2026 Mathematics Newsletter
Message from the Chair
Department Spotlights
Department Kudos
Alumni Class Notes
Message from the Chair
Greetings from the GW Math Department!
The department hosted numerous activities in 2025-26. Knots in Washington (KiW) continued with KiW 52 held in December 2025 and KiW 53 held in April 2026. The April 2026 GW Pi Mu Epsilon Talk, “Conway-Coxeter Friezes and SLk-Tilings,” was delivered by GW alumnus Dr. Zachery Peterson, BS ’18, from William and Mary. Also in April, the GW Association of Women in Mathematics hosted a talk “Music Theory Mod n” by graduate student Anthony Christiani and a panel discussion on careers.
The department hosted honors thesis defenses by Shivani Regan, Georgia Semzato and Abigail Stein. As part of his National Science Foundation (NSF) CAREER Award, Professor Lien-Yung Kao established the GW Experimental Mathematics Lab in Spring 2026. GW will host the 2026 Fall Eastern Sectional Meeting, October 3-4, 2026, and we hope to see many of you there.
We are very proud of the students we graduate and all the good things they do after they leave GW. We look forward to hearing from them and visiting with them when they return to Foggy Bottom.
Please math
gwu [dot] edu (email us) and keep in touch!
Sincerely,
Frank E. Baginski
Professor of Mathematics and Department Chair
Department Spotlights
Kao Wins CAREER Award Honors
Professor Lien-Yung (Nyima) Kao was recognized with the National Science Foundation’s prestigious honor for his work combining ergodic theory and geometry to test how orderly systems respond to chaos. He was profiled in the CCAS Spotlight newsmagazine.
GW Experimental Mathematics Lab
The George Washington University Experimental Mathematics Lab (GWEML) is vertically integrated research and learning community that brings together faculty, graduate students and undergraduates to explore mathematics through experimentation, visualization and collaboration. The lab emphasizes a hands-on approach—using computation, simulation and construction—to connect classroom learning with active research, while fostering mentoring and outreach. The lab is supported by the NSF CAREER Award of Professor Lien-Yung Kao.
This semester, the lab features four collaborative projects led by Kao and additional faculty mentors Professors Max Alekseyev, Joel Lewis and Xiaofeng Ren.
Graduate student mentors include Charlene Houchins, Mathew Kukla, Yi Nie, Sophie Rubenfeld and Chengyi Yang. Undergraduate participants include Owen Cain, Chesapeake Dowdy, Oliver Kemper, Robin Liam, Suzane Rai, Aaron Shanil, Rohan Singh and Jiexi Xie.
Students presented their work through midterm and final presentations, and several participants also showcased their projects at the CCAS Research Showcase, highlighting the lab’s emphasis on communication and public engagement. Together, these teams form a collaborative research community that highlights the lab’s core philosophy: learning mathematics by doing mathematics.
Departmental Awards
Professor Sharon Roosevelt will be awarded the 2026 Robert W. Kenny Prize for Innovation in Teaching of Introductory Courses. The Kenny Prize recognizes a faculty member whose teaching has encouraged students to think differently, allowing them to take advantage of their academic experiences at GW in the beginning of their GW experience. Professor Roosevelt created, designed and supervises an undergraduate learning assistant program that provides additional foundational and study-skills support to students at risk of doing poorly in Math 1220/1221, the two-semester Calculus 1 sequence.
PhD student Huizheng (Ali) Guo is the second-place winner for the Outstanding Dissertation Award in the category of Physical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering. This recognition is a testament to the exceptional quality, originality and rigor of research. As a recipient of the Outstanding Dissertation Award, Ali Guo will be recognized at the GW Innovation Fest on Thursday, April 30, 2026.
Department Kudos
The Murli Gupta Fund was bequeathed by Professor Murli Gupta (1946–2024) to provide financial support for a graduate student in the Mathematics Department. The fund provides a need‐based fellowship, awarded each year to one graduate student.
Professors Valentina Harizanov and Keshav Srinivasan and graduate student Henry Klatt co-organized an AMS special session on definability, decidability and computability at the 2026 Joint Math Meetings. Professor Harizanov also co-organized an Association for Symbolic Logic special session on computability and its applications.
In fall 2025, Professor Harizanov also co-organized a semester-long research program at Hausdorff Institute of Mathematics in Bonn, Germany, on definability, decidability and computability. Graduate students Henry Klatt, Jacob Rhody, Paula de Lima Souza and Jeremias Valenzuela Morales were supported participants in the program.
Professor Hugo Junghenn recently retired after a successful career and long tenure at GW in spring last year. We held an official retirement lunch for him on April 17 in Sichuan Pavilion.
