This page contains older news about our current and retired faculty, and older news about our graduates.
Prof. Omar Saldarriaga, who earned his Ph.D. in 2004 under the direction of Alex Feingold, has been an Assistant Professor at William Patterson University in Wayne, NJ. He wrote a paper based on his thesis which was recently accepted for publication in the Journal of Algebra. Omar and his wife, Diana, have one son, Sebastian. He has recently moved back to Colombia, South America.
Michael Weiner earned his Ph.D. in 1994 under the direction of Alex Feingold. He is currently a tenured associate professor at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University. Mike and his wife, Roberta, have one son, Joshua. In March, 2004, Mike received the George W. Atherton Award for Excellence in Teaching. The Atherton Award is a university-wide teaching award that is universally recognized as the highest honor available for excellence in teaching at Penn State University. Mike Weiner joined award winner Doug Brown as the second member of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Penn State Altoona to win this prestigious teaching award.
Also tenured associate professors at the Altoona campus of Pennsylvania State University, are Victor Brunsden (Ph.D. 1995 under the direction of Thomas Farrell)) and Karl Lorensen ( Ph.D. 1997 under the direction of Peter Hilton).
Xiaodong (Sheldon) Wang earned his Ph.D. in 1997 under the direction of Shelemyahu Zacks. He is currently working as a statistician for Ortho-Clinical Diagnostics, Clinical Affairs Department, Raritan, NJ/. He and his wife, Huiling Li, have two children, Emily and Kevin.
Hanxiang Peng (Ph.D. 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) has received tenure and promotion to Associate Professor at the University of Mississippi to be effective this fall. He will be visiting Prof. Schick for two weeks this summer to work on some ongoing projects.
Jeff Forrester (Ph.D. 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) spent several years at Vanderbilt University as a research assistant. Last year he joined the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Dickinson College in Carlisle, PA, as a visiting faculty member. Starting this fall he will continue his employment there in a tenure-track position. Dickinson College is a small liberal arts school located in south central Pennsylvania (about 2½ hours from Binghamton) with a full time faculty of 6 mathematics and 4 computer science professors.
Natasha Jonoska (PhD 1993 under the direction of Tom Head) has the title Professor of Mathematics at the University of South Florida. The international community for research in DNA-Computing initiated in 2000 an annual award, the Yellow Tulip Award, for contributions to DNA computing. Natasha was presented with this award for the year 2007. In addition to writing numerous papers in dynamical systems, formal language theory, and wet lab technology of DNA, she has co-edited two distinguished volumes: Nanotechnology: Science and Computation, Springer-Verlag (2006) and Aspects of Molecular Computing, Springer LNCS (2004). She was also an organizer for Knotting Mathematics and Art: A Conference in Low Dimensional Topology and Mathematical Art, University of South Florida, Tampa, Nov. 1-4, 2007. Natasha will present a talk on ``RNA-Guided DNA Rearrangements and Virtual Knots" at a conference on Algorithmic Bioprocesses, Dec. 3-7, 2007, in the Lorentz Center, Leiden University. Her former advisor, Tom Head, will also give a talk on ``Aqueous Computing: Out of the Water and into the Light".
John Harrison (PhD 1993 under the direction of Tom Head) has the title Associate Professor of Mathematics & Computer Science at Wilkes University. John served as Associate Dean of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Professional Studies from 2000-2004. He continues to contribute to the undergraduate and graduate programs in Mathematics, Computer Science, and Computer Information Sciences. He continues his research activities and has has published several papers in formal language theory.
Arthur Weinberger (PhD 1998 under the direction of Tom Head) now has an advanced position at Google in California. PhD thesis, Reducing Fuzzy Algebra to Classical Algebra, was published in its entirety as the first research paper in the inaugural issue of the new journal: New Mathematics and Natural Computing, Vol.1 No.1 (2005). Since completing his PhD he has worked in aspects of industrial, computational, and statistical mathematics.
6-16-2008: Elizabeth (Laun) Goode (PhD 1999 under the co-direction of Tom Head and Dennis Pixton) is a tenured Associate Professor of Mathematics at Towson University. She continues to contribute to the undergraduate and graduate programs in Mathematics. She continues to be active in research in formal languages & DNA and has initiated students into publications via joint activities.
