News updates from the Department of Mathematics for the year 2014.

• UAB has now a student chapter in the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Thanks to Ph.D. student Alzaki Fadlallah and Dr. Carmeliza Navasca for their efforts in this respect.
• Prof. A. Blokh won an NSF grant supporting the Dynamical Systems and Ergodic Theory Conference Dedicated to the Memory of Nikolai Chernov, to be held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham on May 18 - May 20, 2015.
• Logan Hoehn (Nipissing University) and Lex Oversteegen (UAB) have announced a solution to a classic problem dating back to 1920: What are all homogeneous plane continua? 
• Dr. Nikolai Chernov was named (posthumously) a Fellow of the AMS for the 2015 class.
• Graduate student Rachel Ejem won the 2014-2015 Kauffman award for excellence in first year graduate studies.
• Jordan Walton received the 2014-2015 O'Neil Scholarship.
• Garrett Higginbotham is the recipient of the 2014-2015 Warner Scholarship.
• Lara Putnam and Elizabeth Liddle were awarded 2014-2015 Travis Wood Memorial Scholarships.
• Alexandra Fry, Tori Gandy, Jarrod Hicks, and Calla McCulley received College of Arts and Sciences Scholarships.
• Andrew Arnold, Fatoumata Sanogo, William Tidwell, and Samuel Wunderly received Department of Mathematics Scholarships.
• Our Colleague Dr. Nikolai (Kolya) Chernov passed away on Thursday, August 7, 2014.
• The Greater Birmingham Mathematics Partnership, under the direction of Dr. John Mayer, was awarded funding for a third year by the Alabama Department of Education.
• Dr. Roman Shterenberg won support for his project Spectral Properties of Almost Periodic Operators from the Simons Foundation.
• Dr. Paul Jung won an NSA grant for his project Fractional Stable Fields.
• On July 11 Terrence Muthoka successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis American Options and Semilinear Parabolic Partial Differential Equations in Weighted Sobolev Spaces. His studies were directed by Dr. M. Nkashama.
• The article Singularities and non-hyperbolic manifolds do not coincide by Dr. Nandor Simanyi was selected for inclusion in the 2013 Highlights Collection by the journal Nonlinearity.
• The article Solving Multilinear Systems via Tensor Inversion by Dr. Carmeliza Navasca et al. is among the 20 most read articles for the SIAM Journal on Matrix Analysis and Applications.
• The Southeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America awarded their Distinguished Service Award for 2014 to Dr. John Mayer for his many contributions to the MAA, to mathematics, and to mathematics education at all levels. The honor is well deserved.
• Fast-track student Jarrod Hicks scored among the top 15% of participants on the 2013 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, considered to be one of the most prestigious mathematics examination in the world. UAB's Putnam team is coached by Profs. Jung and Simanyi. The competition is held once a year in December.
• Mitch Wyatt, John Samples, and Gaurav Verma were chosen as the department's Outstanding PhD Student, Outstanding Master's Student, and Outstanding Undergraduate Student, respectively.
• On April 8 an Interdisciplinary Innovation Forum on Mathematical Biology will take place in the UAB National Alumni Society House from 1pm to 3pm.
• Fast-track student Alexandra Fry has been selected to participate at the highly competitive 2014 Program for Women and Mathematics on Random Matrix Theory held at the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ.
• Graduate student Nichole Pompey won first place at the Emerging Researchers National Conference in Washington, DC, for her presentation on "A Randomized Algorithm for Tensor Decomposition".
• Ph.D. student Kyle Besing won a first place at the 2014 Graduate Student Research Days.
• On February 27 Ajay Mahato successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis The Inverse Volatility Problem for American Options. His studies were directed by Dr. I. Knowles.
• Dr. John Mayer was appointed co-director of the UABTeach initiative which was recently awarded a $1.45 million dollar grant from the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). The UABTeach initiative will revolutionize the preparation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers at UAB and will dramatically impact the science education of Alabama's future K-12 students. For further information see the UABTeach site.
  
• Profs. Starr, Stolz, and Jung won an NSF grant supporting the CBMS Conference: Quantum Spin Systems which will take place in June 2014.