Department of Mathematics
We're proud of Math major Maria Paz Rios for her work in Colombia: "As part of the Duke for Colombia Campaign, and with the help of Bogotá Police and Red Cross Colombia, I was able to go to Soacha, one of the poorest sectors in Bogotá, and deliver 600 family kits with food and essential supplies to people that hadn't had anything to eat in days. This aid will support around 3,000 people in Soacha for two weeks! Thank you for allowing me to pursue this campaign while I was in school, which is when it was really… read more about Undergrad delivers food in Colombia »
Congratulations to the following student award winners from Duke University units in 2020. African & African American Studies John Hope Franklin Award for Academic Excellence: Elizabeth DuBard Grantland Karla FC Holloway Award for University Service: Beza Gebremariam Mary McLeod Bethune Writing Award: Jenna Clayborn Walter C. Burford Award for Community Service: Kayla Lynn Corredera-Wells Art, Art History & Visual Studies… read more about Student Honors and Laurels for 2020 »
DURHAM, N.C. -- Eighteen Duke students and alumni have been awarded Fulbright placements to teach English, study and do research abroad during the 2020-2021 academic year. The Fulbright US Student Program is the U.S. government’s flagship international educational exchange program, offering opportunities in over 140 countries. The Fulbright award is designed to facilitate cultural exchange and increase mutual understanding between the people of the United States and those of other countries. The awards are announced on… read more about Eighteen Duke Students And Alumni Awarded Fulbright Scholarships »
Congratulations to Duke Mathematics Professor Alexander (Sasha) Kiselev for being named one of the 2020 Simons Fellows in Mathematics and Theoretical Physics. The Simons Foundation’s mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. It exists to support basic or discovery-driven scientific research undertaken in the pursuit of understanding the phenomena of our world. The Simons Fellows program extends academic leaves from one term to a full year, enabling recipients to focus solely… read more about Professor Kiselev named 2020 Simons Fellow »
Duke dance alumna Anne Talkington discusses how her research in biology, mathematics, and her training as a dancer came together to film a dance representing her graduate thesis work for the "Dance Your Ph.D." competition. Anne Talkington is an alum of the Duke dance program, having studied with the program between 2012 and 2016 in addition to her majors in biology and mathematics. She is currently pursuing her PhD at the Department of Mathematics, UNC-CH in Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, and paid a… read more about Dance Your PhD with Anne Talkington »
A New Look at Ancient Handwriting Researchers have been analyzing the handwriting on these 2,800-year-old pottery fragments, with help from artificial intelligence. Duke mathematician Barak Sober and colleagues at Tel-Aviv University used a machine learning algorithm they developed to determine how many people wrote on pieces of broken pottery from Samaria, once the capital of ancient Israel. The fragments are important because they are among the few examples of handwritten texts to survive from… read more about A New Look at Ancient Handwriting »
Ingrid Daubechies has built a career on breaking barriers and following ideas. “I was always interested in what makes things work,” Daubechies, the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics and Electrical and Computer Engineering told the Wall Street Journal in a feature story published this week. Her study of mathematical structures called wavelets – now regularly referred to by others as “Daubechies wavelets” – made possible a wide use of data compression in a large number of applications common to everyday life – from… read more about Ingrid Daubechies, Making Waves »
A profile of Duke mathematician Ingrid Daubechies was published in the Wall Street Journal. read more about Mathematics Pioneer Ingrid Daubechies Has More Barriers to Break »
A startling experimental discovery about how fluids behave started a wave of important mathematical proofs. Duke mathematician Alexander Kiselev comments in the article in Quanta Magazine. read more about For Fluid Equations, a Steady Flow of Progress »
The 2019 Duke Math Meet was held on SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 2, 2019. Check out photos from the meet here: Fall 2019 photos The meet was sponsored in part by Jane Street Winners of the 2019 Math Meet DMM 2019 Team winner PRISMS: Tianyue Daniel Cao, Yichen Cedric Xiao, Jingdong Daniel Xiang, Tianze Peter Jiang, Yuxiao Tom Wang, Yuxuan Wendy Zheng Top five teams: PRISMS (Princeton International School of Mathematics and… read more about Duke Math Meet 2019 »
