Month: June 2017

This year a number of faculty members in the department welcomed new additions to their families.

Meredith and Michael Burr were happy to introduce Joshua Kevin Burr, born October 23, 2016.

Mishko Mitkovski and Svetlana Poznanovikj were pleased to announce the birth of their daughter, Stella Mila Mitkovski, who was born on February 9, 2017.

Elena Dimitrova and her husband Jean-Paul Cane welcomed their daughter, Marguerite Sofia Cane, on March 9, 2017.

Congratulations to all of these tiger families!

Dr. Heister is a hard working, dedicated teacher who routinely goes out of his way to help students.  As expected for a winner of this award, Dr. Heister’s teaching evaluations have been excellent, despite his teaching of primarily programming-heavy service courses.  He has been a great asset to many graduate students over the past few years, as he has put forth tremendous effort helping them use deal.II software (large scale, parallel programming libraries for solving PDEs) for their research.  He has also has made a mark in undergraduate education: in 2015, Dr. Heister published a textbook for the MATH3650 course that retails for $20 at the bookstore – the students love both the book and the price.

This year, Clemson has been distinguished by the participation of four Mathematical Sciences majors in the prestigious Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. Alex Stoll participated in Fall 2016, while Daniel Christensen, Sloan Nietert, and Garrick Stott did so in Spring 2017. According to the BSM website, students in the program take “standard upper-level courses with courses in areas of traditional strength of Hungarian mathematics, such as combinatorics, number theory, and probability theory.”

About the program, Daniel Christensen writes, “I’ve enjoyed my time here in Budapest very much. The history and culture of this place is very rich, and often overlooked, which makes it noticeably unique when compared to other places that I’ve travelled so far in Europe. Also, the classes offered here are all interesting, rigorous and are taught by quality professors. It’s an experience I will never forget and, as a math major, I couldn’t imagine studying abroad anywhere else.”

Garrick Stott echoes many of these sentiments, writing “I’d strongly encourage other math students to study abroad in the BSM program. There’s around 70 students in the program from around the US, all of whom are passionate about mathematics without there being an air of competitiveness amongst the students. The quality of instruction is fantastic, and Budapest is a great city to be in.”

Clemson Mathematical Sciences hosted several conferences and workshops recently, including Operations Research Week, the 31st Clemson Mini-Conference on Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms, the Shannon Centennial, and the joint Clemson/UGA seminar.

Clemson University’s Operations Research Week was held from April 5–7, 2017 in Martin Hall and Freeman Hall. It was jointly organized by Akshay Gupte from Mathematical Sciences and Cole Smith and Burak Eksioglu from Industrial Engineering. Three hour-long research talks were given by the following invited speakers:

– Daniel Bienstock (Columbia University, NY)

– Arie Koster (RWTH Aachen, Germany)

– Jeff Linderoth (University of Wisconsin-Madison).

The purpose of the event was to officially launch and kickstart activities of the Clemson Operations Research Institute (CORI). This is a newly-formed institute that assembles faculty and students that are distributed across campus but active in the areas of mathematical optimization and stochastic processes. Besides the talks, the OR Week also included some social events and research discussions in breakout rooms. About 40 faculty and students from across campus participated in the activities, which were supported by the departments of Mathematical Sciences and Industrial Engineering.

The 31st Clemson Mini-Conference on Discrete Mathematics and Algorithms was held Friday October 21, 2016. It was organized by Clemson faculty members Michael Burr, Neil Calkin, Wayne Goddard, and Svetlana Poznanovik, and held in Clemson’s Hendrix Center.

The mini-conference had six invited talks and a poster session. The invited speakers were:

Megan Bernstein, Georgia Institute of Technology

Albert Bush, Georgia State University

Eva Czabarka, University of South Carolina

Drew Lipman, Clemson University

Jacques Verstraete, University of California San Diego

Xingxing Yu, Georgia Institute of Technology.

The mini-conference had forty registered attendees, from ten different institutions, and several non-registered participants and was supported by the NSA.

The Shannon Centennial at Clemson was part of a series of events financed by the IEEE Information Theory Society taken place around the world to celebrate the life and influence of Claude Shannon on the hundredth anniversary of his birth on 30 April 1916. Shannon is best known for developing the mathematical foundations of communication, data compression, digital computers, cryptography, circuit complexity, flow networks, and juggling, as well as laying foundations of artificial intelligence and human–computer interaction. The list of events can be found at the page http://www.itsoc.org/resources/Shannon-Centenary.

