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Mar 14, Jonathan Pakianathan, Rochester

Colloquium, 458 Campbell Hall, 2:30pm. An Elementary Construction of Tesselated Riemann Surfaces.
Tesselated polyhedra have been studied from the beginnings of mathematics. Regular spherical polyhedra like those given by the Platonic solids have long been connected to aspects of group theory through the study of reflection groups and through Fuchsian group actions on the upper half plane. However these connections require a decent amount of machinery. In this talk, I will outline an elementary and natural construction studied by Mark Herman, Ergun Yalcin and myself which constructs a singular surface naturally from any finite nonabelian group. This surface desingularized yields a collection of tessellated Riemann surfaces with regular or near-regular tessellation from which subquotients of the group act as the object's automorphism group. The key aspect of the construction is that the group algorithmically constructs these surfaces in a direct manner together with their tesselations and action. No inspiration is needed to find them and the constructions yields many famous classical examples together with potentially new ones. A single group produces a large collection of tessellated surfaces encoding the algebraic structure of the group - for example, the symmetric group on 6 letters produces 4477 tessellated surfaces of 27 distinct genus. Many examples will be discussed during the talk.
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News 2013


    • Dr. John Mayer was appointed co-director of the UABTeach initiative which was recently awarded a $1.45 million dollar grant from the National Math and Science Initiative (NMSI). The UABTeach initiative will revolutionize the preparation of Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) teachers at UAB and will dramatically impact the science education of Alabama's future K-12 students. For further information see the announcements here and here and, of course, the UABTeach site.
    • Profs. Starr, Stolz, and Jung won an NSF grant supporting the CBMS Conference: Quantum Spin Systems which will take place in June 2014.
    • Our former colleague Eugene R. (Gene) Wilson passed away on August 21. Gene was an alumnus of UAB (BS 1977 and MA 1979) and later, from 1983 to his retirement in 2003, the Director of the Mathematics Resource Center (a precursor of today's MLL). Click here for more information.
    • Math major Kiersten Engel  ranked among the top 200 international scorers on the Bloomberg Aptitude Test, click here for more details.
    • Former Fast-track student Ethan Mallick Hossain (MS May 2013) was selected for an internship at the White House, click here for more details.
    • Prof. P. Jung won a Collaboration Grant for Mathematicians from the Simons Foundation.
    • On July 15 Mitch Wyatt successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Uniqueness of the Potential in Schrodinger's Equation with One Boundary Measurement. His studies were directed by Dr. I. Knowles.
    • On July 12 Ross Ptacek successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Laminations and the dynamics of iterated cubic polynomials. His studies were directed by Drs. A. Blokh and L. Oversteegen.
    • Alexandra Fry received the CAS God of the Speed of Light Scholarship.
    • Samuel Wunderly is the recipient of the 2013-2014 Warner Scholarship.
    • Lara Putnam was awarded the 2013-2014 Travis Wood Memorial Scholarship.
    • Jordan Walton received the 2013-2014 O'Neil Scholarship.
    • Tori Gandy, Miriam Hood, and Micaela Kuhn each received a Mathematics Department Scholarship for 2013-2014.
    • Prof. Nandor Simanyi proved a fifty-year-old conjecture of Ya. G. Sinai, the "Boltzmann-Sinai Ergodic Hypothesis", which states that any classically interacting hard sphere system in a box with periodic boundary conditions is ergodic (chaotic). This result is an important building block in the theoretical foundations of statistical physics. The paper may be found here.
    • Prof. Nikolai Chernov was invited to give a lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) to be held in August 2014 in Seoul, Korea. An invitation to the ICM is a very significant honor. Congratulations.
    • The following mathematics students will present at this year's Expo on Friday, April 26 at the Campus Recreation Center:
      • Gaurav Verma (oral presentation at 9:30am)
      • Posters by Jennifer Baggett, Rachel Ejem, Alexandra Fry, Mallick Hossain, and Alicia McCormack
    • Prof. Chernov won an individual research grants from NSF. You may click his name for the award abstracts.
    • PhD student Matthew Bledsoe and Fast-track student Ethan Mallick Hossain received a College of Arts and Sciences Dean’s Award as Outstanding Graduate Student and Outstanding Undergraduate Student, respectively. They will be recognized at the Honors Convocation on Tuesday, May 7 at 3pm.
    • On May 1 Alexei Korepanov successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Small Perturbations in Hard Balls Dynamics. His studies were directed by Drs. N. Chernov and N. Simanyi.
    • On April 18 Jacob Chapman successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Spectral properties of random block operators. His studies were directed by Dr. G. Stolz.
    • Former math student John Knox (BS 1988), now an Associate Professor of Geography at the University of Georgia, won Georgia's Richard B. Russell Award for Excellence in Undergraduate Teaching, the university's highest early career teaching honor. Click here for more details.
    • Our colleague Dr. James (Jim) Ward passed away on Monday, March 25, 2013. His wife Ana has created the Dr. James Robert Ward, Jr. Memorial Scholarship Fund in recognition of Jim's passion for mathematics and the education of mathematics students. Click here for more information.
    • On March 7 Matthew Bledsoe successfully defended his Ph.D. thesis Resonances and Inverse Scattering. His studies were directed by Dr. R. Weikard.
    • Matthew Bledsoe, Joseph Olson, and Mallick Hossain were chosen as the department's Outstanding PhD Student, Outstanding Master's Student, and Outstanding Undergraduate Student, respectively. Congratulations to all.
    Resonances and Inverse Scattering