Courtesy of Robin Smith – University Communications If you’ve ever visited the Louvre in Paris, you may have been too focused on snapping a selfie in front of the Mona Lisa to think about the nearest exit. But one Duke team knows how to get out fast when it matters most, thanks to a computer simulation they developed for the Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling, an international contest in which thousands of student teams participate each year. Their results, published in the Journal of Undergraduate… read more about Leaving the Louvre - How to get out fast »
The department congratulates Didong Li, one of three recipients of the inaugural IMS Lawrence D. Brown PhD Student Award. Didong will present his work at an invited session at the World Congress/IMS Annual Meeting in Seoul (Aug 2020). Didong Li is co-advised by David Dunson and Sayan Mukherjee, Professors of Statistical Science and Mathematics at Duke University. Professor Lawrence Brown was a faculty member in the Cornell math department for many years before moving to the Wharton School at the… read more about Didong Li receives IMS award »
Two flat paper shapes are considered "scissors congruent" if you can cut up one shape and rearrange it as the other. But is there a way to determine this relationship if you don't have scissors? Are there characteristics you could measure ahead of time that would determine this, and would they apply to both two and higher dimensional shapes? These questions have been pondered by mathematicians for over a century. This fall Jonathan Campbell of Duke University and … read more about Mathematicians Cut Apart Shapes to Find Pieces of Equations »
Dr. William G. Kaelin Jr., a Duke trustee and alumnus, was awarded the 2019 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine. Kaelin received both his undergraduate and medical degrees from Duke and is a professor in the Department of Medicine at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute at Harvard Medical School and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute investigator. Kaelin shared the prize with Sir Peter Ratcliffe of Oxford University and Gregg Semenza of Johns Hopkins University for research on how cells sense and adapt to oxygen availability… read more about Duke Alumnus, Trustee William Kaelin Receives Nobel Prize for Medicine »
Award makes Duke a National Science Foundation center for data/statistical science A Duke University team led by professor of statistical science and mathematics Sayan Mukherjee has won a three-year, $1.5 million dollar grant that will develop the foundations of data science both at Duke and in the broader NC Research Triangle and surrounding region. As part of the award, 25 Duke faculty from the departments of computer science, electrical engineering, mathematics, and statistical science will collaborate to… read more about Duke Researchers Awarded $1.5M Tripods Grant »
The work of James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics Jonathan Mattingly appeared in numerous media outlets this fall — including this News & Observer article — following the N.C. Supreme Court's decision that political maps for the state were unconstitutional and must be redrawn. Mattingly, who testified as an expert witness in the case, leads a nonpartisan research group "Quantifying Gerrymandering" that grew out of a project initiated by a Duke mathematics undergrad. read more about Mathematician's research influences NC ruling »
Researcher Shan Shan discussed how math informs the beauty of the world. She's exploring lemur evolution through the topography of their teeth and using the Duke Compute Cluster to do the heavy lifting. Minute Marvels are really short videos depicting scholarship that Duke researchers have conducted with Duke Research Computing resources. Check out more at Duke Research Computing Minute Marvels. read more about Beautiful Math with Shan Shan »
The Flatiron Institute, an internal research division of the Simons Foundation, is a community of scientists whose mission is to advance scientific research through modern computational methods including data analysis, theory, modeling and simulation. Ingrid Daubechies played an instrumental role in the conception of the institute in 2012, when she proposed the notion of a center devoted to data analysis. Since then the Flatiron Institute has grown to over 150 scientists working across computational… read more about The Simons Foundation Flatiron Institute Names Auditorium after Ingrid Daubechies »
Duke Mathematics professor Ingrid Daubechies was one of nine to be awarded an honorary degree from Harvard University. One of the world’s leading mathematicians, a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, a MacArthur Fellow, and past president of the International Mathematical Union, Ingrid Daubechies is the James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University. Daubechies was born and educated in Belgium and moved to the U.S. in 1987. She came to Duke in 2011 after stints… read more about Ingrid Daubechies is awarded an honorary degree by Harvard University »