Dan Clouse (PhD 2002 under the direction of Fernando Guzman) has been working for the Department of Defense at Ft. Meade, MD. He is married to Rebecca Clouse, who is a PhD candidate at the Johns Hopkins School of Public Health. They live in Annapolis, MD. Dan sometimes visits Prof. Guzman to pursue some research topics.
Jichang Du (PhD, Fall 2007 under the direction of Anton Schick) has taken a position as Senior Biostatistician with the pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline in the Philadelphia area.
Hanxiang Peng (PhD 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) has been awarded an NSF Grant for his proposal entitled "Theil-Sen Estimators in Semiparametric Mixed Models".
William J. Hopper (PhD 2001 under the direction of Anton Schick) is working as a Statistician in the Research and Development Department of Church & Dwight Co., Inc. in Princeton, New Jersey.
Xueqin Wang (PhD 2003 under the direction of Qiqing Yu) is a full professor in the school of mathematics and computational science, Sun Yat-Sen University, P. R. China. He holds a joint position as a full professor of Bioinformatics in the Zhongshan School of Medicine, Sun Yat-Sen University. He is also the principal investigator of the Lab of Statistical Genetics. Before joining the faculty of Sun Yat-Sen University, he was a postdoctoral fellow in the Collaborative Center for Statistics in Science, Yale University School of Medicine. Thanks to Prof. Hanxiang Peng (Email: mmpeng@olemiss.edu) for sending us this news.
Jennifer (Every) Sassano, Mathematics Coordinator, Dominican College, 470 Western Highway, Orangeburg, NY 10962, (Email: Jennifer.sassano@dc.edu), was a graduate student in our department in 1989-91. She left to relocate and ended up finishing her doctorate at Teachers College, Columbia University. She has been a full-time faculty member at Dominican College in Rockland County, NY, for the past 16 years and she is now the Coordinator Of Mathematics.
Bronlyn Wassink defended her Ph.D. thesis, written under the direction of Matt Brin, on April 11, 2008. Next year she will have a tenure-track position as an assistant professor at Utica College in Utica, NY.
Silvia Millan-Vossler, who came to Binghamton in Fall 2001 with a BA in 1994 from University Puebla, Mexico, defended her Ph.D. thesis in Spring 2008, written under the direction of Thomas Farrell. Her dissertation was entitled ``The Whitehead Group and the Lower Algebraic K-Theory of Braid Groups on S2 and RP2.
6-16-2008: Aaron Pixton is not really an alumnus, although he took a number of graduate math courses at Binghamton when he was in high school. Aaron just completed his undergraduate math degree at Princeton, with highest honors. While at Princeton he was a Putnam Fellow three times; he also wrote five research papers (one published, two accepted, two submitted). Aaron has been awarded a Churchill Scholarship to spend one year of graduate study at Cambridge. After that he will enter the graduate program at Princeton.
August 6: 2008: During the summer of 2008, a number of graduate students completed and defended their Ph.D. theses. Congratulations to these students and their advisers:
12-8-2008: Elizabeth A. Lamprecht, PhD, Professor and Chair, Adrian College Mathematics Department, Adrian, Michigan, completed her PhD in December 1994 under the direction of Shelemyahu Zacks. She is presently a Professor and Chair of the Mathematics Department at Adrian College in southeastern Michigan. Adrian is a liberal arts college of about 1400 students. In fall 2007, she oversaw the renovation and dedication of the Cynthia T. Bosio Mathematics Lab. This lab is named in honor of her colleague who lost her battle with cancer in January 2007. She is presently studying the life and contributions of George Polya and will give a presentation on this topic in the Adrian College Faculty Lecture Series in February 2009. She can be reached at elamprecht@adrian.edu.
1-27-2009: On January 6, 2009, Aaron Pixton Received the 2009 AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize for outstanding research in Mathematics by an undergraduate student. The Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student recognizes and encourages outstanding mathematical research by undergraduate students. It was endowed by Mrs. Frank Morgan of Allentown, Pennsylvania. The citation for the award is as follows.
Aaron Pixton is the winner of the 2009 Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research by an Undergraduate Student. The award is based on five impressive papers in addition to his Princeton senior thesis. One of Pixton's papers has already appeared in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, two others have been accepted by Forum Mathematicum and the International Journal of Number Theory, and two others have been submitted. In addition to being creative, Pixton's work spans a remarkable range of topics, including combinatorial number theory, modular forms, algebraic topology, and Gromov-Witten invariants. Pixton participated in Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs at Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Minnesota Duluth, and wrote interesting papers at all three. One of his mentors described his ``ability to digest current research papers, to formulate interesting questions ..., and within a week's time, to start solving [them]" as ``simply astonishing" and considers his work as ``probably stronger than many Ph.D. dissertations." Another mentor describes the ``depth and breadth" of his papers as ``amazing."
