Department Events
Undergraduate Events
April 1, 2024
The Math Department hosted its bi-annual Curriculum and Advising Event on Monday, April 1st. We reviewed the class schedule for Fall 2024, the major and minor requirements, questions about the math curriculum, and the opportunities and resources in the Math Department. Here's the Powerpoint from the event: events/april-curriculum-and-orientation-event.pptx
The Math UDRs, Dakota Lichauco and Bhakti Parwani, hosted this very busy pie-eating event in celebration of PI Day. Wewere also lucky to have Adam Levine join us to give a short talk
March 14, 2024
November 2, 2023
September 6, 2023
The Brandeis Math UDRs Present: Boba X Math Meet + Greet. Outside Goldsmith Building September 6th 12:30pm-1:30pm.
Description of image: floating bubbles, a calculator and a zeta sign
September 12, 2023
Starting Tuesday September 12, students are invited to the 84th Annual Putnam Challenge: Putnam Practice at Brandeis with Prof. Kiyoshi Igusa and Tudor Popescu. Where? Goldsmith 101. When? Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 7pm. Pizza!
May 4, 2023
Alexander Apo (thesis advisor, An Huang), Lin Yu (thesis Advisor, Gleb Nenashev), Rebekah Kristal (thesis advisor, Jonathan Toboul), and Yuteng Chen (thesis advisor, Tyler Maunu) presented their Senior Research Thesis Defenses.
May 3, 2023
Undergraduate students Yihan Gao, Marco Qin, Allen Minch, Pengqui Li, Isaac Berger, Phuong Pham, Qianrun Wu and Sarah Levine took part in the Directed Reading Program (DRP) which pairs undergraduate students with their graduate student mentors (Alex Semendinger, Rocky Klein, Rebecca Rohrlich, and Ray Maresca) to undertake independent study projects of various sizes and scopes over the course of the spring semester.
April 21, 2023
The Math Department (DEI Committee) hosted an event for students and faculty providing information on outreach activity and how to have a positive impact on our community.
Presenters:
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Megan Ross representing COMPACT https://www.brandeis.edu/
compact/index.html -
Francesca Panorese representing the Waltham groups (especially the General tutoring and Afternoon enrichment) https://www.brandeis.edu/
student-engagement/community/ waltham-group/index.html -
Jill Mastrocola, Math PhD student, shared her experience as a mentor in the Galaxy and Posse mentoring programs.
March 31, 2023
The Math Department's faculty met online with students to present new program initiatives, guidelines for math and applied math majors, 2023-2024 course offerings, upcoming events and other important information.
March 24, 2023
UDRs Lucca Raabe and Nicole Meng hosted an event for undergraduates to hear about the current research from two faculty members in the Math Department. Professor An Huang's talk was on "Are certain arithmetic questions optimization problems in disguise?" Professor Tyler Maunu's talk was on "Recovering Structured Matrices."
February 15, 2023
The Brandeis team did very well at the Putnam Mathematics Competition this year. The Brandeis team ranked 39 out of 456 institutions! This is a great result, especially given that small institutions are naturally at a disadvantage in such rankings. The Putnam Exam is an annual Mathematics Competition for all undergrad math students in the US and Canada. It is famous for the intricate mathematical puzzles it proposes, whose solutions require imagination and inventiveness.
We had 8 students participate in the weekly competitions at Brandeis, with Ben Kamen, Issac Berger and Phong Pham going on to compose the Brandeis Team at the national competition. Student Ben Kamen got an honorable mention since he scored 58 out of 3415 participants, and the other students on our team also did very well. Read more about the competition on the Science at Brandeis Blog.
Congratulations to our team and all participants, and a great thank you to our Putnam coaches Prof. Kiyoshi Igusa and PhD student Tudor Popescu!
