The 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.
Recently Roman Holowinsky, a former post-doc student here in the Department, alongside Soundararajan, a Professor of Mathematics at Standford University, were profiled in the AIMath newsletter.
Their work on proving the Quantum Unique Ergodicity (QUE) conjecture was featured. The conjecture focuses on how waves are influenced by the geometry of their enclosure, like sound waves in a concert hall. At one end the waves spread out evenly, at the other end there are “whispering zones”.
The pair showed that for certain shapes that come from number theory the waves always spread out evenly leaving no “whispering zones”.
The full article, which includes links to the full papers and other research by the pair, can be found here: http://www.aimath.org/news/que/
Roman Holowinsky was a post doctoral fellow here at the University of Toronto from 2007 – 2009. He was a visitor to the Fields Institute in 2008, is currently working at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) at Princeton and will be a tenure track professor at The Ohio State University starting in July 2010. He specilizes in Analytical Number Theory.
We wish Roman all the best in his research and congratulate him on his work.