August 2017, No 17

Chair’sCorner

ElizabethHousworth

First things first: We have a greatfaculty. This past academic year, Mi-hai Ciucu and Dylan Thurston be-came the fourteenth and fifteenthfaculty members elected as Fellowsof the American Mathematical Soci-ety. Kevin Zumbrun, already a Fel-low of the AMS, was elected Fellowof the Society for Industrial and Ap-plied Mathematics. Ciprian Demeterwas invited to speak at the 2018 In-ternational Congress of Mathemati-cians. A conference honoring the60th birthday of Russ Lyons willtake place at Tel Aviv University inSeptember, and in January of 2018,a workshop at UCLA will exploremethods developed by David Fisherwho, collaborating with two post-docs at U. Chicago, made dramaticprogress on the Zimmer conjecturethis past year (more on both con-ferences under Department News be-low).

Early last April, we hosted aSectional Meeting of the Ameri-

can Mathematical Society. It was agreat success, with over 500 atten-dees. I was honored to introducethe 2017 Einstein Public Lecturespeaker, Richard Evan Schwartz,Chancellor’s Professor of Mathemat-ics at Brown University. I got to holdup my very well-used copy of his chil-dren’s book You Can Count on Mon-sters.

The department also continuedits outreach with the arts by co-hosting the film The Man Who KnewInfinity. Special thanks go to DavidFisher for organizing this and toMichael Larsen, guest speaker ElonLindenstrauss, and Susan Seizerfrom Anthropology who, along withDavid, formed a discussion panel af-ter the film. More on this delightfulevent under Departmental News be-low.

I have served for many yearson the Budgetary Affairs Committeefor the Bloomington Faculty Coun-cil. This past year, I was fortunateto also serve on the Campus andUniversity committees that reviewedthe Responsibility Centered Manage-ment budget model. Standard uni-versity budget models have all rev-enues flowing to the center. Schoolswithin the university then requestincrements to their budgets fromthat center. Roughly speaking, RCM

gives back to each school the revenuethey generate directly. Money to sup-port shared services and the centraladministration is viewed as taxes orassessments on that income. IndianaUniversity was an early adopter ofRCM, and the model has been re-viewed and tweaked roughly everyfive years since its adoption to ad-dress the institution’s ever-changingneeds. I am particularly proud of ourreport and look forward to its publicrelease this Fall.

For the past year, I have alsoserved on the College’s Panel ofChairs which morphed into theStrategic Planning Oversight Com-mittee. This committee took the re-ports and ideas generated by eightsubcommittees and drafted a strate-gic plan for the College of Arts andSciences. The plan was circulated indraft form to all the faculty and re-sponses were incorporated into the fi-nal version. The resulting Plan willalso be made public in the Fall. Onenice feature is its recognition of thebasic research done in all areas in theCollege. It may be unlikely that amath theorem will cure cancer in thenext 5 years, but mathematics oftenturns out to be fundamental to newdiscoveries and to new technology insurprising ways. It is nice for that tobe recognized.

Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni NewsletterPage 1

The Strategic Plan will guide theCollege as it navigates past severalyears of fiscal contraction. The fi-nancial situation does appear to beimproving: the College will do somenormal hiring this year, and we arevery happy to be one of the depart-ments with an open search this com-ing year.

As for me, I am leaving the Bud-getary Affairs Committee and thePanel of Chairs. At the Universitylevel, I am turning my attention torules! I have been elected Parliamen-tarian of the Bloomington FacultyCouncil and will be brushing up onfaculty governance documents andRoberts Rules of Order. And I willcontinue as Chair of the Math De-partment. Along with Dean Singell,the Department agreed to extend myterm for 2 more years. So you shouldbe hearing from me again next year,and from a new chair the year afterthat.

Finally, I want to convey mygratitude to Peter Sternberg, whoserved as Associate Chair for myfirst three years. He is now steppingdown, and Bruce Solomon will takethat role going forward. I thank themboth for working together to producethis newsletter as part of the transi-tion process. ⊗

DepartmentNews

Conference honoring Lyons’60thElegance in Probability, a confer-ence honoring Rudy Professor Rus-sell Lyons’ 60th birthday, will takeplace in early September at Tel AvivUniversity in Israel. Fields Medal-

ists Stanislav Smirnov and Wen-delin Werner will give talks at theweek-long conference, along with 23other invited speakers from Prince-ton, Stanford, Cambridge, and otherprestigious institutions around theworld.

Russ Lyons

Lyons got his Ph.D. in 1983 at theUniversity of Michigan, and joinedthe IU math department in 1990 af-ter working at the University of Parisand Stanford. He has held numer-ous visiting positions in the interim,and makes particularly frequent vis-its to Microsoft Research in Seat-tle, where he collaborates with YuvalPeres. His many publications (100and counting) include a recent bookwith Peres, Probability on Trees andNetworks, published by CambridgeUniversity Press (2016).