Professor Joel Lewis co-organized an AMS special session on algebraic and geometric combinatorics at the 2026 Joint Math Meetings in Washington. He also co-organized the 2025 edition of the Mid-Atlantic Algebra, Combinatorics, and Geometry workshop. This year’s edition of the workshop took place in New York at the CUNY Graduate Center. Next year’s edition will be held at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. The workshop should return for another GW edition in the following year.
Professor Jozef H. Przytycki co-organized an AMS special session on recent progress in quantum topology. He also led a group that organized a 3-day conference Knots in Washington 52 in December. The conference started with a talk by Mikhail Khovanov, from John Hopkins University. The group also organized a 3-day conference Knots in Washington 53 in April. The conference started with a talk by Boyu Zhang of University of Maryland.
Professors Harizanov, Przytycki and Max Alekseyev also organized the University Seminar Computability, Complexity and Algebraic Structure, which featured a variety of talks by GW and outside speakers, such as: Java Villano, University of Toronto; alumnus Andrew Hirsch, University of Buffalo; Alexei Miasnikov, Stevens Institute. The Distinguished Speculative First of April talk (jointly held with the University Seminar) was delivered by Anzor Beridze, Batumi Shota Rustaveli State University, Georgia.
Six GW undergraduates participated in the 86th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition in December 2025. Nationwide there were 4329 participants from 487 institutions across the United States and Canada. The GW team (Orlando Luce, Shivani Regan and Winter Stelling) placed 169th. Professor Daniel Ullman is the director of the competition.
This year’s Pi Mu Epsilon talk and induction of new members was held in April. Alumnus Zachery Peterson, BS ’18, from the College of William and Mary gave a very interesting talk titled “Conway-Coxeter Friezes and SL k-Tilings.” Five new Pi Mu Epsilon members were inducted: Gabrielle Gilberti, Liana Moldovanu, Ramit Parshad, Liam Robins and Anusha Shah. Congratulations to all!
The GW Chapter for Women in Mathematics organized a special event on April 24 starting with a lecture “Music Theory Mod n” by graduate student Anthony Christiana. The lecture was followed by panel discussion about careers in math and graduate school.
Anthony Christiana was also awarded the Graduate Student Teaching Award. Yaqi Wu was awarded the James J. Taylor Mathematics Graduate Prize for excellence in graduate research and overall accomplishments. Christiana, graduate student Ben Clingenpeel and undergraduate Georgia Semenzato shared the Marvin Green Prize for significant use of computing. Orlando Luce and Liana Moldovanu shared the Ruggles Undergraduate Mathematics Prize.
First-year student Amelia Nelson won an individual bronze medal in the Calculus Olympiad organized by George Mason University. There were 165 students from 13 high schools and seven colleges participating in the competition. Amelia is studying sociology with minors in journalism and data science. She loves math, running and rock climbing. In her free time, she writes for the GW Hatchet.
In a double-header on May 1, undergraduate Georgia Semenzato defended her honors thesis, “Lazy Cost Functions on Symmetric Groups,” and undergraduate Shivani Regan defended her honors thesis, “Inversion Arrangements, Bruhat Order, and Pattern Avoidance in Coxeter Groups.” Both theses were advised by Professor Joel Lewis.
On April 29, undergraduate Abigail Stein defended her honors thesis “Power and Limitations of Computing with Finite Automata,” advised by Professor Valentina Harizanov.
Professors Katharine Gurski (Howard University) and Rebecca Rebhuhn-Glanz (George Mason University) co-organized an AMS special session on a “Research Showcase of the Summer Program for Women in Mathematics: 1995-2013” in honor of Professor Murli Gupta during the 2026 Joint Math Meetings.
Alumni Class Notes
- Viola Hoche Foronda, BS ’83, lives in North Potomac, Maryland, and works as an account manager and business manager at a private firm in Rockville. She and her husband, GW graduate, visit GW every January 5th, for their wedding anniversary.
- Andrew Meranda, BS ‘82, is a pilot with the North Carolina Forest Service, a Civil Air Patrol Unmanned Systems Mission Pilot (drones)/instructor/check pilot and Transport Mission Pilot. He is a U.S. Air Force Vietnam veteran and is partially retired for the third time. He served 27 years with the Federal Government and 12 years with private industry. He lives in Western North Carolina on Lake James. He has owned and flown his Maule MX-7-180 bush plane for 37 years.
- Gabriel Montoya-Vega, PhD ’22, finished his postdoctoral fellowship with the NSF at CUNY in 2025. He then joined the Math Department at the University of Puerto Rico at Rio Piedras in San Juan.
- Stanley Seelig, BS ’77, retired after 40+ years as an industrial chemist, chemical consultant and chemical entrepreneur. He is now working on a start-up chemical company with a local university.