Biographical Note: Aaron Pixton was born in Binghamton, New York, and has lived in nearby Vestal, New York, all his life. He was interested in mathematics from an early age, when he enjoyed reading recreational math books. His formal study of mathematics began when he took various math classes from Binghamton University during high school. Pixton spent the past four years studying mathematics at Princeton University, from which he graduated in June 2008. During this time period, Pixton took advantage of opportunities to work on original research both at Princeton during the school year and at REUs during the summers. Pixton is currently at the University of Cambridge doing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos. Next fall, he will be returning to Princeton to enter the Ph.D. program there, where he plans to study some combination of number theory and algebraic geometry. Pixton's nonmathematical diversions include playing chess, reading fantasy books, and watching his seven cats.
Darryl Daugherty got a teaching position at Lycoming College in Williamsport, PA.
Elizabeth Wilcox got a visiting position at Colgate University after graduating from our department.
Jamil Ferreira, who was in our graduate program for four years, and worked with Alex Feingold, sends some news about his current situation in Brazil. His work is at the Department of Mathematics of the Universidade Federal de Ouro Preto (Federal Univ. of Ouro Preto). There are several nice pictures of Ouro Preto in the internet. This town has been named as a cultural patrimonial of the humanity by UNESCO.
He has written (in Portugese) and published a book on the rigorous construction of various number systems. You could see some more information at Jamil's Book Information and then click on "A Construcão dos Números". The publisher is the Brazilian Math Society (Sociedade Brasileira de Matemática - SBM).
He is studying function fields and some applications to cryptography, but his main activity is still teaching algebra and analysis for math undergraduate students in the math major.
His children: Iara (9) and Maíra (almost 7). They dance ballet, study music and practice swimming, besides regular school and lots of playing.
Collin Bleak, a student of Matt Brin, has taken a position as Lecturer at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
Xiao Xiao, a student of Adrian Vasiu, graduated in May, 2011, and has taken a position as Assistant Professor at Utica College starting in Fall 2011. Xiao Xiao and his wife had their first child, son Sean, born on April 16, 2011.
5-18-2012: James Laurence Short was born at 12:59 pm on May 15th, 2012. Candace and Matt Short are incredibly excited, of course, and wish to share his smiles with our friends and family in our home department. Pictures are available upon request.
6-16-2012: Viji Thomas got married on Feb. 4, 2012 in Baroda. It was a traditional Indian Christian wedding with about 850 guests. His wife's name is Brittany Serafini (now Brittany Zachariah, as his church name is Zachariah). They got married at a second ceremony in Dushore, PA, on April 21, 2012. His wife will join him in India in Oct, 2012. Viji has been a post-doc at the Tata Institute of Fundamental Research since September 2010. He will be there until September 2012. After that he will be going to the Kerala School of Mathematics, where his collaborator from Spain will join him for a year, and they will be working together on a problem. Even though The Kerala School is a new research institute, it is historical. It is historical because at this location, mathematicians had done work in Calculus about 2 centuries before it was done in Europe. So a lot of Calculus was done by this school in Kerala. This institute is supposed to be built at the same location where this historic school was located centuries ago. You can read about this historic school here : Keraia School of Astronomy and Mathematics
7-30-2012: Quincy Loney, a student of Alex Feingold, defended his dissertation on July 30, 2012. He has been teaching in the Mathematics Department at SUNY Cortland since Fall 2011.
Keith Jones (Binghamton PhD 2010, student of Ross Geoghegan), after two postdoctoral years at Trinity College CT, has been appointed Assistant Professor at SUNY Oneonta.
Nic Koban (Binghamton PhD 2004, student of Ross Geoghegan), recently received tenure and was promoted to Associate Professor at University of Maine, Farmington.
Dirk Schuetz (Binghamton PhD 2001, student of Ross Geoghegan), has been promoted to the rank of Reader at University of Durham, England.
Donco Dimovski, (Binghamton PhD 1983, student of Ross Geoghegan), professor at the University of Sts. Cyril and Methodius in Skopje, Macedonia, has been elected to the Macedonian Academy of Sciences.