The recipient of numerousawards, fellowships, grants, andother honors, Russ is also a superbexpositor of mathematics, travelingfrequently and widely to speak abouthis work.

In 2014, Lyons became the JamesH. Rudy Professor of Mathematics atIU Bloomington. ⊗

Workshop on Fisher break-throughIn January 2018, researchers fromthe US and abroad will gather at

UCLA’s Institute for Pure and Ap-plied Mathematics (IPAM) for aworkshop called “New Methods forZimmer’s Conjectures.”

David Fisher

The methods in question weredeveloped by IU Math professorDavid Fisher, along with U. Chicagopostdocs Aaron Brown and Sebas-tian Hurtado, in recent breakthroughwork on a decades-old conjecture bygeometer (and Fisher Ph.D. advisor)Robert J. Zimmer, who now servesas President at Chicago. In 1983,Zimmer predicted that certain in-finite discrete groups—“lattices” inLie groups of real rank at least 3—can act non-trivially only on mani-folds of sufficiently high dimension.He saw this it as a first step towarda more ambitious program: classify-ing actions of higher-rank Lie groupson manifolds. The precise conjectureis easy to state, and motivated lotsof activity in geometric rigidity the-ory since he posed it. But it resistedany truly general progress until lastyear, when Fisher and his collabora-tors were able to prove it for a majorclass of lattices in essentially any di-mension. As of this writing, there arestill “pockets of resistance” but ac-cording to Fisher, “This is way closerto the full conjecture than anythingthat had been done before.”

Dynamicist Amie Wilkinson ofU. Chicago, a member of the IPAM

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board of directors, recruited Fisherto organize a workshop there. Asadvertised on the IPAM website,“The recent breakthrough dramati-cally improves the state of knowl-edge, and involves many novel ideasand contributions from diverse ar-eas of mathematics.” These areas in-clude rigidity theory, smooth dynam-ical systems, homogenous dynamics,measure theory, and operator alge-bras. The proof of a well-known con-jecture is always newsworthy, but theunifying connections between theseareas, as newly revealed by Fisherand his coauthors, make their workespecially exciting.

Rigidity theory has, in recentyears, attracted some of the bestminds in geometry. Fisher is theIU math department’s resident ex-pert in the area, working in it sincethe late 1990’s. He came to Bloom-ington in 2005 after postings atYale and the CUNY Graduate Cen-ter in New York. He first beganto tackle the Zimmer conjecture in2001 and had worked on it inter-mittently since then. “The closestI came was in a paper with LiorSilberman, published in 2008,” hesays, “where we made significantprogress on a related conjecture ofMikhael Gromov. But while a hand-ful of special cases of the conjecturehad been known. . . the conjecture it-self remained wide open for over 30years.” ⊗

Panel Discussion on the “ManWho Knew Infinity”On a Monday evening last April,the IU Cinema, in conjunction withthe departments of Mathematics,and India Studies, screened TheMan Who Knew Infinity, a majorHollywood film devoted to the as-tounding life of Srinivasa Ramanu-jan (played by Dev Patel) and his

relationship—as student, collabora-tor, and ultimately friend—to G. H.Hardy (Jeremy Irons) at Cambridgein the early twentieth century. Thefilm is based on the same-titled bookby Robert Kanigel.

The story of Ramanujan isamazing but bittersweet. His seem-ingly superhuman talent producednotebooks full of esoteric number-theoretic identities long before hehad any formal training in mathe-matics. Yet he reached almost allhis results without leaving a clueas to how to prove them formally—leaving no way for other mathemati-cians to understand, much less verifythem. Long efforts have, over the in-tervening decades, yielded proofs formost of his discoveries, but Ramanu-jan himself lived only 32 years. Hespent his final six years at CambridgeUniversity in England. His mentorHardy considered his “discovery” ofRamanujan—and his fruitful collab-oration with him—to be a high pointof his own career.

The packed screening was intro-duced by IU math professor DavidFisher, who noted how hard it is

to capture the excitement of mathe-matical discovery on film, given howmuch of it happens “behind closedeyelids.” He pointed out that the shy-ness common to so many mathe-maticians also works against the bigscreen. (An extroverted mathemati-cian, Fisher joked, is one who, in con-versation, looks at your shoes.)

Afterwards, Fisher was joined,for a panel discussion by MichaelLarsen of the math department, An-thropology colleague Susan Seizer(an expert on both Indian cultureand Drama), and notably, Fieldsmedalist Elon Lindenstrauss of He-brew University. Lindenstruass wasvisiting the math department thatweek as the annual Seymour Sher-man lecturer.