Blue Devil of the Week: Helping People Unlock Math's Mysteries Name: Matthew JungeTitle: Research Assistant Professor, Duke Department of MathematicsYears at Duke: 3 What he does at Duke: Late in his undergraduate studies at the University of Washington, Matthew Junge thought he was destined for a career as an actuary, using established elements of math to determine the likelihood of real world occurrences. But… read more about Blue Devil of the Week: Matt Junge »
Duke Math Faculty Ingrid Daubechies was interviewed by Forbes Magazine, resulting in the article "8 Tips For Generating Creative Ideas From The Mind Of A 'Genius' Woman Scientist." read more about Ingrid Daubechies in Forbes magazine »
Assistant Professor of the Practice of Mathematics Tori Akin has been named one of the most innovative professors of 2019 by the education and training services company Arist for her approach to math education. Akin was one of six faculty selected from among nearly 100 nominees from universities including Harvard, Stanford and Brown. “Math isn’t an innate ability, becoming good takes struggling through complications and working hard,” Akin said. Rather than teaching math in a traditional ‘lecture’ format, she… read more about Tori Akin: Innovative Professor and all around GEM »
The team of Duke University students Vinit Ranjan, Junmo Ryang and Albert Xue was designated Outstanding in the 2019 Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling (ICM) for their submission Time to Leave the Louvre: A Computational Network Analysis. For the past four decades, thousands of teams of three undergraduates from around the world have been invited to choose one of a few open-ended problems to write up and submit their solution within 96 hours. This year 11,262 teams representing institutions… read more about Duke students earn Outstanding in the ICM »
Incoming faculty member Joseph Rabinoff, along with his colleagues Omid Amini, Matt Baker and Erwan Brugallé, were awarded "Best Article" by Research in the Mathematical Sciences (RiMS) for their paper, "Lifting harmonic morphisms I: metrized complexes and Berkovich skeletal." RIMS is celebrating their fifth anniversary and are presenting awards in recognition of the outstanding research published in the journal. read more about New Math faculty wins Best Article award »
Demonstrating the real-world impact of interdisciplinary research, a team of two machine learning experts and two neurologists used interpretable models to predict seizures in ICU patients. Duke University's Cynthia Rudin, Berk Ustun of Harvard's John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Aaron Struck from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, and Massachusetts General Hospital's Brandon Westover won first prize in the 2019 INFORMS Innovative Applications in Analytics Award… read more about Cynthia Rudin and colleagues from Wisconsin, Harvard and Mass General take first prize at IAAA »
Mathematics Department chair Jonathan Mattingly has been awarded the James B. Duke distinguished professorship. Distinguished professorships recognize both exceptional achievement and the potential for future accomplishments. They are awarded to our most distinguished faculty who are inspiring teachers, motivated mentors, and leading scholars and researchers. Professor Mattingly joins these other Math faculty members who have also received distinguished professorships from the Trinity College of… read more about Mattingly receives Distinguished Professorship »
The Math department congratulates its faculty members Tori Akin, Rann Bar-on, Sarah Schott, Hugh Bray and Tom Witelski. They have been recognized by Academic Affairs for their contribution to teaching excellence at Duke. These faculty are in the top 5% in the category of Overall Quality of Instructor. Percentiles are based on class size and division and require at least five students to submit evaluations, so faculty are compared to their peers based on the courses they are teaching each semester.… read more about Math Faculty in Top 5% of Undergraduate Instructors in Natural Sciences »
Duke Math Department's Matt Junge and graduate alumni Ma Luo are included in the AMS' Next Generation of Mathematics. These Early-Career AMS (American Mathematical Society) members share something about themselves: What do you miss most about graduate school? Matt Junge: The camaraderie and commiseration What is your favorite mathematics book? Ma Luo: A Scrapbook of Complex Curve Theory read more about AMS: The Next Generation of Mathematics »