7-15-2012: Prof. Natasha Jonoska (Ph.D. in Mathematics, B.U., 1993, supervised by Tom Head) held an NSF funded Workshop, "Discrete and Topological Models in Molecular Biology", at her home institution, March 12-14, 2012, U. South Florida, Tampa. Her co-hosts were Alessandra Carbone, U. Paris P. & M. Curie, and Reidun Twarock, U. of York, U.K. The same three scientists also held a special session with the same title at the 1079th AMS Meeting in Tampa, March 10-11, 2012.
Qiqing Yu taught two graduate courses this summer in China, one on "Survival Analysis" in Zhongshan University, and the other on "Data Analysis" in the South China Agriculture University.
Anton Schick gave an invited lecture "On Efficient Estimation in Time Series" at the Workshop on Frontiers of Statistics held at Princeton University, Princeton in May 18-20, 2006 in honor of Peter J. Bickel's 65th Birthday.
Thomas Zaslavsky gave several talks:
Shelemyahu Zacks participated in an international conference at Tel Aviv University, May 16 to May 20, 2006, in honor of his ex-student, Professor Uri Yechiali, who had retired. Prof. Zacks gave a paper on "Switching Capacities of an M/G/1 Queue."
Tom Head contributed the chapters on modern applications in the book "Automata Theory with Modern Applications - with contributions by Tom Head" by J.A. Anderson, (Cambridge U. Press, 2006).
Ross Geoghegan was a research guest at the University of Durham from July 13 through 28, 2006, during which he spoke on "Boundaries of Groups" at Durham and on "Associativity and Thompson's Group" at Edinburgh and Newcastle.
Christopher Hanusa was a visitor at the University of Bordeaux where he gave a seminar on "A Gessel-Viennot-Type Method for Cycle Systems in a Directed Graph".
Pedro Ontaneda was invited to give two talks titled "Harmonic maps, Ricci flow and negative curvature" and "Is the space of negatively curved metrics connected?" during the June, 2006, conference on Geometric Methods in Topology at the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore.
Tom Farrell travelled extensively this summer giving a talk each at the University of Meunster in June and the University of Edinburgh in July, and a series of 4 talks during July and August at the Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing.
A conference to celebrate the 60th birthday of Erik Pedersen, professor and chair in Mathematical Sciences, was held in June, 2006, at the University of Meunster. Pedersen then gave a talk "On the Hauptvermutung" at a conference celebrating the 70th birthday of another mathematician, C. T. C. Wall, in July, 2006, at the University of Edinburgh.
Ross Geoghegan attended the 2nd William Rowan Hamilton Geometry and Topology Workshop on "Surface Groups in Low Dimensional Topology and Geometric Group Theory" at the Hamilton Mathematics Institute, Trinity College Dublin, September 28-30, 2006, and then gave a seminar lecture on "Associativity and Richard Thompson's group" at University College Dublin, on October 2, 2006.
Miguel Arcones was elected a member of the International Statistical Institute, which includes more than 2,000 individual elected members who are internationally recognized as leaders in the field of statistics. He also has been named to the forthcoming 2007 edition of Who's Who in America.
Fernando Guzman spoke on "Thompson's groups and associativity of binary operations" at the XIII Congress of the Regional School of Mathematics held September 11-15, 2006 at the Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Pereira, Colombia.
A conference "Geometry, Topology, and their Interactions" was held in Morelia, Mexico, January 8th-13th, 2007, to honor the work of Tom Farrell and his collaborator Lowell Jones of SUNY-Stony Brook. Among the 25 speakers at the conference was Erik Pedersen.
Shelemyahu Zacks spoke at two honorary conferences in December of 2006. At a conference at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, December 18-20, in honor of Professor Ester Samuel-Cahn, Prof. Zacks spoke on "Distributions of Stopping Times for Compound Poisson Processes and Non-Linear Boundaries." At a conference at the University of Haifa, December 21, in honor of Professor Abram Kagan, Prof. Zacks spoke on "The Distribution of a stopping time for a sequential estimation of the log odds of Bernoulli trials, with fixed width confidence intervals."
Tom Head gave 12 hours of lectures during December 19-21, 2006, to a group of students from the European Union at The Fifth International Ph.D. School of Formal Languages and Applications, Roviri i Virgili University, Tarragona, Spain. He spoke on "Higher Natural Numbers and Thue-Morse Words."