Larsen launched the discussionby crediting Hardy for recognizingRamanujan’s talent. Prominent as hewas in the mathematical world of hisday, Larsen said, Hardy probably gotscores of letters purporting to an-nounce breakthroughs of one kind oranother (proving Fermat’s last the-orem, squaring the circle, or prov-ing the twin prime conjecture, forinstance. Nowadays, many of us getemail spam of this type). Unlike oth-ers whom Ramanujan had contacted,however, Hardy recognized signs ofgenius in the young Indian’s letter.

By contrast, Lindenstraussnoted that one of the best aspectsof mathematical culture is pre-cisely its openness to good worklike Ramanujan’s—when actuallycorrect—no matter how unexpectedits origin. Recent case in point:In 2013, Yitang Zhang, a hithertounknown lecturer at University ofNew Hampshire sent the Annals ofMathematics a short paper claim-ing to break through on the twinprime conjecture. The journal hasundoubtedly rejected hundreds ofbogus manuscripts making similar

Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni NewsletterPage 3

claims. But Zhang’s work was rec-ognized as correct, and quickly pub-lished.

Lindenstrauss also suggestedthat now, 100 years on, mathematicshas perhaps bridged more of the gapbetween rigor and Ramanujan’s intu-ition. Today, we may be closer to get-ting a rigorous glimpse of whateverit was that Ramanujan’s astonishingintuition let him see. “Ramanujanwould have been much happier withthe current state of mathematicsthan he was in Hardy’s time,” hesurmised.

Larsen agreed that mathemat-ics has indeed gotten enormouslymore sophisticated since Ramanu-jan’s time, and we can now answerquestions that we couldn’t even haveimagined 100 years ago. Still, hepointed out, many of the simplestquestions—questions “that might oc-cur to a curious high school stu-dent” still frustrate our most ad-vanced tools.

Anthropologist Susan Seizerfound Ramanujan’s history—and themovie’s storytelling—heartbreaking.The portrayal of Indian culture andthe villanization of Ramanujan’smother-in-law both struck her asfalse. On the other hand, the all-too-believable depiction of the culturalrigidity and insensitivity that Ra-manujan, a vegetarian, encounteredat Cambridge, felt tragic to her. Asshe put it, “They kept him in a freez-ing cold room, he ate nothing, andhe died of tuberculosis.”

Fisher wrapped up by caution-ing the audience—particularly thestudents—not to succumb fully tothe romantic message about math-ematics that Man Who Knew Infin-ity and many other popular accountstend to promulgate: That success inmathematics is reserved for peopletouched in some way by genius. Itcan also come to those willing to

combine far more modest gifts withpersistence, determination, and hardwork. Yitang Zhang’s story, also thesubject of a recent movie, Countingfrom Infinity makes that point quiteforcefully.

Both The Man Who Knew In-finity and Counting from Infinity(which was screened at the IU Cin-ema in late 2015) can be purchasedonline. ⊗

New Course targets studentsfrom Arts and Humanities

Every IU undergraduate must pass aMathematical Modeling course. Forstudents majoring in the Arts andHumanities, the standard path tomeeting this requirement—by pass-ing M118 (Finite Mathematics) orM119 (Calculus)—too often seemsboth difficult and onerous. Last year,aiming to make a difficult hurdlemore engaging, the Math Depart-ment launched a course that fulfillsthe requirement while focusing onmaterial more likely to intrigue Artsand Humanities majors. The course,M106, is called The Mathematics ofDecision and Beauty.

Comprised of separate—andlargely independent—units lastinga few weeks each, M106 introducesstudents to game theory, graph the-ory, and the mathematics of votingsystems. It also features units on ge-ometry and art, and on mathematicsand music, with plans to includea unit on symmetry and groups infuture versions of the course.

The rationale for M106 hingeson three goals that distinguish itfrom M118 and M119. First, sincethe unit topics don’t depend on eachother, the course offers students var-ious points of re-entry in case theystruggle or fall behind in grapplingwith the material of a given unit.M118 (and M119 even more so) build

week by week on previous concepts,so that students who hit a roughpatch during the semester often findthemselves unable to recover.

Secondly, M106 provides a lesssymbolic, more visually oriented al-ternative to the traditional offer-ings. It relies less on numerical andalgebraic manipulation, emphasiz-ing visual modeling of relationships,and critical/conceptual reasoning in-stead. Finally, the course is designedaround topics more likely to engageArts and Humanities majors, and toinclude more activity-based learning.

