Juming Pan, completed a consulting project to help Minnesota Power decide how frequently they should trim trees and bushes near their power lines.
Richard Buckalew gave voting talks at Café Scientifique. He also spoke at the MCCCC conference on “Frenemies,” a mathematical model of a warmup exercise for theatre performers. He also spoke at the SIAM LS18 conference in Minneapolis about joint work with Sarah Pierro (former graduate student in our program).
Eric Erdmann gave voting talks at Café Scientifique with Richard Buckalew.
Laura Carr and Kate Niedzielski developed the first departmental online courses for 2018 UMD Summer School: College Algebra and Precalculus.
Tracy Bibelnieks continues to direct the Duluth site of UMTYMP (University of Minnesota Talented Youth Mathematics Program), a program for high-ability students, starting as early as 7th grade. The 4th cohort was started in Fall 2018. She also continues to advise analytic competition teams. In Spring 2018, one of the UMD teams won the MN DataDerby Analytics competition. This advanced the team's work to the National TeraData Competition as a finalist where they won honorable mention. Tracy also continues her collaborative work with the St. Louis County Department of Public Health doing research on the analysis of the economic and social impact of health disparities across the county.
Rachel Breckenridge directed Math Prep for STEM Careers summer bridge program for incoming UMD students and collaborated with Leech Lake Tribal College on a NSF-funded project to develop programs in Tribal Resource Environmental Stewardship. She also advised the American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) chapter at UMD and presented about the bridge program at the AISES National Conference.
Joe Gallian operated his Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) at UMD for the 40th year!
Bethany Kubik organized the first annual Sonia Kovalesky Day, a day-long program for high school girls, celebrating women in mathematics. This is a collaboration with the University of Wisconsin-Superior and The College of St. Scholastica.
Xuan Li was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure. Congratulations!
Marshall Hampton is spending part of his Fall 2018 single semester leave in Chengdu, China, working with a collaborator on research in celestial mechanics.
Dalibor Froncek taught a course titled "Introduction to proof techniques and research in graph theory" at AGH-University of Science and Technology in Krakow, Poland. He also organized the MCCCC conference at UMD in October. There were 5 invited speakers (4 of them females), and 69 participants. There were 34 contributed talks presented in two parallel sessions. Richard Buckalew and Bryan Freyberg were among the speakers. Also, two graduate students (Jehyun Lee and Karlee Westrem) and one undergrad (Jiangyi Qiu) presented their research.
For more details on the conference, go to: https://scse.d.umn.edu/mcccc
Zhuangyi Liu published three refereed papers recently in research journals. Another three refereed papers have been accepted for publication. He was on the thesis committee of three Ph.D. students in Donghua University, Tianjin University, and the Lebanese University, respectively, and participated their defense in China and Lebanon. In April of 2018, he visited University of Jordan and Jordan University of Science and Technology, and gave two colloquium talks there. In May-June he was an invited speaker at the Joint Conference of American Mathematics Society and Chinese Mathematics Society in Shanghai, and an invited speaker at Conference on Control Theory at Fudan University. He also visited Zhejiang University, Donghua University, and Tianjin University in China, and gave several colloquium talks on his research.
Yongcheng Qi published a book, coauthored with Liang Peng from Georgia State University: Inference for Heavy-Tailed Data: Applications in Insurance and Finance.