The American Mathematical Society recently published Braid Foliations in Low-Dimensional Topology, co-authored by UB Mathematics Professor William W. Menasco, and Western Illinois University Professor Douglas J. LaFountain. This book is a self-contained introduction to braid foliation techniques, which is a theory developed to study knots, links and surfaces in general 3-manifolds and more specifically in contact 3-manifolds. Professor Menasco is currently serving UB Math as Director of Graduate Studies. Learn more.

A new paper by Gino Biondini and colleagues at the University of Colorado Boulder brings us closer to finding an answer. The research, published in August in the Proceedings of the Royal Society A, lays out a set of newly formulated equations that are designed to characterize what happens when an undular bore occurs and spreads along two axes. Visually, this phenomenon resembles the concentric ripples that proliferate outward when you toss a stone into a pond. Read more.

UB Math welcomes Dane Taylor to our faculty in Fall 2017. His work, at the intersection of high-dimensional data analysis (HDDA), nonlinear and complex systems, and network science, uses analyses of functional and structural networks, time series, images, videos, etc., to study complex systems arising in biology, physics, and engineering. Aiming to develop new tools for HDDA, Taylor's research incorporates methodologies from nonlinear dynamics, linear algebra, spectral graph theory, computational topology, statistics, statistical physics and machine learning. We expect Taylor will make full use of abundant resources available at UB and within our department.

UB Math welcomes Alexandru Chirvasitu to our faculty in Fall 2017. His work includes: representation theory with a quantum group flavour; non-commutative geometry and some functional analysis and operator algebras; category theory; and some algebraic geometry, mostly foundational issues, such as scheme/stack reconstruction from category-theoretic data. Chirvasitu is co-author of Exotic Elliptic Algebras of dimension 4 (with S. Paul Smith) forthcoming in Advances in Mathematics. We look forward to watching his impressive publication repository continue to grow as a member of our faculty.