Two years in the making, theMathematics of Decision and Beautywas first taught during the 2016 sum-mer session. Two sections, limitedto 25 students each, have been of-fered every term since then. Seniorlecturer Andrew Dabrowski, findsthe new course rewarding. “Teach-ing voting in the Fall of an electionyear was quite fun. I think many ofthe students had never thought crit-ically about voting systems and howthey might affect the government weget. Personally, I also enjoy teachingmusic. The mathematical underpin-nings of math and art are intricate,and that material is usually new evento music majors.” Dabrowski broughtin string players to demonstrate in-tervals and harmonics for the unit onmusic and felt it worked well.

Shabnam Kavousian, another se-nior lecturer, taught a unit on graphtheory during that first summer andalso had a positive experience. “I hadsome wonderful students who were sointerested in graph theory and werealso creative and very good thinkers.They mostly did not consider them-selves ‘good in math’. In fact, most ofthem hated math, but they did reallywell in graph theory!”

Both Dabrowski and Kavousianwere members of the committee thatdevised the course. Chaired by Pro-

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fessor Bruce Solomon, it included Se-nior lecturer Will Orrick and Lec-turer James Hendrickson as well.

At this point the Math Depart-ment offers one faculty-taught sec-tion and one taught by a graduatestudent each term. The graduate stu-dent teachers are trained by assistingfaculty-taught sections before theytake on a class of their own. ⊗

—Peter Sternberg

New Faculty

The Zorn Postdoctoral Instruc-torship is a three-year research/teaching position. A slightly reducedteaching load facilitates the holder’sresearch. Five new Zorn Postdocs arejoining our faculty in fall of 2017.

Graham White, a student ofPersi Diaconis at Stanford, looks for-ward to working with mentor RussLyons. He works in combinatorics,probability, Markov chains, and re-lated areas.

Guillem Cazassus will be com-ing to us from Nantes University.His Ph.D. advisors there were MichelBoileau and Paolo Ghiggini. Guillemwrote a dissertation about instantonhomology, and will be working herewith Prof. Paul Kirk.

Wai-kit Yeung also got his Ph.D.in topology —from Yuri Berest atCornell, with a dissertation entitledRepresentation homology and knotcontact homology. His mentor herewill be Asst. Prof. Ajay Ramadoss.

Siao-Hao Guo is coming here towork with geometric analysts PeterSternberg and Nam Le. Siao-Haoearned the doctorate under NatasaSesum at Rutgers, at the interfacebetween Differential Geometry andPartial Differential Equations.

Nicholas Miller doesn’t have tomove far: He got his Ph.D. under

the tutelage of Ben McReynolds atPurdue. His interests include arith-metic, hyperbolic geometry and alge-braic groups. He’s planning to workhere with David Fisher.

Four new Visiting Faculty memberswill also help us fulfill our teachingmission:

Chris Johnson, with a 2014Ph.D. from Clemson, will be comingto us from Wake Forest. His researchon translation surfaces overlaps theinterest of several other faculty mem-bers.

Chris’ wife Christa Johnson hasbeen teaching at Guilford Techni-cal Community College. She holds aMaster’s in Mathematics from Clem-son.

Nikolay Shcherbina will be visit-ing us from Bergische Universität inWuppertal, in Germany.

Benjamin Texier, a longtime col-laborator of Professor (and formerChair) Kevin Zumbrun is returningto Bloomington as a Visitor. He’s amember of the Institut de Mathéma-tiques de Jussieu-Paris Rive Gauche,France’s largest Mathematics re-search institute. ⊗

Farewells

For the first time in some years,the Math Department had no retire-ments last May.

But we do have one farewell: Lec-turer Palanivel Manoharan (“Mano”to us) is leaving Bloomington to takea position at Virginia Tech. Thou-sands of our students have benefit-ted from Mano’s skill and warmthsince he first taught M118 (Finite)and M119 (Calculus) here in the fallof 2010. We wish him every successgoing forward. ⊗

GraduateProgram

Michael Mandell, Director of GraduateStudies

Greetings from the Graduate Studiesoffice! We had a very successful yearthis year, graduating 13 new Ph.D.’s,with an additional 11 students earn-ing MA or MAT degrees. Congrat-ulations to all our new Doctors andMasters!

Congratulations also to all ourgraduate students who won awardsthis year (see Awards below), but letme highlight the two awards we giveto advanced students for research ex-cellence.

Henry Horton won the Out-standing Thesis Award for his the-sis "A Functorial Symplectic Instan-ton Homology Via Traceless Char-acter". According to Henry’s advisorPaul Kirk, his results have earnedwidespread attention from the topol-ogy community, along with invita-tions to speak at conferences andseminars. Henry will graduate thissummer and move on to a prestigiouspostdoctoral post at Princeton Uni-versity in the fall.

Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni NewsletterPage 5

Hongmin Nie took the WilliamB. Wilcox Mathematics Award. Nie,according to his advisor Kevin Pil-grim, shows remarkable indepen-dence, initiative, and the ability tomaster mathematics well outside hisoriginal specialization. He is workingin dynamics and is expected to com-plete his PhD in Spring 2018.

We had a very successful recruit-ing season for the 2017 entering grad-uate class. Twenty-six new studentswill embark on graduate studies herein the fall, and they come from acrossthe US and from five foreign coun-tries. Eight students will arrive withmaster’s degrees. All are receivingfull support and many of them willhave spring semester, or even full-year fellowships. We’re excited to getto know them, and we wish them alla great year. If you meet any, pleaseremind them to study for the quali-fying exams!

—Michael Mandell

UndergradProgram

Jee Koh, Director of Undergrad Studies

This past year—my first as Directorof Undergraduate Studies (DUS)—

presented many challenges. Fortu-nately I had the generous supportof my colleagues and in particular,from my predecessor Kevin Pilgrim.Among my many new responsibil-ities, the most enjoyable was get-ting to know our amazing majors.Here are a few of their most notableachievements:

• For the third year runnning,one of our majors earned a Gold-water Scholarship—one of only twoon campus. Baptiste Dejean is earn-ing double degrees in math: a Bach-elor of Science and a Master ofScience. Though only a sophomore,he has already performed extremelywell in some of our advanced gradu-ate courses!

• Our majors earned awards fromthe College of Arts and Sciences too.Baptiste Dejean and Noah Schloss-berg (math and physics major) wereamong three students earning the2017 Marshal H. Wrubel award, ad-ministered by the Department of As-tronomy. Sixteen math majors wereelected to Phi Beta Kappa.

• Sophomore Baptiste Dejeanand senior teammates Andrew Vander Werf and Ben Briggs placed52nd in the 2016 national Put-nam Competition. Locally, IUB wasonce again victorious in the In-diana College Math Competition.We fielded two teams: earning 1stplace was the team of Baptiste De-Jean, Andrew Henderson, and Ben-jamin Briggs. First-time competitorsLeigha Amick, Nanjie Chen, and An-thony Coniglio also made a strongshowing, finishing in the top half of30-team field.

• Several graduating seniors aregoing on to pursue Ph.D. studies inmath: Taylor Ball is headed to NotreDame, Rebekah Eichberg to the Uni-versity of Utah, Samuel Pilgrim tothe University of Hawaii, and An-drew Vander Werf to Ohio State

University. Michael Peters will pur-sue a physics doctorate at MIT andGrant Schumacher will do so at Yale.Benjamin Briggs plans to pursue aPh.D. in mathematics, but will firsttake a year to study Mandarin Chi-nese at National Taiwan University.

We send them all off with prideand best wishes. ⊗

—Jee Koh

Careers

Kevin Pilgrim, Alumni & Career Liai-son

Alumni Giving BackThree distinguished alumni visitedus this past year to support our cur-rent students in generous ways.

Anne Koehler (B.A. 1962, M.A.1963, Ph.D. 1968) returned inSeptember to meet with faculty andstudents. Among the latter was thefall 2016 Koehler Scholar CatherineBlankensop. We’re very grateful toAnne; she recently expanded her en-dowment for undergraduate renew-able scholarships. In fall 2017, theDonald Koehler Scholarship is go-ing to incoming freshmen Alex Kokotand Gavin Whelan, both from Indi-ana. The Anne Koehler Scholarshipgoes to Amanda Suleski from Mas-sachusetts. All three stood out for

Page 6Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni Newsletter

their enthusiasm for math and mu-sic. Anne also has our profound ap-preciation for her ongoing support ofmath majors on Careers field trips(see below).

In October, Mark Johnson (BS& MA in Computer Science andMath, 1993) visited us through theCollege’s Luminaries Program. Markserved as student manager of ourbasketball team and went on to earna Ph.D. in applied math. He nowconsults around the world on issuesrelated to data science. During hisvisit he shared his experiences witha diverse audience of students fromaround the College, and with ourMath Club, where he discussed hispioneering of analytical methods inbaseball.

John Brown (BS English & Math2012), now works as a BusinessTechnology Analyst at Deloitte inChicago. He returned for his thirdvisit as an alum this past April.John also spoke both to a groupof diverse College students and toour Math Club, where we learnedabout machine learning and neu-ral network simulation. There’s aneural network “sandbox” onlinethat he used for demonstration pur-poses; Check it out at http://playground.tensorflow.org/.

