News updates from the Department of Mathematics for the year 2013.

• Our former colleague Eugene R. (Gene) Wilson passed away on August 21. Gene was an alumnus of UAB (BS 1977 and MA 1979) and later, from 1983 to his retirement in 2003, the Director of the Mathematics Resource Center (a precursor of today's MLL).
• Math major Kiersten Engel  ranked among the top 200 international scorers on the Bloomberg Aptitude Test.
• Former Fast-track student Ethan Mallick Hossain (MS May 2013) was selected for an internship at the White House.
• Prof. P. Jung won a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation.
• On July 15 Mitch Wyatt successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Uniqueness of the Potential in Schrodinger's Equation with One Boundary Measurement. His studies were directed by Dr. I. Knowles.
• On July 12 Ross Ptacek successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Laminations and the dynamics of iterated cubic polynomials. His studies were directed by Drs. A. Blokh and L. Oversteegen.
• Alexandra Fry received the CAS God of the Speed of Light Scholarship.
• Samuel Wunderly is the recipient of the 2013-2014 Warner Scholarship.
• Lara Putnam was awarded the 2013-2014 Travis Wood Memorial Scholarship.
• Jordan Walton received the 2013-2014 O'Neil Scholarship.
• Tori Gandy, Miriam Hood, and Micaela Kuhn each received a Mathematics Department Scholarship for 2013-2014.
• Prof. Nandor Simanyi proved a 50-year-old conjecture of Ya. G. Sinai, the "Boltzmann-Sinai Ergodic Hypothesis," which states that any classically interacting hard sphere system in a box with periodic boundary conditions is ergodic (chaotic). This result is an important building block in the theoretical foundations of statistical physics.
• Prof. Nikolai Chernov was invited to give a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to be held in August 2014 in Seoul, Korea. An invitation to the ICM is a very significant honor.
• The following mathematics students will present at this year's Expo on Friday, April 26 at the Campus Recreation Center:
  • Gaurav Verma (oral presentation at 9:30am)
  • Posters by Jennifer Baggett, Rachel Ejem, Alexandra Fry, Mallick Hossain, and Alicia McCormack
• Prof. Chernov won an individual research grants from NSF.
• PhD student Matthew Bledsoe and Fast-track student Ethan Mallick Hossain received a College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award as Outstanding Graduate Student and Outstanding Undergraduate Student, respectively. They will be recognized at the Honors Convocation on Tuesday, May 7 at 3:00 p.m..
• On May 1 Alexei Korepanov successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Small Perturbations in Hard Balls Dynamics. His studies were directed by Drs. N. Chernov and N. Simanyi.
• On April 18 Jacob Chapman successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Spectral properties of random block operators. His studies were directed by Dr. G. Stolz.
• Former math student John Knox (BS 1988), now an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia, won Georgia's Richard B. Russell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the university's highest early career teaching honor.
• Our colleague Dr. James (Jim) Ward passed away on Monday, March 25, 2013. His wife Ana has created the Dr. James Robert Ward, Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund in recognition of Jim's passion for mathematics and the education of mathematics students.
• On March 7 Matthew Bledsoe successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Resonances and Inverse Scattering. His studies were directed by Dr. R. Weikard.
• Matthew Bledsoe, Joseph Olson, and Mallick Hossain were chosen as the department's Outstanding PhD Student, Outstanding Master's Student, and Outstanding Undergraduate Student, respectively.