At Clemson University the event took place on December 2, 2016 and involved the seminars of two world renown researchers:

– Emina Soljanin from Rutgers University, and

– Frank Kschischang from University of Toronto.

The event has been principally founded by the IEEE ITSoc together with the RTG grant on Coding Theory, Cryptography and Number Theory and the Holcombe Department of ECE. Local organizers were Felice Manganiello, Gretchen Matthews, Shuhong Gao and Michael Pursley and had an approximate attendance 25 researchers. For more information please visit the link https://www.math.clemson.edu/ccnt/research/shannon-centennial-at-clemson/

The joint Clemson/UGA seminar was held this year on Thursday, April 13. This year’s speaker was Dr. Brian Williams of Los Alamos National Laboratory. He spoke on Gradient-Free Construction of Active Subspaces for Dimension Reduction.

Dr. Williams is contributing to the development and implementation of statistical methods for the design and analysis of experiments, focusing on the technical areas of sequential optimization, global sensitivity analysis, model calibration, predictive maturity assessment, and rare event inference. Most recently, he worked on the design and utilization of uncertainty quantification tools and methods for nuclear and weapons engineering applications. He is a Fellow of the American Statistical Association.

The joint Clemson/UGA seminar has been held between the UGA Department of Statistics and our department since 1973. Previously it was held twice a year, so this year was the 69th joint seminar. Past speakers include Ingram Olkin, Malay Ghosh, Pranab K. Sen, Steve Stigler, Ray Carroll, Ed George, George Casella, John Stufken, Richard Davis, Jianqing Fan, Steve Marron, Marie Davidian, Kathryn Chaloner, Jim Berger, and David Ruppert.

This year’s seminar had approximately 60 attendees from the UGA Department of Statistics and the Clemson departments of Mathematical Sciences, Civil Engineering, and Environmental Engineering & Earth Sciences. The seminar was partially funded by Clemson’s Mathematical Sciences Department.

We profile two of the research projects recently funded in Mathematical Sciences: Warren Adams’ work in operations research that was funded by the Office of Naval Research, and Mishko Mitkovski’s analysis research that was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Warren Adams

New RLT Theory for Solving Continuous Nonlinear and Mixed-Discrete Optimization Problems

The US Navy is interested in developing novel solution methods for solving large-scale optimization problems. These problems commonly arise in such scenarios as engineering design, facility layout and location, logistics, mission planning, production planning and control, resource allocation, and transportation science. Unfortunately, while they are of marked importance, these problems are well-recognized as being extremely difficult to solve. Generally speaking, state-of-the-art solution procedures lag far behind Navy needs, so that research advances can have significant positive impact. The goal of this project is to develop new theory and tools for more efficiently solving such problems, with the intent of solving larger and more complex instances than currently possible.

A fundamental challenge to solving these optimization problems is the development of mathematical representations that are amenable to solution strategies. While more than one mathematical form can accurately depict a given scenario, the ability to obtain optimal solutions often critically hinges on the formulation used. Two challenges arise. These challenges are: to devise representations that lend themselves to superior solution strategies, and to develop the underlying theory that fully exploits the mathematical structure of the representations. Both challenges are addressed in this research.

A promising direction for obtaining improved representations is to recast motivating problems into different variable spaces. Such problem “redefinitions” use auxiliary variables to partially avoid mathematical complexities, and thus yield simpler forms in higher-dimensional spaces. Over the course of the past 25 years, Drs. Adams and Sherali (former PhD advisor of Dr. Adams) have developed a comprehensive and unifying theory, known as the reformulation-linearization-techinque (RLT), for effectively reformulating difficult combinatorial and nonconvex optimization problems. The RLT theory, which is now well-known in the optimization literature, has led to marked improvements for a wide array of problems. However, the general RLT process is very broad in nature, and there exists considerable potential for further extending the theory and for applying it to additional problem classes.

The main research thrust of this effort is to develop a comprehensive new theory that extends the RLT constructs for mixed-discrete polynomial programs to encompass continuous, nonconvex programs, and to use this newfound theory as the foundation for global optimization methods. A secondary thrust is to invoke existing RLT constructs to unify and extend recent theoretical contributions for classical combinatorial optimization problems.