Extracurricular Math

Our student-led active Actuary Clubcontinues to assist students prepar-ing for careers in the actuary pro-fession. Supported again by fac-ulty member Russ Lyons, the Clubwas led this past year by Alexan-der Dewhirst. In the Fall, it hostedreturning alumnus and past Clubpresident—and now Senior ActuarialAssistant—Bradley Hipsher duringthe AllState Insurance company’sIUB recruiting visit. In 2017–18, the

Club will be led by Chase Abram.Chase will work with our faculty toincrease the Club’s visibility on cam-pus, and to continue supporting stu-dent preparation in this ever morecompetitive field.

A new interdisciplinary initia-tive, led by Math and Infor-matics faculty member EsfandiarHaghverdi, supported a team of 5students from Economics, Math, Fi-nance, and Informatics in develop-ing algorithms for trading commodi-ties. Their academic foundation wasalso supported by Esfan’s instruc-tion in the Math-M 451 Mathemat-ical Finance course—and his leader-ship in weekly evening training ses-sions throughout the fall term. Theteam headed to Chicago in January2016 to compete against four otherexperienced teams (some consistingentirely of grad students) in theirfirst Algorithm Showcase contest,sponsored by Chicago firm TradingTechnologies. Our team’s hard workearned them an award for best risk-adjusted return. They also competedat the University of Chicago in a re-lated contest in Spring 2017.

Last September, math majorsAndrew Maben and Xi Qian ’17joined Economics Chair GerhardGlomm and I to meet IU’s WalterCareer Center staff for a field tripto St. Louis. The busy schedule in-cluded visits to Procter and Gambleheadquarters, lunch with two youngwomen from Venture for America,and a panel discussion (with tour) atthe new office building of retail ana-lytics firm 84.51◦. Math alumna PamMatsko ’87, a Senior Accountant atCarew Realty, hosted us for a visitto the top of Carew Tower, where wehad a magnificent view of the Ohioriver and the historic bridge. It wasa great trip; we look forward visitingSt. Louis again in September ’17!

Happily, we’re now hearing more

and more often from our graduatesabout their jobs, internships, and fu-ture programs of study, thanks tonew initiatives that help keep us intouch. Between 2012 and 2015, atleast 40 of our graduates have goneon to doctoral programs, with atleast 45 going to Masters’ programs.Noteworthy among the latter is in-ternational student Xiaohan Xu ’16,currently completing an Economicsand Education Masters program atColumbia University, with financialsupport. New graduates have headedto companies from the large and dis-tant (GM, Amazon) to the small andlocal (Bloomington-based HanapinMarketing and Megaputer). Amongtheir job titles, “Analyst” and re-lated titles seem to be common.Need advice on buying Google ads?Hanapin’s Digital Marketing Pro-duction Associate Brett Schrank BS’14 MA ’16 can help. Companies likeEpic and Qualtrics (healthcare andsurvey IT) and financial firms con-tinue to find great value in our grad-uates and their skillsets.

I look forward to continued col-laboration with alumni, recruiters,faculty, advisors, and IU’s WalterCenter for Career Achievement. Ourgoal is simple: to help students findthe “sweet spot” where their passionand technical skills meet. ⊗—Kevin Pilgrim

Bookshelf

Zero Space OmegaMathematics enjoys a unique po-sition straddling science and art.Its grounding in precisely articu-lated definitions and axioms some-how offers a freedom to create new

Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni NewsletterPage 7

objects and engage old conceptsin completely new—and sometimessurprising—ways. Erica Isaacson, ahighly popular Lecturer in the MathDepartment, devotes much of herfree time to exploring this interplay

Recently Isaacson found herselfembarking on a literary and artis-tic journey inspired by her love ofmathematics. The result is an ex-traordinary picture book, Zero SpaceOmega, that is thought-provoking,visually gorgeous, and honestly a bitmind-blowing.

Isaacson grew up in Bloomingtonand graduated from I.U. with anundergraduate degree in math. Shewent on to complete a math Ph.D. atUC Berkeley. Recently, she began theyear-long project that produced ZeroSpace Omega, writing and illustrat-ing a story that taps into the mysteryand excitement of mathematical dis-covery itself.

Though difficult to summarize,Isaacson’s book has the feel of a feverdream involving the journey of theauthor into a strange place “hiddeninside the number zero.” The textdescribing this surreal trek is en-hanced by spectacular illustrationslike the one above, that Isaacsoncreated using pencil, ink and wa-tercolor. Her images involve math-ematical symbols stunningly inte-grated into scenery featuring plants,sky and bodies of water. “Althoughthey are imaginary, there is a fairamount of structure to the formulasand equations in the pictures,” she

said.At this point, Zero Space

Omega can only be viewed on-line (https://zso2017.wordpress.com/2017/01/09/download-zero-space-omega-here/) but Isaacsonis submitting the book to publishersin hopes of seeing it materialize inphysical space too.

With the fall 2017 term, Isaac-son will return to teaching IU under-grads. She started her lecturing ca-reer at IU back in 2012 as an adjunct,stepping into a full-time lecturer po-sition here two years later.

