In March, Lisa Traynor, chair and professor of mathematics, gave a talk at Duke University where she had a chance to reconnect with Bryn Mawr alumni Orsola Capovilla-Searle '15; Seppo Hanson-Colvin '16, M.A. '16; and Ziva Myer, Ph.D. '17.
Pi Day once again fell during Spring Break. The Mathematics Department celebrated Pi Day a few weeks later at its Math Major Information Session.
Hannah Schwartz successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation Exotic Phenomena in Dimension Four on April 11. Next year, Hannah will hold a postdoc at the Max Planck Institute for Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, followed by a three-year postdoc at Princeton.
Danielle Smiley successfully defended her Ph.D. dissertation Estimates on Oscillatory Singular Integral Operators on April 18. Danielle will continue teaching at Villanova University.
The Mathematics Department underwent an external review in April. The external review team was composed of Colin Adams (Williams), Carolyn Gordon (Dartmouth), and Julianna Tymoczko (Smith).
Associate Professor Djordje Milićević co-organized the 33rd Automorphic Forms Workshop, which took place in March at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. There was strong Bryn Mawr representation: graduate student Lindsay Dever attended the workshop, and Assistant Professor John Bergdall gave a talk. The annual international conference long recognized as a friendly venue supportive of junior researchers was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation, National Security Agency, and Elsevier. Milićević has been selected for a Simons Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians for the project on “analytic properties of cusp forms.”
Assistant Professor John Bergdall gave a conference presentation at the AMS Eastern Sectional Meeting in Hartford, Conn., and further gave his first official invited colloquium address to the Notre Dame math department in April. JB was also featured in the graduate school newsletter from Brandeis University.
Lisa Traynor has often been involved in organizing activities for the IAS Women and Mathematics Program. This year the IAS program won the AMS Programs that Make a Difference Award.
As a new member of the Park City Mathematics Institute Steering Committee, Paul Melvin attended an organizational meeting in January for this summer’s session on Quantum Field Theory and Manifold Invariants, where he will be giving a series of lectures in the Undergraduate Faculty Program. This session will also include several local mathematicians, including two Bryn Mawr undergrads, one Haverford undergrad, and two Philadelphia area math faculty members.
Bryn Mawr College established the Community Building Honor Roll in 2018—an initiative to acknowledge important student contributions to the quality of campus life. This May the following math majors were named to the second Community Building Honor Roll: Leah Baker '19, Emily Barry '19, Namrata Basu '19, Immaculate Lang’at '19, Ellie Lee '20, Ruth McLeod '20, Natalie Meacham '19, Aisha Mechery '20, Cate Roa '19, Zainab Sadia Saeed '20, Sanjana Sen '19, Mehendi Siraj '19, Jwahir Sundai '19, and Sabrina Yoh '19. Math Ph.D. students Isaac Craig, Hannah Schwartz, and Danielle Smiley also received this honor.
Two teams from Bryn Mawr participated in the 35th annual Mathematical Contest in Modeling, which ran from Jan. 24 to Jan. 28. One team earned a Meritorious Winner designation, and the other a Successful Participant designation.
In March 2019, Professor of Mathematics Victor Donnay spoke on Math Modeling and Sustainability at the Ithaca College Mathematics Colloquium. He also attended the Critical Issues in Education Conference at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley. The topic at the Institute was Mathematical Modeling in K-16: Community and Cultural Contexts.
In May, Amy Myers, senior lecturer in mathematics and math program coordinator, helped organize the Mid-Atlantic Algebraic Geometry and Combinatorics Conference at Drexel University.
Graduate student Daniel White and his wife, Jessie, had a baby girl, Rowan Olivia, on April 6. White, a Ph.D. candidate, gave an invited talk, Twelfth Power Moment of Dirichlet L-functions, at the 2019 Study Group in Number Theory series of lectures at City University of New York.