Mishko Mitkovski

De Branges Spaces as a Model for a General Theory of Function Spaces

A wide variety of problems in mathematics and science in general, after some preliminary mathematical considerations can be expressed as problems concerning operator semigroups. One of the classical approaches for solving these types of problems is to look at the spectral picture of these semigroups. The corresponding spectral picture usually involves a chain of spaces of analytic functions, and understanding the structure of these spaces is crucial for resolving the initial problem. The class of de Branges spaces is one of the most important classes that appears in the spectral picture of a very general class of operator semigroups. Introduced in the sixties, the theory of de Branges spaces encompasses a great deal of mathematical analysis knowledge at that time. In particular, this theory generalizes the theory of orthogonal polynomials, moment problems, the theory of Sturm-Liouville systems, Schrodinger operators, Dirac systems, Krein strings, etc. As such, it continues to play an important role in modern mathematics providing a setting for interplay between various areas of mathematics, including Fourier analysis, spectral theory, operator theory, random matrix theory, analytic number theory, and mathematical physics.

The main research objective of this project is to conduct a deeper analysis of de Branges function spaces, and use the resulting findings to attack and resolve several long-standing open problems. Many of these problems are much more general in nature and go far beyond the setting of de Branges spaces. The reason that we chose de Branges spaces as a model is due to the fact that this class of spaces already contains most of the key difficulties. A second goal of this project is to develop a theory that will unify the theory of classical function spaces, and use this unification as a guideline to new methods for resolving the remaining open questions about these spaces. Until now, most of the function spaces were studied one at a time and consequently there are many results which are known to hold for some of them, but are considered to be not known for other spaces. With so many results appearing almost daily it becomes really difficult even for the experts to keep track of what is known and what is unknown for each space separately. This project provides a solution to this problem by offering a framework to systematize all these results, and make it clear which of the properties are known and which ones deserve a further exploration. Furthermore, it also allows one to identify and adapt techniques that were successful in certain spaces, and use them to attack similar problems in other spaces. Finally, this project provides a language that is easily accessible both to people working in function and operator theory, as well to people working in mathematical physics and harmonic analysis. This way, it provides a bridge to translate and apply ideas from different areas of mathematics.

Meet the members of Clemson’s Mathematical Sciences family who came on board during the past year.

Sharon Evans and her husband moved from Georgia to Seneca, SC a year ago to enjoy life on Lake Keowee. Their five grown children live in CA, NC, NY and GA so they do a bit of traveling. In her spare time, she enjoys swimming, biking and CrossFit. She is currently coordinating STAT 3090. Prior to coming to Clemson as a Lecturer, she taught for five years at Perimeter College at Georgia State University as well as various high schools in GA, PA and OH. While at Perimeter College, she developed online courses in statistics and calculus as well as a precalculus course for the University System of Georgia.

Jenna Gettings is a Postdoctoral Fellow working in the Mathematical Sciences Department as part of a team of researchers working to create mathematical models for several zoonotic canine vector-borne pathogens. She graduated from North Carolina State University with a Doctor of Veterinary Medicine in 2012, worked in private practice for 4.5 years, and graduated from the University of North Carolina with a Master of Public Health in Epidemiology in 2016. She is excited to be working with a truly multi-disciplinary research group and to be actively applying the One Health concept. Her mentors in the department are Chris McMahan and Robert Lund, supported through their grant from CAPC (Companion Animals Parasite Council).

Carlos Nicolas Gomez is an Assistant Professor of Mathematics Education jointly appointed in the Department of Teaching and Learning and Mathematical Sciences. His research interests center on issues of mathematics teacher development. Specifically, he focuses on the emotional experiences of teachers as they form their identities as teachers-of-mathematics. He is also interested in teachers learning to conduct argumentation and developing professional learning communities. Carlos received his Ph.D. from the University of Georgia Department of Mathematics and Science Education. Prior to this he taught mathematics for five years at Winder-Barrow High School in Winder, Georgia.

Qi Ke is a Visiting Scholar in the Mathematical Sciences Department from June 2016 to July 2017. He is an associate professor in the School of Computer Science at Guangzhou University in China. His research interests are wireless sensor network security, watermarking, steganography and steganalysis, and coding theory. He is working with Shuhong Gao in the field of information hiding with lattices.

Hiram H. Lopez Valdez received his Ph.D. Degree in Mathematics from CINVESTAV-IPN, in Mexico City, May 2016. Under the supervision Dr. Rafael H. Villarreal, he worked on coding theory from a commutative algebra point of view. His earlier degree is from the Autonomous University of Aguascalientes, Mexico. During his Ph.D. program, Dr. Lopez had research visits at IMPA (Rio de Janeiro, Basil), at University of Uberlandia (Brazil), and at University of Neuchatel (Switzerland). He is a Postdoc/Visiting Scholar with us, working with Felice Manganiello and Gretchen Matthews. He is partially supported by a personal postdoctoral grant from the Mexican national science foundation (CONACyT). Dr. Lopez likes and has research papers in Commutative Algebra, Coding theory and Pattern recognition (the last one is a topic of computer science).

