Letter from Mathematical Sciences Department Head, Tom Bohman

Undergraduate research has become a hallmark of a Carnegie Mellon University education, with students citing that it has helped to prepare them for their futures in academia and the workforce. Mathematics hasn’t traditionally been seen as a field where students do meaningful research; over the course of the last few years, the department has made a concerted effort to change that.

In this issue of the Department of Mathematical Sciences Newsletter, we highlight undergraduate research in the department and the programs we have developed to provide research experiences for our students. Our main interest is in summer programs that allow students to focus on a project without the distractions of coursework. With the institution of these programs, the number of students engaged in summer research has grown over the last four years from a handful to more than 60 working on high-quality, open-ended mathematics projects. This is an extraordinary program that very few, if any, other mathematics departments can match.

In addition to exposing students to research, the summer programs, which include the Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowships (SURF) and the Mathematical Finance Summer Undergraduate Research Program, give students the opportunity to be mentored by our renowned faculty. The mathematical finance program, which has grown dramatically in the last few years, is administered by Bill Hrusa. The SURF program involves a large fraction of the faculty, including Florian Frick, who recently joined us as an assistant professor and was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship this year (see the articles on pages 14 and 16 for more on Professor Frick and his research).

The summer research programs have been made possible through the support of our alumni, including David Simmons, Larry Jennings, David and Jacqui Martin, and Elizabeth and Konstatin Andreev. To learn more about the research our students engage in, see page 28 for details on the 2019 SURF projects and page 10 for an article on the evolution of the summer programs. Additionally, the image on the cover of this issue is drawn from the SURF project of Fei Peng, a junior mentored by Professor Frick.

Of course, there have been many other developments in the department. In this issue you can also read about our new faculty, faculty awards (including Po-Shen Loh’s receipt of the Presidential Early Career Award in Science in Engineering) and student awards.