Alex Feingold gave a talk entitled ``A New Perspective on the Frenkel-Zhu Fusion Rule Theorem" at Davidson College, NC, March 3-4, 2007, at a meeting of the American Mathematical Society, in the Special Session on Geometric and Combinatorial Methods in Representation Theory.
Luise-Charlotte Kappe retired in Sept. 2004, but held the position of Bartle Professor for one year. Tom Head and David Hanson retired this year. Prof. Head's last student, John Loftus, and Prof. Kappe's last student, Gabriela Mendoza, will defend their dissertations this summer.
We welcome a new faculty member, Xiangjin Xu, an analyst whose interests are in harmonic analysis on manifolds and nonlinear differential equations.
We also welcome two visiting professors, one who will be joining the faculty in the Fall, and one who will come in the Spring:
In January 2007, Erik Pedersen left our department to take up (perhaps temporarily) the position of chairman of the University of Copenhagen. Anton Schick has generously accepted the task of being our chairman.
Prof. Schick has also been traveling this summer, and was in Germany for five weeks, from May 29 to July 2. Two of these weeks (June 3 till June 16) were spent at the the Mathematical Research Institute at Oberwolfach where he took part in the Research in Pairs Program with his long-time collaborator Wolfgang Wefelmeyer from the University of Cologne. The other time was spent at the University of Ulm where he a gave a colloquium talk (June 26) entitled "Residual-based empirical distribution functions".
Thomas Zaslavsky was on sabbatical in Spring 2007, and used the opportunity for extensive travel. He was in:
Dikran Karagueuezian is taking a leave of absence from our
department
to work in the ``real world" as a financial consultant for an
investment firm in
California. Although the job pays better than being a professor, Dikran
says he is
not really cut out for the corporate world, and expects to eventually
return to us,
where he can continue to pursue his mathematical research and teaching.
Alex Feingold will visit the Albert Einstein Institute in Potsdam, Germany July 30 - August 10, 2007, at the invitation of collaborator Hermann Nicolai (Director, Max Planck Institute for Gravitational Physics). Afterwards, Feingold will briefly visit the Max Planck Mathematical Sciences Institute at Bonn, and then go to the first part of the XXXVIIth Paris Summer Institute on Black Holes, Black Rings and Modular Forms, at the Ecole Normale Superieure.
Ross Geoghegan sends the following information about his recent and planned mathematical activities.
Prof. Miguel Arcones gave an invited talk "Minimax estimators of the coverage probability of the impermissible error for a location family" to the 2007 Joint Statistical Meeting of the ASA/IMS at Salt Lake City, Utah, July 29-August 2, 2007. While there he also spoke with several of our graduate alumni.
Alex Feingold attended and presented a talk at the conference (organized by Natasha Jonoska and Masahico Saito) ``Knotting Mathematics and Art: A Conference in Low Dimensional Topology and Mathematical Art", November 1 - 4, 2007, at the University of South Florida, Tampa, FL. Prof. Feingold's talk was on ``Mathematics as Art: Links and Knots in space and on surfaces". One of his bronze sculptures ``Hypocycloid Trefoil" was part of the exhibition ``Rhythm of Structure: Beyond the Mathematics", curated by John Sims as part of the conference. Pictures of the pieces in the exhibition, and pictures taken at the conference can be seen by following the link: Knot Art Conference Pictures.
After returning from a very stimulating trip to Germany and Paris in August, Prof. Feingold completed the paper ``A New Perspective on the Frenkel-Zhu Fusion Rule Theorem" in collaboration with Prof. Stefan Fredenhagen (Albert Einstein Institute, Potsdam, Germany). This happy collaboration came about after Feingold gave a talk based on the incomplete manuscript, and Fredenhagen made a suggestion on how the proof could be completed. Two months and many emails later, a complete proof and manuscript were produced as joint work, and the paper is currently submitted for publication. Another collaborative research project was also started in Potsdam between Feingold, Hermann Nicolai and Axel Kleinschmidt.
Tom Head, Professor Emeritus of Mathematical Sciences, will attend the conference "Algorithmic Bioprocesses" held at the Lorentz Center at Leiden University, Dec. 3-9, 2007. This meeting will also celebrate the 65-th birthday of Professor Gzegorz Rozenberg, the founding director of the Leiden Center for Natural Computing and the founding editor of the journal, "Natural Computing". Head will present: 'Aqueous Computing: Out of the water and into the light' in which he resolves the aqueous technique of DNA-computing into a system which uses only light - no water, no DNA. He calls it 'PhotoComputing'. A proof of concept is given using a xerox machine as a parallel computer. The content of this talk will appear in the December issue of the journal "Parallel Processing Letters".
