathematical concepts, and when she couldn’t sleep she did not count numbers as others do, but instead mentally computed powers of 2.… read more about Math is (also) for Women »
Anne Talkington, an undergraduate Mathematics student under the auspices of Richard Durrett, attempts to gain a quantitative grasp on cancer through mathematical modeling. Historically, tumor growth has only been measured in vitro (in a laboratory setting); however, Talkington looks at clinical data from MRIs and mammograms to study how tumors grow in vivo (in the human body). Talkington is primarily interested in how fast tumors grow and if growth is limited. To analyze these trends, Talkington extracted two time-point… read more about An Intersection of Math and Medicine: Modeling Cancerous Tumor Kinetics »
Durham, NC - Racially and economically mixed cities are more likely to stay integrated if the density of households stays low, finds a new analysis of a now-famous model of segregation. By simulating the movement of families between neighborhoods in a virtual “city,” Duke University mathematician Rick Durrett and graduate student Yuan Zhang find that cities are more likely to become segregated along racial, ethnic or other lines when the proportion of occupied sites rises above a certain critical threshold -- as low as 25… read more about Could Suburban Sprawl Be Good For Integration? »
Q. How can math be used to keep us healthy and safe? We have all sorts of data at our fingertips – on healthcare trials and treatments, crime statistics, and weather patterns for example. But how do we use the data to make the best and most ethical decisions? Mathematical modeling can be used to help us understand a problem in a new way. It can be used to make predictions on what clinical trials to run, where crime will happen, or when catastrophic storms might hit. We can use predictive modeling to help decide where to… read more about How Can Math Be Used to Keep us Healthy and Safe? »
Rowena Gan ('15) combined music and math for her Graduation with Distinction project. Rowena studied piano at Duke with David Heid. She majored in math, and earned a minor in music. read more about Rowena Gan: Math & Music »
Bracket math isn’t an exact science, but for years mathematicians have told us that the odds of picking a perfect NCAA tournament bracket are a staggering 1 in 9,223,372,036,854,775,808 (that’s 9.2 quintillion). According to Duke math professor Jonathan Mattingly, the average college basketball fan has a far better chance of achieving bracket perfection. Taking into account the fact that a 16 seed has never beaten a one-seed (meaning your bracket should have four guaranteed wins) and adjusting… read more about Duke Math Professor Says Odds of a Perfect Bracket are One in 2.4 Trillion »