2025 Mathematics Newsletter
Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
In Memoriam
Department Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Message from the Chair
Greetings from the GW Math Department.
The department hosted numerous activities in 2024-25. Knots in Washington (KIW) continued with KIW 50 held in December 2024 and KIW 51 held in April 2025. The GW Student Chapter of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) co-organized the 6th Annual Conference on Applied Mathematics along with Johns Hopkins University; University of Maryland, Baltimore County; George Mason University; Georgetown University; and University of Maryland College Park. The meeting was held at Johns Hopkins and included talks and poster-presentations on topics in machine and statistical learning, numerical methods and mathematical biology.
The April 2025 GW Pi Mu Epsilon Talk, “Proof Assistants and the Future of Math (featuring Lean),” was delivered by Apurva Nakade of Johns Hopkins. In February 2025, the GW Math Department and GW Association of Women in Mathematics (AWM) hosted the special event “Connections and Confections: The Four-Color Theorem (and Cake)!” a talk by Professor Joel Lewis on the history of the Four-Color Theorem. The GW AWM also hosted “Universal Artificial Intelligence,” a talk by Professor Keshav Srinivasan, PhD ’24, which was followed by a Career and Grad School Q&A Panel.
We are very proud of the students we graduate each year and all the good things they do after they leave GW. We look forward to math
gwu [dot] edu (hearing from them) and visiting with them when they return to Foggy Bottom.
Sincerely,
Frank Baginski
Professor of Mathematics and Department Chair
Department Spotlights
Knots in Washington 50!
Every semester, GW topologists and their collaborators organize an international conference in the D.C. area on Knot Theory and its Ramifications. This tradition was started in fall 1995 by Jozef H. Przytycki and Yongwu Rong. This fall, a group led by Professor Przytycki organized the three-day anniversary conference Knots in Washington 50 in December 2024, supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF). Over 80 participants from the United States and abroad attended, including a number of GW graduate students and alumni. Plenary speakers included alumnus Adam Sikora, MA ’97, (U. at Buffalo) as well as K. Kawamuro (U. of Iowa), M. Khovanov (Johns Hopkins U.), S. Krushkal (U. of Virginia), C. Lee (Texas State U.) and A. Lowrance (Vassar College).
A group led by Professor Przytycki also organized the three-day Knots in Washington 51 conference in April, 2025. The conference started with a talk by Anna Zamojska-Dzienio, Warsaw University of Technology, Poland. It was also the Distinguished Speculative First of April talk.
Faculty Awards
Professor Joel Lewis was awarded the Columbian Prize for Teaching and Mentoring Advanced Undergraduate Students at the CCAS graduation ceremony in May. The award recognizes his excellent record of research mentorship and support for undergraduate students. Professor Valentina Harizanov received the Office of the Vice Provost for Research Distinguished Career Award at the 15th Annual Faculty Honors Ceremony in April. The award supports and recognizes excellence in research and scholarship.
In Memoriam
With great sadness, we learned that Professor Emeritus Murli Gupta passed away on August 19, 2024. He worked at GW for 46 years teaching a variety of courses and successfully conducting research in numerical analysis. He provided a long and distinguished university service as a faculty senator. He was also the director of the GW Summer Program for Women in Mathematics during 1995–2013.
Department Kudos
Professors William Schmitt, Daniel Ullman and Hugo Junghenn retired after successful careers and long tenures at GW. Professor Ullman delivered his retirement colloquium talk on “Classic Problems” on April 18.
Professor Max Alekseyev received the Test of Time Award at the 2025 International Conference on Research in Computational Molecular Biology (RECOMB), widely regarded as the most prestigious international conference in computational biology. The award recognized Dr. Alekseyev’s 2013 landmark paper “Assembling Genomes and Mini-Metagenomes from Highly Chimeric Reads,” which introduced SPAdes, a genome assembly tool that reconstructs complete genomes from fragmented and noisy sequencing data. Selected from hundreds of submissions RECOMB receives annually, the award honors papers that have demonstrated lasting impact and continued relevance over more than a decade.
Professor Jay Daigle published an opinion piece titled “Election predictions can’t be proven – and that’s not a problem” at Britain’s LBC Opinion.
Professor Valentina Harizanov co-authored the article “In Memory of Martin Davis,” one of the four mathematicians who solved Hilbert’s Tenth Problem. It appeared in the August 2024 issue of the Notices of the AMS.
Professor Harizanov also co-organized, as part of an NSF focused research group, the workshop on Definability, Decidability, and Computability at Harvard University during July 28–August 2. Graduate students Keshav Srinivasan and Henry Klatt gave presentations at the workshop.
Professor Harizanov also continued to organize, with Professors Przytycki and Alekseyev, the University Seminar Computability, Complexity and Algebraic Structure, which featured a variety of talks by GW and outside speakers.
Professor Lien-Yung Nyima Kao received a five-year NSF CAREER award for his project “Ergodic Geometry Beyond Compactness and Uniform Hyperbolicity.” As part of his project, he will establish the GW Experimental Mathematics Lab, creating a collaborative and vertically integrated research environment.
Professor Joel Lewis co-authored Princ-wiki-a Mathematica: Wikipedia Editing and Mathematics, an introduction to Wikipedia editing for mathematicians. It appeared in the January 2025 issue of the Notices of the AMS.
Professor Lewis also led the Mid-Atlantic Algebra, Geometry, and Combinatorics Workshop (MAAGC 2024), which the Math Department hosted in October 2024. The workshop included invited talks, poster presentations by graduate students along with a panel discussion including GW math alumni Jiayuan Wang, PhD ’22, and Jingjing Xu, PhD ’22.
This year’s Pi Mu Epsilon talk and induction of new members was held in April. Apurva Nakade of Johns Hopkins University gave a talk titled “Proof Assistants and the Future of Math (featuring Lean).” Six new Pi Mu Epsilon members were inducted: Maggie Baker, BS ’25, Samuel Harris, BS ’25, and current students Orlando Luce, Leehe Peleg, Shivani Regan and Georgia Semenzato.
Several math students presented thesis defenses. Undergraduate student Paul Bianco successfully defended his honors thesis, “Spaces of Orders on Magmas,” in December 2024. Wangbo Luo and Philip White both defended their PhD dissertations. Luo’s thesis was titled “Generalized Ohta-Kawasaki Model: Theory and Numerics.” White’s was titled “The Syntactic Characterization of Computability Theoretic Properties.”
Congratulations to our Math Department award winners! Charlene Houchins won the Graduate Student Teaching Award. Anthony Christiana and Peiqi Yang shared the James J. Taylor Mathematics Graduate Prize for excellence in graduate research and overall accomplishments. Yaqi Wu was awarded Marvin Green Prize for significant use of computing. And Alexander Rankin and Shivani Regan shared the Ruggles Undergraduate Mathematics Prize.
Alumni Class Notes
- Tim Neuman, BS ’24, is moving closer to his home country Germany and pursuing a master’s in quantum information science and technology at TU Delft in the Netherlands.
- Glenn Simmons, BA ’69, is grateful to still be selling real estate with VIP Realty Group Sales on Sanibel Island, Florida, at age 86.