3-Minute Thesis Competition (March 3, 2023)
Jonathan Rubin, PhD, Chair
When our colloquium time rolled around, Thackeray 704 was full of nervous excitement. The buzz in this case wasn’t about an esteemed visitor; rather, it was time for the first Pitt Department of Mathematics 3-Minute Thesis (3MT) Competition! The idea of the 3MT contest was to provide graduate students with an opportunity to distill the essence of their thesis work into a concise presentation that a general educated audience could understand, as practice for future job interviews and research talks. Each presentation was required to last no more than three minutes and to include only one slide.
This March, six of our senior PhD students participated. Their names and talk titles are as follows:
Hasitha Ekanayake, “Identifying the smaller cusped hyperbolic 3-manifold with compact totally geodesic boundary”
Shaoyu Huang, “Combinatorial Algebraic Geometry”
Tian Jing, “Two-phase Magnetohydrodynamic equations”
Sushmita John, “Dynamical systems analysis of patterning and robustness of bursts in neuronal models”
Farjana Siddiqua, “Spurious numerical dissipation and time accuracy”
Shuxian Xu, “The finite element method with penalty”
It was a real treat to get this rapid glimpse into some of the diverse research directions represented among our graduate students and to see the students’ expertise on display. The three winners selected by a faculty jury -- Mr. Huang, Mr. Jing, and Ms. John – received bookstore gift certificates and the opportunity to advance to the Dietrich School competition!
Graduate Program Open House (March 24, 2023)
Michael Neilan, PhD & Jay Drummond
Earlier this spring, the Graduate Program Open House provided a unique opportunity for fourteen prospective students to gain insights into Pitt Math's PhD program and to experience life on campus firsthand. Throughout the day, attendees engaged with faculty and current students, attended graduate courses, and enjoyed a guided tour of the campus, allowing them to fully immerse themselves in the Pitt Math community. Overall, the event was an excellent platform for encouraging connections between prospective students and the University of Pittsburgh, and we look forward to welcoming many of these students to our program in the Fall 2023 semester.
Integration Bee (March 24, 2023)
Linhong Wang, PhD, and Math Club members Bella, Diego, Noah and Stephen
The Integration Bee took place in Alumni Hall 343, organized by the Math Club and Professor Linhong Wang, and hosted by Stephen Arndt.
We were very excited to have 70+ Pitt undergraduates who competed. In the pre-qualifying round, they were given the integral:
There were 17 people who made it to the next rounds, the show-case rounds. After that, four finalists were selected to head in the tournament for the head-to-head competition.
The finalists (pictured above) in order, are, Eli Ullman-Kissel, who took the 2023 Champion T-shirt, Josh Ascher, Maximilian Warias, and James Keller . Each shared $250 in bookstore certificates, generously donated by the Frederick Honors College, as a reward for their integration performance. Congratulations to the four winners, and to all of the competitors, who showed impressive integration talent!
Thank you to everyone who participated in this event in any way! It was great to have such enthusiastic 150+ contestants and audience members. Some of them walked away with top-notch door prizes.
This event was made possible by:
- The big help of faculty members Angela Athanas, Thomas Everest, Jeremiah Morgan, Roxana Popescu, and Evgeni Trofimov
- The volunteer efforts of graduate students Edison Hauptman, Eugene Eyeson, Chanuka Dissanayake, Anna Thomas, Delanna Do, Chris Brown, and Anuradha Ekanayake
- The equipment and logistic help of staff members Richard Misura, William Tarleton, Lou Lane, Dylan Knapp-Scott, Jason Irwin, Carol Cawley, Suzanne Lynch, Diane Bova, Lauren DelSignore, and Terry Jarbe
- The recruiting efforts of many TAs and faculty members
Finally, as always, thanks to the Federick Honors College and Math Department for funding this competition!
MathFest (April 14, 2023)
Jason DeBlois, PhD
Many thanks to all who attended MathFest. We enjoyed the snacks, the submitted posters – which were excellent and interesting – and stimulating conversation with poster presenters and each other. Our faculty judging panel ranked the top three posters as follows:
The Reinhardt Conjecture as an Optimal Control Problem, submitted by Neil Maclachlan, Sasha Sluis-Cremer, and Lark Song, mentored by Tom Hales.
Population Dynamics with Migration between Environments, submitted by Mia DeCataldo, mentored by Jonathan Rubin.
A likelihood-free approach to Estimate Parameter Posterior Distribution Using Sequential Neural Networks, submitted by Bosi Hou, mentored by Jon Rubin.
Special thanks to all of you who took your time to create and submit a poster, and to the faculty mentors of our undergraduate researchers. Every poster exhibited substantial mathematical content, drew interesting conclusions, and clearly reflected sustained effort from its creator on the project that it described.
Special thanks also to our faculty judges Ming Chen, Tom Hales (who recused from ranking the poster he mentored), Juan Manfredi, and Eugene Trofimov. They each took time to visit each submitted poster and discuss it in detail with the poster presenter.
I hope to see you all next year!
Science Revealed Public Lecture Series (April 19, 2023)
Professor Jonathan Rubin, PhD, chair of the Department of Mathematics, has continued his work along with Professor Satish Iyengar, a colleague from the Department of Statistics, to organize the “Science Revealed” Public Lecture Series. The idea of the series is to allow Pitt experts to communicate with the interested public about what science can – and cannot – currently tell us about topics of recent interest.
This semester, two Science Revealed events were held: the panel "Reaping What We Spill, Leak and Spew" on environmental contamination in the region and its impacts on human health, and the panel "ChatGPT Wrote this Title: Exploring the Impact of AI on Our Minds and Society".
The latter event was particularly well attended and presented fascinating, interdisciplinary perspectives on how we have arrived at our current state of AI infiltration into education, business, and culture; on what is “under the hood” of large language models such as ChatGPT; and on what challenges and opportunities lie ahead in this rapidly evolving domain.
A recording of this panel discussion as well as many of the earlier Science Revealed panels can be found at the official Science Revealed website.