November 11, 2022
UDRs Lucca Raabe and Nicole Meng hosted an event for undergraduates to hear about current research in the Math Department. Professor Jonathan Touboul spoke on "Dynamic and Probabilistic Models for Biology" and Professor Assaf Bar-Natan spoke on "Surfaces, but Bigger Than you Thought".
October 25, 2022
The Math Department's faculty met online with students to present new program initiatives, guidelines for math and applied math majors, Spring 2023 course offerings, upcoming events and other important information. Here's the powerpoint (pdf) we shared, which includes a "Notes Section" on the rotation of math courses and ideas for pursuing research.
September 30, 2022
The Math Department's math majors, soon-to-be majors, Undergraduate Student Representatives, graduate students and faculty met outside of the Math Building for some food, apple cider and lively conversation.
May 2, 2022
The Math Department's UDRs, Lucca Raabe and Nicole Meng, hosted seven alumni during a virtual alumni panel this spring. Jiyin Chen '20, Amy Gao '19, Andrew Lipnick '18, Susannah Miller '19, Siqing Tao '19, Brandis Whitfield '19 and Athena Xiao '20 answered the question "What can a math degree do for you"?
May 6, 2022
Seven seniors presented their honors research thesis in Goldsmith 300.
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Lachlan Elam “Diffusion of dynamical networks with applications to cell biology”
Thesis Advisor: Profs. Thomas Fai and An Haung
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Chami Lamelas “Vorticity-Stream Solver for Microfluidic Devices and Applications to Blood Cell Sorters”
Thesis Advisor: Profs. Thomas Fai and An Huang
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Chloe Shiff “Investigating Length Control by Severing in Cytoskeletal Structures”
Thesis Advisor: Profs. Jonathan Touboul and Jane' Kondev -
Ashley Kamal “Spatial Coherence of Low Frequency Sound in Continental Shelf Environment”
Thesis Advisors: Prof. Keith Merrill and Madeline Miller (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)
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Victoria Xu “Balanced Regime of Large Neural Networks”
Thesis Advisors: Profs. Jonathan Touboul and Thomas Fai -
Max Cui-Stein “Symmetry Breaking in Oscillator Networks and Destabilization of Equivarient Patterns”
Thesis Advisors: Profs. Jonathan Touboul, Paul Miller and Irv Epstein
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E Huffman "“Non-Archimedean Geometry and the Weight-Monodromy Conjecture after Scholze”Thesis Advisor: Prof. Joël Bellaïche
April 29, 2022
The Math Department's UDRs, Lucca Raabe and Nicole Meng, and the Math Department hosted over fifty people at a barbeque in Volen Circle.
April 1, 2022
The Math Departments faculty met with math students to discuss program requirements, course selections and upcoming events.
February 4, 2022
February 8, 2022
Every spring semester, the Directed Reading Program (DRP) pairs undergraduate students with graduate student mentors to undertake independent study projects of various sizes and scopes over the course of the spring semester. The projects can take the form of reading and working through a mathematics text, reading research papers, or even doing research. The goal of the DRP is to enable undergraduate students to study mathematics in greater depth than is possible in a classroom, to increase interaction between undergraduates and graduates, to give undergraduates an opportunity to practice explaining mathematical ideas in conversations and in presentations, and to give graduates an opportunity to share their passion for mathematics. For questions about the program, please email mathdrp@brandeis.edu.
May 12, 2021
Bradley Kaplan BS ’21
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Title: "Mathematical and Computational Analysis of Stochastic Car and Drone Sharing Network Models." Adviser: Prof. Jonathan Touboul
Ryan Xie BS ’21
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Title: "Mathematically Modeling the Neuron Network Involved in Sleep Regulation." Adviser: Prof. Jonathan Touboul
April 29, 2021
The Math Department's Undergraduate Department Representatives hosted an Alumni Career Night with three stellar alumni: Siddhi Krishna BA '12, Yitong Wang BA'14 and Elana Israel BA'18. Alexandra Martin from the Hiatt Career Center presented us with tips for job hunting.