What lies ahead for her on thecreative front? “I am working ona number of small projects aboutmathematics, art and the occult,”she said, “which I hope to start post-ing soon—on the same website asZero Space Omega.”

We personally can’t wait to seewhat she comes up with next. ⊗—Peter Sternberg

AwardsUndergraduatesWe currently have close to 300 mathmajors, of whom roughly 100 gradu-ate each year.

Among the undergraduates win-ning academic awards and scholar-ships at this year’s award ceremonyon April 28, were 2 first-year stu-dents:

Thomas Sweeney and Jacquelyn Parkes

• Thelma Abell Prize: JacquelynParkes

• Jeffrey and Deborah KingScholarship in Mathematics:Thomas Sweeney

Six second-year students:

Embry, DeJean, Lowry, Coniglio, andAbram

• Cora B. Hennel MemorialScholarship: Chase Abram,Anthony Coniglio, and Natha-nial Lowry

• Marie S. Wilcox Scholarship:Baptiste Dejean, AlexandraEmbry and Hannah Sakaluk

Ten third-year students:

Chen, Miller, Wenning, Henderson,Schiefer, Moorhead, and Hu

• Thelma Abell Prize: JonathanHu, Trenton Moorhead, andMary Presto

• Ruth E. Gilliatt MemorialScholarship: Leah Schiefer

Page 8Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni Newsletter

• Cora B. Hennel MemorialScholarship: Andrew Hender-son and Derek Wenning

• Juma Shabani Book Fellow-ship: Doryan Miller

• Marie S. Wilcox Scholarship:Nanjie Chen, Chuhan Jie, andXinlu Zhang

Ten fourth-year students:

Eichberg, Peters, Ball, Vander Werf,Briggs, Pilgrim, and Stitsworth.

• Thelma Abell Prize: KarolineStitsworth

• Ciprian Foias Prize: SamuelPilgrim

• Ruth E. Gilliatt MemorialScholarship: Mary Smart

• Trula Sidwell Hardy Scholar-ship: Ben Briggs

• Cora B. Hennel MemorialScholarship: Grant Schu-macher and Andrew VanderWerf

• Jeffrey and Deborah KingScholarship in Mathematics:Taylor Ball, Michael Peters,and Samuel Pilgrim

• Rainard Benton RobbinsPrize: Taylor Ball

• Marie S. Wilcox Scholarship:Rebekah Eichberg and Jen-nifer Huang

Last but not least: Andrew Hender-son, Braden Palmore, and KaileighPieroth won the M118 Undergradu-ate Intern Award.

Pieroth and Henderson.

Graduate Students

• Hazel King Thompson Fellow-ship: Dami Lee, Anuj Kumar,Dimitrios Sakellariou, DylanSpence, Truong Vu, and An-dres Zuñiga

• College of Arts and SciencesFellowship: Sanjana Argarwal,Gökçen Büyükbas

"Çakar, Seok

Hyun Byun, Adnan CihanÇakar, Yaqing Hu, Homin Lee,Ian Montague, Ryan Stees,Siyuan Tang, Krutika Tawri,Jonathan Wood, Daodao Yang,Alfed Yerger, and RamazanYol

• Robert E. Weber MemorialAward: Homin Lee

• James P. Williams Memo-rial Award: Seok Hyun Byun,Anuj Kumar, Homin Lee, andSiyuan Tang

• Muriel Adams Stahl GraduateFellowship: Sanjana Agarwal

• Robert K. Meyer GraduateFellowship in MathematicsRobert Rose

• Rothrock Summer Fellowship:Seth Lehman

• Rothrock Teaching Awards:Patrick Haggerty, Steven Hus-sung, WonTae Hwang, EmilyRudman, David Sprunger,Brady Thompson, and RyanVitale

• William B. Wilcox Mathemat-ics Award: Hongming Nie

• Glenn Schober MemorialTravel Award Alper Gur,Aranya Lahiri, Xuqiang Qin,Edward Timko, and Zhao Yang

• Educational Opportunity Fel-lowship: Brady Thompson

• College of Arts and SciencesTravel Award: Wai Kit Lamand Zhao Yang

• Outstanding Thesis Award:Henry Horton

Faculty Awards

• The Rothrock MathematicsFaculty Teaching Award wentto Prof. Christopher Connell.

• The IU Trustee’s TeachingAward went to ProfessorsMichael Jolly and Paul Kirk,and to Senior Lecturer StephenMcKinley.

