A Showcase of Undergraduate Research

Article By: Brian Pigott

Each year senior undergraduates in the Math Specialist program at the University of Toronto take a seminar course taught by a senior faculty member. A glance at the course calendar provides almost no information about the course, with the exception of the phrase “Student presentations will be required.”

During the 2009-2010 term, this course was taught by Professor P. Milman who took the presentations to a new level using a new Departmental Wiki page to showcase these innovations. When asked about the purpose of the course Professor Milman said “I wanted to force them to prepare good talks that the other students could absorb.”

Students were required to prepare notes on a topic approved by Professor Milman using Beamer, a LaTeX document class used for preparing slides for presentations. These slides would then be distributed to the audience to be used as an aid for following the seminar. Professor Milman reviewed the notes ahead of time to make sure they were succinctly brief so as not to be read like a book during presentations. This brevity meant that questions played an integral role in the seminars with Professor Milman assigning participation marks to the students based on their level of engagement in the presentations. “If you want to be a mathematician, you have to learn to ask questions,” he said.

The presentation topics themselves were diverse, covering major theorems from differential topology, algebraic geometry, resolution of singularities, and others. For many of the students, this was their first time reading research articles or advanced textbooks. From the perspective of the students, the workload was enormous. Will Pazner, a third-year undergraduate who was registered in the course, said, “I have never worked that hard on a single project before, especially leading up to the presentation date.”

That hard work paid out in the end, though. Janet Li, a fourth-year student in the course, said that she took away a confidence in her ability to prepare and deliver a good presentation. “(Professor) Milman’s dedication really motivated us,” she said. According to Paul Harrison, a fourth-year undergraduate, “It gave me a whole new appreciation for how much work the professors put into preparing lectures.”

Professor Milman put in his share of hours as well, from spending six hours on the phone on a Sunday with Janet Li, to what Will Pazner figured to be twenty hours in his office answering questions. Paul Harrison said that he felt more like a collaborator than a student with Professor Milman.

Altogether there were fifteen presentations given in the course, with one talk being given by a student who wasn’t officially part of the course but who wanted to participate nonetheless.

At the end of the course, each student received a gift from Professor Milman: a CD with a class photo, preliminary materials prepared by Professor Milman, and the slides from each of the presentations.

When asked what it was that he hoped students took away from the course, Professor Milman replied, “I wanted them to see mathematics as a whole (though none of the students chose a topic in analysis) and to experience at least some aspects of the working life of a mathematician.”

For more information or to see the slides from the presentations, please visit the official Wiki page for the course:
http://wiki.math.toronto.edu/TorontoMathWiki/index.php/2009-2010_MAT477_Seminar

UTSC Mathematics Professor Wins Coxeter-James Award

Professor Bálint Virág of the Department of Computer and Mathematical Sciences (UTSC) and the Graduate Departments of Mathematics and Statistics on the St. George campus has been awarded this year’s Coxeter-James prize in Mathematics.

From their website: The Coxeter-James Prize was inaugurated to recognize young mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to mathematical research. The first award was presented in 1978.

Since it’s inception in 1978 eight other winners of the prize have been affiliated with the University of Toronto.

Congratulations to Professor Virag!

More on the story can be found here

CMS Cover Page Article

V. Kumar MurtyThe cover page editorial article for this month’s CMS Notes was written by Professor Kumar Murty, Chair of the Department of Mathematics.  He also holds the position of Vice-President of the CMS.

The article is entitled “Mathematics in a Changing World” and describes the many challenges faced by mathematics departments across the country and the different ways to make the most of these changes.

3 Sloans! A New Record!

We are delighted to announce the Department of Mathematics is the recipient of three (3) Sloan Fellowship Research Awards.

The winners are Larry GuthSpyros Alexakis and Balazs Szegedy

“The Sloan Research Fellowships seek to stimulate fundamental research by early-career scientists and scholars of outstanding promise. These two-year fellowships are awarded yearly to 118 researchers in recognition of distinguished performance and a unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field.” - http://www.sloan.org/fellowships

“With three Sloan recipients, the Department of Mathematics has set a new U of T record for the number of fellowships going to a single department. Of 19 Sloans awarded to mathematicians this year, three went to U of T, two went to SUNY, Stony Brook and 14 other universities got one each.”

Congratulations to the winners!

Official UofT Article

Faculty Honoured for Excellence in Teaching

The department is proud and honoured to announce that Professor James Colliander is a recipient of one of this year’s Outstanding Teaching Awards given out by the Faculty of Arts and Science.

The criteria for the awards is as follows:

The awards are made on the basis of continuing excellence in undergraduate teaching and other contributions to undergraduate education in the Faculty of Arts and Science (St. George). The following attributes are considered:

  • excellence in communication skills
  • mastery of subject area
  • ability to stimulate critical and analytical thinking in students
  • ability to stimulate enthusiasm in students
  • innovations and creativity in teaching methods, course design, and curriculum development

We are very proud of our distinguished faculty member for receiving this honour.

Full Story

Faculty Honoured

Professor’s Yael Karshon and Stephen Kudla were recently honoured by the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) for their great contributions to teaching and research.

Professor Yael Karshon was honoured with the 2009 Krieger-Nelson Prize. Awarded for her work with symmetries of symplectic manifolds, formalized as Hamiltonian group actions.

Professor Stephen Kudla was honoured with the 2009 Jeffery-Williams Prize. He was awarded for his work on forming connections between the theory of automorphic forms and the theory of algebraic cycles on Shimura varieties.

Further information on both these prestigious awards can be found in the CMS Notes, Volume 41, No. 6 (October 2009) (pages 8 and 9)

Congratulations to them both!