Siddhi Krishna A Boston native, Siddhi Krishna graduated from Brandeis in 2012, with double majors in Math and Economics, and double minors in Computer Science and IGS. As an undergraduate, she was a Schiff Research Fellow studying behavioral economics, intending on pursuing a career in this field. After graduating, she decided to study math instead, and returned to Brandeis for a postbac/master's degree. Siddhi graduated with her PhD from Boston College in May 2020. She is currently a postdoc at Georgia Tech, and starting this Fall, she will be an NSF postdoc and a Ritt postdoc at Columbia University. Her research area is low-dimensional topology, the study of shapes and spaces of different dimensions.
Yitong Wang is a data scientist at Marcus by Goldman Sachs. With backgrounds in economics and mathematics, Yitong started her career in advertising, and developed a genuine interest in customer facing products and working with data, which led to subsequent endeavors in healthcare and eventually finance. Today, Yitong works on building advanced analytical solutions and machine learning models to achieve state of the art fraud detection, as well as exceptional customer service for millions of Apple Card customers.
Elana Israel is currently a second year PhD student and Graduate Teaching Assistant at Syracuse University. She graduated with a Bachelor’s from Brandeis in 2018 with a double major in Math and Chemistry. Her mathematical interests lie in Algebraic Topology, specifically Knot Theory. At Brandeis, Elana assisted the Math Department as a UDR and worked in the Admissions Office, among other activities. After Brandeis, she took a gap year with City Year Americorps.
Alexandra Martin is a Hiatt Career Center advisor and a junior majoring in biochemistry with a minor in Psychology.
December 4, 2021
Mathematics Professor Kiyoshi Igusa prepared a group of Brandeis students for the 82nd Putnam Mathematics Competition, "the “preeminent mathematics competition for undergraduate college students in the United States." The students met twice-weekly with Prof. Igusa and with graduate student Tudor Popescu to work on fun, practice Putnam problems.
Graduate Events
November 19, 2021
The Math Department hosted a Virtual Open House for students considering graduate studies in applied and pure mathematics. The Open House focused on outreach to a diverse, talented pool of students as part of our efforts to recruit more women and BIPOC students to our PhD and Master's programs. The program included admissions FAQs with our Director of Graduate Study, small group meetings with our faculty, and a student panel with our current PhD students. It was an informative yet casual way for us to connect with prospective students!
August 17, 2021
The Summer Math Prep Camp is a workshop run by the Graduate Student Representatives to help incoming graduate students with the transition to graduate school. Advanced graduate students teach refresher courses in analysis, algebra, and topology.
Graduate Thesis Defenses, 2020-2021
Tarakaram Gollamudi, PhD’21
Thesis Title: "L-ideal at irregular CM points of weight 1"
Advisor: Joël Bellaïche
Abhishek Gupta, PhD’21
Thesis Title: "Faster Markov Chain Monte Carlo Algorithms via Inflation"
Advisor: John Wilmes
Eric Hanson, PhD’21
Thesis Title:"Picture Groups and Simple Minded Collections"
Advisor: Kiyoshi Igusa
McKee Krumpak, PhD’20
Thesis Title: "Twisted h-invariants"
Advisor: Daniel Ruberman
Duncan Levear, PhD’20
Thesis Title: "Bijections for Faces of the Shi and Catalan Arrangements"
Advisor: Olivier Bernardi
Qing Liu, PhD’21
Thesis Title: "Dynamics and rigidity of the Morse boundary"
Advisor: Ruth Charney
Zihao Liu, MS’21
Thesis Title: "Scaled Homology and Topological Entropy"
Advisor: Kiyoshi Igusa
Anurag Rao, PhD’20
Thesis Title: "Some Problems in Uniform Diophantine Approximation"
Advisor: Dmitry Kleinbock
Mishel Skenderi, PhD’21
Thesis Title: "Some Results concerning Random Lattices and Metric Number Theory"
Advisor: Dmitry Kleinbock