Connell, Jolly and McKinley

Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni NewsletterPage 9

InMemoriam

Grahame Bennett

Grahame Bennett

Born in Gateshead, England on Jan-uary 23, 1945, Grahame Bennett re-ceived his Bachelor of Science fromthe University of Newcastle in 1966.He then went to the University ofCambridge, earning his Ph.D. underD.H.J. Garling in 1970.

He spent the 1969–70 academicyear at Lehigh University, at the in-vitation of Albert (Tommy) Wilan-sky. There, Tommy told Grahameabout twelve problems he was cur-rently trying to solve. Grahamesolved all twelve!

Grahame came to IU in the fallof 1970 as a Research Assistant Pro-fessor. He was promoted to AssociateProfessor in 1975, and to Professor in1979.

He held a Sloan Fellowship in1977–79, and NSF grants from 1972–1997. In 1979 he was one of just twopeople in the country with an NSFgrant in classical analysis.

From the late 70’s through theearly 80’s, his wife pursued a de-gree in pharmacy at Purdue. Gra-hame took care of their three chil-

dren. He had few publications duringthis period, but continued to read,discuss mathematics, and attend de-partmental colloquia and seminars.

His early research focused onBanach spaces, especially sequencespaces, and properties of their mor-phisms. When he resumed his re-search he turned to the study of in-equalities, proving several deep andbeautiful results, and solving a long-standing conjecture of Littlewood.

Grahame published over 60 pa-pers, all of high quality. We quote areferee of one of his research propos-als: "When I was a graduate student,my professor was fond of saying thata particular theorem was O.K., butit would not set the Thames on fire.The mathematics that Grahame de-scribes in this proposal might set theThames on fire."

Grahame’s wrote and spoke withclarity, wit, and humor. He gave in-vited talks around the US, and atmany international conferences, in-cluding a 1975 conference in honor ofLittlewood, the 1987 Polya Confer-ence in Birmingham, England, andin 2003, the plenary address in Poz-nan, Poland honoring the Centennialof Orlicz.

A fine teacher at IU, Grahame re-ceived a Teaching Excellence Recog-nition Award in 1997. He taught awide variety of courses at all levels,and produced two Ph.D. students.Grahame was also among the firstin our department to use computa-tion in his research, as a method to“look for the answer in the back ofthe book".

Grahame also did his share of de-partmental service, and played a keyrole in starting the now large andsuccessful Advanced College Pro-gram (ACP). This program linkshigh schools and IU with a strong,rigorous program for dual credit. Theprogram started with the two pub-

lic high schools in Bloomington andwith two departments at IU (Chem-istry and Mathematics). Grahamewas the key contact person for theMath Department; he helped get theprogram off to a strong start and toexpand its math component to manyhigh schools around the state.

Grahame continued his researchafter retirement, right up until hisheart attack. After an extended timein a rehab facility, he died on Decem-ber 16, 2016. ⊗

— Hari Bercovici, Dan Maki,and Billy Rhoades

Acknowledgements

Thanks to all who helped out bywriting articles for this newslet-ter: Hari Bercovici, Elizabeth Hous-worth, Dan Maki, Michael Mandell,Kevin Pilgrim, Peter Sternberg andElizabeth Smith. Special thanks tomy predecessor as Associate Chair,Peter Sternberg, who showed mehow it’s done.

—Bruce Solomon

m Want to read this Newsletteron a computer, tablet, or smart-phone? You can view or downloadit in PDF format at https://math.indiana.edu/newsletters/AlumniNewsletter2017.pdf m

Page 10Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni Newsletter

The Department of Mathematics is grateful for all of the support it receives from its generous donors.The Department has several funds to which you can give. Donations may be made using the attachedIndiana University Foundation Donation Form or through the Give Now link atm http://www.math.indiana.edu/

• Mathematics Enrichment Fund (I380008688): Gifts to this fund will be used for the generalsupport of the Mathematics Department, in the College of Arts and Sciences.

• Mathematics Alumni Lecture Fund (I380012139): Gifts to this fund are used to cover the directcosts of presenting guest lectures each year on the Bloomington campus for the benefit of ourundergraduate students, for example, by bringing Alumni back to speak to students in our newCareers in Math course. This fund was recently established with the generosity of faculty support.

• Glenn Schober Memorial Fellowship Fund (I380008692): Gifts to this fund support outstandingadvanced graduate students, including travel and registration fees for national meetings.

Gifts to Indiana University are deductible as charitable contributions within the limits of the InternalRevenue Code. Indiana taxpayers are eligible for a 50% tax credit for gifts up to $400 on joint returnsor $200 on individual returns.

The Indiana University Foundation solicits tax-deductible private contributions for the benefit ofIndiana University and is registered to solicit charitable contributions in all states requiring registration.For our full disclosure statement, see m http://go.iu.edu/89n.

Giving

Indiana University Department of Mathematics Alumni NewsletterPage 11

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