Ling Ma is a new Assistant Professor in the Statistics and Probability subfaculty. She earned her PhD from University of Missouri, Columbia in 2014 and then joined the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) as a postdoctoral fellow before coming to Clemson. Her research interests include survival analysis of interval-censored data, joint modeling of longitudinal and time-to-event data, and statistical methods with applications to reproductive and environmental epidemiology. In her free time, she likes to cook, listen to music and watch movies.

Julie McKenzie started working in our department in June of 2016 as the Student Services Coordinator. Julie grew up in the nearby town of Seneca. She still resides there with her two daughters, ages 13 and 17, and with her two cats. Julie started attending Clemson University in 1988 as an undergraduate student, and was very active in the Pi Beta Phi sorority, the Baptist Student Union, and was even a member of the 1990 Homecoming Court.   She graduated with a Bachelor degree in 1991, and a Masters degree in 1996, both in Elementary Education. Shortly after graduation, Julie began teaching for the School District of Oconee County where she taught for 23 years. She enjoys reading historical novels, doing crafts, swimming, horseback riding, walking, college football, 80s rock music, and spending time with friends and family. Julie has a goal of obtaining a PhD degree in Education from Clemson University.

Tony Nguyen earned a master’s degree in our department and for the past year has been a full-time Lecturer in math sciences and a part-time PhD student in engineering and science education. His research interests in post secondary education include how the learning and understanding of mathematical concepts occurs, the connection between problem solving and problem representation, and mathematics self-efficacy and identity. During free time, Tony enjoys playing Ultimate, running, playing board games, cooking, and drawing.

Chris Wilson graduated from Clemson University in December 2016 with a PhD in mathematical sciences (advisor Pat Gerard). He is a Post Doctoral Fellow and his responsibilities are to work alongside researchers in our department and Greenville Health System’s Department of Pediatrics to assist in designing studies as well as analyzing and reporting data. His research interests are statistical applications and analytical methods for interdisciplinary collaborations. Additionally, he is working towards expanding the relationship between Greenville Health System pediatric researchers and Clemson’s School of Mathematical Sciences faculty and students. His mentor is Billy Bridges.

Honghai Xu joined the undergraduate subfaculty as a Visiting Assistant Professor after completing his PhD in mathematical sciences from Clemson University in 2016, with advisor Wayne Goddard. His research interests lie primarily in the area of graph theory. In his free time, Honghai enjoys spending time with his family, watching soccer, and listening to music.

Shuhan Xu received her PhD from our department under the advisement of Hyesuk Lee and was a Visiting Assistant Professor in the department during the 2016-2017 academic year. Dr. Xu has taken a position as an Assistant Vice President in Compliance Quantitative Operations for Bank of America in Charlotte.

Fei Xue is a new Assistant Professor in the department, working in the Computational Mathematics subfaculty.  His research interests are Development and analysis of numerical methods for solving large-scale algebraic system of equations, and in particular linear and nonlinear eigenvalue problems arising from a variety of applications. Dr. Xue came to Clemson from University of Louisiana at Lafayette, where he was an assistant professor. After earning a PhD from the University of Maryland, Dr. Xue was a visiting assistant professor at Temple University for three years.

Boshi Yang, another new Assistant Professor, received his PhD from the Applied Mathematical and Computational Sciences program at the University of Iowa in 2015. Prior to joining Clemson, he was a postdoctoral fellow in Operations Research at the Tepper Business School of Carnegie Mellon University. His research interests are in mathematical optimization and operations research. In particular, he focuses on solving quadratically constrained quadratic programs (QCQP) with semidefinite programming and conic programming techniques. He is also interested in finding convex hulls/convex relaxations for nonconvex problems and mixed-integer problems. He, along with other researchers with similar interests, claims that their ultimate goal is to #convexify the world.

Oleg Yordanov is a Visiting Scholar from the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia who came to Clemson to work with Elena Dimitrova. His research interests include statistical physics and stochastic processes, fractal-like structures and scattering/transmission of waves by such structures, and nonlinear and chaotic phenomena.

Members of our department at all levels – students, faculty (current and emeritus), and staff – have recently received awards and other forms of recognition that are signs of the outstanding work that happens here every day.