Tom Zaslavsky and Seyna Jo Bruskin were married on January 5, 2008 in Manhattan. A detailed announcement appears in the New York Times, and can be found through the following link: Zaslavsky-Bruskin Wedding.
Ross Geoghegan, Professor of Mathematics, spoke at the New York Group Theory Seminar on February 1. The title of his talk was "Modules over Groups of Isometries". This weekly seminar is held at the Graduate Center of CUNY.
Adrian Vasiu, who has been visiting Binghamton in Fall 2007, has accepted the position of Associate Professor with tenure in our department. We happily welcome our new colleague, and look forward to his friendship and strong contributions to our program for many years to come.
Miguel A. Arcones was invited to give a talk in the 32nd SIAM Southeastern-Atlantic Section Conference at Orlando, Florida, March 14-15, 2008. The title of the talk was "Minimax estimators of the coverage probability of the impermissible error for a location family".
Miguel A. Arcones will be elected Fellow for the (IMS) Institute of Mathematical Statistics next July. The IMS is an American professional organization for research probabilists/statisticians who work in academics, similar to the AMS. (There is an indepedent association for applied statisticians.) Fellowship in the IMS is granted to individuals who have demonstrated distinction in research in statistics or probability by publication of independent work of merit. The IMS publishes the top international journals in probability and statististics. The list of current fellows, which includes Prof. Shelemyahu Zacks, can be found through the following link: IMS Award List of Fellows.
July 29, 2008: MIGUEL A. ARCONES NAMED IMS FELLOW.
Miguel A. Arcones, Professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, SUNY Binghamton, has been named Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (IMS). An induction ceremony for all 2008 Fellows took place July 14, 2008 at the IMS Annual Meeting/World Congress in Singapore.
Professor Arcones received the award for contributions to probability and mathematical statistics including the bootstrap, U-statistics, M-estimators, Gaussian processes, limit theorems, empirical processes and large deviation theory; and for extensive editorial work.
Each Fellow nominee is assessed by a committee of his/her peers for the award. In 2008, after reviewing 47 nominations, 17 were selected for Fellowship. Created in 1933, the Institute of Mathematical Statistics is a member organization which fosters the development and dissemination of the theory and applications of statistics and probability. The IMS has 4500 active members throughout the world. Approximately 5% of the current IMS membership has earned the status of fellowship.
August 4, 2008: Anton Schick presented a number of invited lectures recently:
Alex Feingold presented an invited talk ``Hyperbolic Weyl Groups and the Four Normed Division Algebras" (a collaboration with Hermann Nicolai and Axel Kleinschmidt), at the International Conference on Vertex Operator Algebras and Related Areas, A conference to mark the occasion of Geoffrey Mason's 60th Birthday, July 7-11, 2008, Mathematics Department at Illinois State University. A manuscript of the complete paper has been submitted for publication and is available on the arXiv.
9-8-2008: Shelemyahu Zacks received the 2008 Abraham Wald Prize at the Joint Statistical Meetings, 2008, for the best paper published in the journal ``Sequential Analysis" in 2007. He shared the prize with his co-author, Prof. Nitis Mukhopadhyay of Connecticut University. The title and reference of the paper are: "Distributions of Sequential and Two-Stage Stopping Times for Fixed-Width Confidence Intervals in Bernoulli Trials: Application in Reliability", Sequential Analysis, Vol. 26, pages 425-441, 2007.
9-19-2008: Matt Brin of the Math Sciences department was one of the principal speakers at the conference "Thompson's Groups: New Developments and Interfaces" at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathematiques in Luminy, France, June 2-6, 2008, where he delivered a three lecture minicourse on "Cousins of Thompson's groups." Also speaking at the conference were Professor Ross Geoghegan of the Math Sciences department who gave two talks: "New invariants of Thompson's group F" and "The Whitehead group of T", and two former Ph.D. recipients of the department, Dan Farley, who spoke on "Actions of Brin's groups nV on CAT(0) cubical complexes" and Collin Bleak, who spoke on "Algorithmic processes in Thompson's groups".
