The architecture of each person’s brain is unique, and differences may influence how quickly people can complete various cognitive tasks. But how neuroanatomy impacts performance is largely an open question. To learn more, scientists are developing a new tool — computational models of the brain — to simulate how the structure of the brain may impact brain activity and, ultimately, human behavior. The research focuses on interconnectivity within the brain, looking at how different regions are linked to and interact with one another (traits that vary between individuals). A team led by Sarah Muldoon finds that this approach shows promise for understanding the interplay between brain structure and performance on language-related tasks. The research was published in PLOS Computational Biology on Oct. 17, 2018. Read more in the UB News Release.

The Department of Mathematics is pleased to announce that, as of July 1, 2018, Dr. Gino Biondini will be named department chair. Dr. Biondini takes over from Dr. David Hemmer who on the same day will begin to serve as dean of Michigan Technological University’s College of Sciences and Arts. Read more.

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.

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.