News

At the 37th New England Statistics Symposium, graduate students Christopher Odoom and Denis Folitse each won student poster awards (sponsored by insurance company Munich Re). The conference was held at the University of Connecticut on 20-24 May 2024.

The Awards Dinner recognized the many activities and achievements of students within the Department of Mathematics and Statistics during the 2023–2024 academic year.

This is my final year as department head and more significantly as a professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at UMass. I am retiring. It has been quite a run, starting here as a young assistant professor in 1987. It is bittersweet, in that I am looking forward to doing new things, but I will truly miss this great department. 

Some of the many things that happened in the last year.

In September 2023 the journal Transformation Groups published a special volume dedicated to the memory of Professor Jim Humphreys, our late colleague. Jim, who joined the faculty in 1974 and became emeritus in 2003, passed away in August 2020. Jim was a prolific author and an influential researcher. His research focused on algebraic questions related to simple Lie algebras, whose classification boils down to understanding the most common symmetry groups, including the symmetries of the cube and the tetrahedron and their generalizations to higher dimensions. Jim had a deep influence on this

This past summer the department mentored 20 undergraduate students in research under the auspices of its Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) and the Lee Science Impact Program of the College of Natural Sciences. The projects covered subjects like Statistics, Data Science, Mathematical Physics, Disease modeling, Mathematical Biology, Partial Differential Equations, Algebra, Discrete Math, and Algebraic Geometry. For more about the research, see the REU website (https://sites.google.com/umass.edu/umassmathreu/),
where the titles and reports are available.