10-8-2008: Thomas Zaslavsky has been traveling and giving talks at many places recently:
Thomas Zaslavsky has reported the following talks, papers, and activities:
Alex Feingold attended one day of the Eighth Interdisciplinary Conference of the International Society of the Arts, Mathematics, and Architecture University at Albany, NY, June 22-25, 2009. A highlight of the day was meeting sculptor Kenneth Snelson, inventor of tensegrity, who gave a talk on ``Forces Made Visible".
Prof. Miguel Arcones, after a long battle with cancer, passed away on Dec. 30, 2009. His courage and positive attitude, continuing to work and teach as much as possible, were an inspiration to all who knew him. A memorial service was held here, attended by his family and many friends.
Alex Feingold was on sabbatical during the entire academic year 2009-10. He gave talks at Rutgers University, Illinois State University, the College of Charleston (North Carolina), and attended a conference at Yale in honor of the 60th birthday of Gregg Zuckerman.
Laura Anderson has adopted son Melese Tilahun Lawrence Anderson, who arrived in the US on December 5, 2009. Laura says he is ``6 years old and cute as a button".
Amanda Ruiz had a baby girl, Eda Carolina Varela Ruiz on Sept. 2, 2010. She weighed 8 lb 5 oz. Amanda says of the experience, ``Made me work really really hard for 24 hours, but she is precious and healthy and worth the wait".
Marco Varisco, a visiting professor here for several years, has left our department and now has a position in the Math department at SUNY Albany.
Onur Koksoy, a visiting professor here for several years, has returned to his native country, Turkey. He wishes us all well and hopes for a return visit someday. He also offers his hospitality if we come to visit him in Turkey.
Tom Head, Emeritus Professor of Mathematical Sciences, presented the paper "Using light to implement parallel Boolean algebra", at the 14th international conference 'Developments in Language Theory 2010' held at the University of Western Ontario, London, Ontario, Aug. 17-20, 2010. The paper appears in the Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science vol. 6224, 2010.
Ross Geoghegan, Bartle Professor of Mathematics, gave a one-hour talk at Approaches to Group Theory: a conference in honor of Ken Brown, Cornell University, October 2010.
In the summer of 2010, Xingye Qiao gave several talks about 'Pairwise variable selection' at three conferences: (1) The 2010 Joint Statistical Meetings, Vancouver, BC, Canada, August 2, 2010, (2) The 2010 International Chinese Statistical Association (ICSA) Applied Statistics Symposium, Indianapolis, IN, June 23, 2010, (3) Conference on Nonparametric Statistics and Statistical Learning, Columbus, OH, May 20, 2010.
Xingye Qiao officially joined the Department of Mathematical Sciences at Binghamton University on September 1, 2010.
Thomas Zaslavsky reports the following talks:
Thomas Zaslavsky reports the following visits:
Xingye Qiao visited the School of Mathematical Sciences at Fudan University (Shanghai, China) and gave a talk on 'Several Aspects of High-dimensional Learning' on January 4, 2011.
Xingye Qiao was invited to attend the 2011 ICSA Applied Statistics Symposium, New York, NY, June 26-29, 2011 and give a talk on his recent research developments.
Xingye Qiao has joined the 2011 Binghamton University - Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI) Interdisciplinary Research for Undergraduate Majors in Science and Engineering Program, in which he will advise two undergraduate students, one of whom is math major, the other of whom is biology major, in an interdisciplinary research project. Nan Bi, a graduate student from math department, will assist him in this program. The project officially starts in the summer of 2011, and is a year-long program.
Xingye Qiao has organized a Topic-Contributed session in the 2011 Joint Statistical Meetings in Miami Beach, Florida, titled 'High Dimensional Data Analysis and Covariance Estimations'.
Alex Feingold has been invited to give a talk at the Special Session on Lie Theory at the Canadian Mathematical Society Summer meeting in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, June 3-4, 2011.
Tom Head, Prof. Math. Sci. (Emeritus) was one of six invited lecturers to contribute to the ``1st International Work-Conference on Linguistics, Biology and Computer Science: Interplays". The conference was held March 11-14, 2011 in Tarragona, Spain. Head's lectures were entitled: ``How the Structure of DNA molecules provides tools for computation".
Ross Geoghegan, Bartle Professor of Mathematics, gave a one-hour colloquium talk at Cornell University, March 2011.
For newer faculty news from Fall 2011 through the present, follow the following
link to current graduate and faculty news.