• Patrick Dynes (graduating with degrees in Mathematical Sciences and Computer Engineering) won the Outstanding Senior Award in the Sciences.
• PhD student Yan Liu received a Distinguished Student Paper Award from the International Biometric Society.
• Associate Professor Lea Jenkins was chosen by the American Mathematical Society as the one presenter for the AMS to highlight this year at the Coalition for National Science Funding exhibition, held on May 16 at the Rayburn House Office Building across the street from the U.S. Capitol.
• David Reynolds, accountant for Mathematical Sciences and Physics & Astronomy, earned the College of Science Outstanding Staff Member Award in May.
• Professor emeritus Dan Warner won the 2017 Alan Schaffer Faculty Senate Service Award.

It has been a year since the last newsletter was published, so here are some other department highlights and milestones from our soon-to-end fiscal year (July 2016 – June 2017):

• We’re in a new college (as of July 1, 2016) and the transition this year has been remarkably smooth for us because of outstanding support from the College of Science Dean’s office and also because of extra efforts from our highly capable office staff.
• Professor emeritus Renu Laskar presented a talk for the Math Club in the Fall entitled ‘Beautiful Minds’, recounting for us the famous visitors (five Nobel Laureates, Paul Erdös, and more) who came to Clemson at the invitation of Renu and her late husband Amulya (Professor in Physics & Astronomy). A recording of Renu’s presentation is available at https://youtu.be/jntEK6qTbwQ.
• We taught a lot of students last year in our MATH and STAT courses.   To be exact, not counting labs and independent study sections, 325 students in Summer Session II 2016, 9177 in Fall 2016, 7385 in Spring 2017, and 606 in Summer Session I 2017.
• We graduated 10 PhD, 17 MS, and 54 undergraduate students.
• Professor Jim Brannan retired in December. I still remember when Jim and Bill Moss picked me up at the airport for my interview in spring 1984. With Jim retired, Warren Adams and I are now the ‘old guard’ of the department, though I’ll note that Billy Bridges’ Clemson career is only about 4 months shorter than ours. Jim’s solid impact on our profession will continue, including on an international level. I hear that he will be doing some teaching in China soon.
• With the retirements of Pam King and Glenda Pepin in December, the MOOTB/PDI2 (Math Out Of The Box/Professional Development for Integrated Inquiry) program that had been under our departmental umbrella since late 2005 has also been retired. MOOTB/PDI2, for which Dot Moss served as program director until her retirement, is a K-5 curriculum development system that has positively impacted many students in South Carolina and beyond.
• Clemson Calculus Challenge and the AP Statistics Practice Exam, in April and May, respectively, continue to draw increasingly more and more prospective students to Clemson.   Participant numbers for CCC were 235 students from 35 schools and for the AP Stat exam, 250 students from 16 schools.
• A new degree program, MS in Data Science & Analytics was developed this year by our department and colleagues in the Department of Management. The program received Board of Trustees approval this spring. We held a Corporate Program Launch, gathering executives from several companies for an overview and feedback that will be useful as we move forward towards welcoming the first group of students in summer 2018.
• The University promoted three of our faculty members, effective August 2017:
  • Chris McMahan to Associate Professor (with tenure)
  • Jim Brown to Professor and
  • Xiaoqian Sun to Professor
• We welcomed a new staff member and several faculty members at a variety of levels: visiting scholars and visiting assistant professors, postdoctoral fellows, lecturers, and assistant professors. Short bios of these people are in a separate article.
• We have three more additions to our Clemson family: babies born to Meredith & Michael Burr, Elena Dimitrova & John Paul Cane, and Svetlana Poznanovikj & Mishko Mitkovski.

It is interesting to reflect on the many events in our department over the past year, from babies to retirements with lots of publications, grants, presentations, teaching and research in between. Some of these are described in other articles in this newsletter.  It has been one of the best years I can think of for our students, undergraduate and graduate, to find work. We normally have a couple of PhD graduates who request to stay around for a year and teach while they explore the job market. It appears that we may not have any who need temporary employment with us. Our bachelors and masters graduates are being snatched up also. A Clemson University Mathematical Sciences degree is a hot commodity.

Two final comments:

• Points of contact for our newsletter are Sean Sather-Wagstaff, Connie McClain, Kevin Hedetniemi, and me. We appreciate it when you send along items to post – in the newsletter, on our website as featured stories, or both.   The College of Science now has a full time information director, Jim Melvin, who has significant media experience and is very willing to help get the bigger stories published.
• To those of you who have donated to one of our Foundation accounts (e.g. by clicking on the ‘Giving’ button on our home page), here is a heartfelt Thank You. Your support helps us achieve our mission in ways that would not be possible without your generosity.

– Chris Cox, Chair