News

According to Popular Mechanics, there’s nothing quite like a maddening math problem, mind-bending optical illusion, or twisty logic puzzle to halt all productivity in the magazine's office. We’re curious people by nature, but we also collectively share a stubborn insistence that we’re right, and so we tend to throw work by the wayside whenever we come upon a problem with several seemingly possible solutions. Mathematicians such as Dr. Johanna Mangahas reveal the real answer. How many triangles can you find in this viral math problem?

Mousa Sunnoqrot is a senior at the State University of New York at Buffalo in Amherst, New York, where he is majoring in Mathematics and minoring in Economics and Statistics, with a concentration on Actuarial Science. Mousa is the professional chair for University at Buffalo’s student-run Society of Future Actuaries, and he interned this past summer at Healthfirst in New York City. Mousa is featured in a Q&A by AdvisorSmith, a provider of comprehensive research and advanced tools to better understand insurance for business professionals.

Professor John Ringland was the faculty speaker at the College of Arts Commencement on Sunday, May 19, 2019. See the video of Ringland's commencement address. Faculty commencement speakers are selected by nominations and a vote of graduating students from among all CAS faculty. This distinction adds to several recognitions of John Ringland’s outstanding record of teaching and mentoring of students. He is a recipient of the SUNY Chancellors Award for Excellence in Teaching, and the MAA Seaway Section Clarence Stephens Award for distinguished university teaching.  

UB Math welcomes Barbara Prinari to our faculty in Spring 2019. Her primary research area deals with nonlinear waves and coherent structures, an area that combines analysis, applied mathematics, and concrete physical applications. Her research activity focuses on the inverse scattering transform (IST) for continuous and discrete integrable systems, a mathematical technique that allows to solve the initial value problem for certain nonlinear equations. Prinari also addresses issues of solvability for the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, by identifying function spaces in which the direct and inverse problems are well posed. She has co-authored a monograph on nonlinear Schrödinger systems. Over the past decade, Prinari worked and published on mathematical techniques for solving the initial value problem for nonlinear 2+1 dimensional PDEs with potentials that do not decay at spatial infinity. Most recently, Prinari has been working on the IST for multicomponent nonlinear Schrödinger systems with nonvanishing boundary conditions. We expect Prinari will make full use of abundant resources available at UB and within our department.

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.

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 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.

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.