May 7, 2014 - ICERM was among the presenters at an exhibition sponsored by the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF) held on May 7 in Washington, D.C. The exhibition, titled "Investments in STEM Research and Education: Fueling American Innovation," aimed to illustrate the value of the federal investment in basic science research to Members of Congress and their staffs. Jill Pipher (ICERM Director), Homer Walker (Deputy Director), and Ruth Crane (Asst. Director), also had the opportunity to meet with Senator Jack Reed as well as staffers from the offices of Senator Sheldon and Representative Jim Langevin. The trip provided many opportunities to discuss the purpose of the NSF-funded math institutes, and to promote math research to a very broad and interested audience.

April 17, 2014 - The National Blackwell-Tapia Committee is pleased to announce that the 2014 Blackwell-Tapia Prize will be awarded to Jacqueline M. Hughes-Oliver, Professor of Statistics, North Carolina State University (visiting George Mason University until May 2014). The prize is awarded every other year in honor of the legacy of David H. Blackwell and Richard A. Tapia, two distinguished mathematical scientists who have been inspirations to more than a generation of African American, Latino/Latina, and Native American students and professionals in the mathematical sciences. Hughes-Oliver has made important contributions in a number of statistical research areas including methodological research on prediction and classification, variable and model selection with dimension reduction, design of experiments, and spatial modeling. She has worked passionately on the cause of increasing diversity of individuals working of the statistical and mathematical sciences. The prize will be presented at the Eighth Blackwell-Tapia Conference, to be held at IPAM on November 14-15, 2014. For more information on the 2014 Blackwell Tapia Conference, go to http://www.ipam.ucla.edu/programs/BTAP2014/

March 31, 2014 - Summer@ICERM 2013 alum Zijian Yao and ICERM faculty advisor Sergei Tabachnikov received an "Outstanding Presentation Award" during the MAA Undergraduate Poster Session at the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meetings. The title of their poster, based on work begun during the Summer@ICERM program, was "Rotation Number of Outer Billiard with Polygonal Invariant Curves."

January 17, 2014 - Francisc Bozgan (UCLA) and Zijian Yao (Brown University) both received "Outstanding Presentation" awards at the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Their posters, based on research conducted while attending the 2012 and 2013 Summer@ICERM programs (respectively), were recognized during the MAA Undergraduate Student Poster Session featuring over 300 presentations. Francisc's poster was titled "Weak Rational Ergodicity of Rank-One Transformations in Infinite Ergodic Theory", and Zijian's poster was titled "Rotation Number of Outer Billiard with Polygonal Invariant Curves."

January 14, 2014 - Jill Pipher, ICERM Director, delivered the MAA Invited Address at the 2014 Joint Mathematics Meeting in Baltimore, MD, on Friday, January 17, 2014. The title of her talk was "The Mathematics of Lattice-based Cryptography." Read more