Research Roundup

We will regularly announce newly posted articles and newly accepted articles within the group.  We are proud to announce the following updates from the past few months.

Arunima Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor

    • Presentation: Geometry and Topology Seminar, Duke University (March 20, 2023)
    • Presentation: Continuum Mechanics Seminar, University of Nebraska-Lincoln (March 30, 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Geometric Analysis Seminar, University of Oregon (May 16, 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Differential Geometry/PDE Seminar, University of Washington (May 17, 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Birthday Conference for Mikhail Safonov, Seoul, South Korea (June 20, 2023)
    • Newly accepted: A. Bhattacharya, J. Chen, and M. Warren: Regularity of Hamiltonian stationary equations in symplectic manifolds, Adv. Math., to appear.
    • Newly accepted: A. Bhattacharya, The Dirichlet problem for the Lagrangian mean curvature equation, Analysis & PDE, to appear.

Benjamin Bechtold, Graduate Student

    • Successfully completed the Departmental Oral Exam (February 2023)

Madelyne Brown, Graduate Student

Yaiza Canzani, Associate Professor

Hans Christianson, Professor

Casey Rodriguez, Assistant Professor

Jian Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow

2023 Undergraduate Research Cohort

With graduation approaching, we want to congratulate our graduating class of undergraduate researchers.

  • Ameer Qaquish has been working with Hans Christianson and will return to UNC in the biostatistics graduate program.
  • David Snider studied with Mark Williams and recently defended his honors thesis “Nonlinear geometric optics for pulses with nonlinear phases”.  He will enrolled in the graduate program in statistics at Columbia University in the fall.
  • Xiao-Ming Porter and Yizhou Gu have worked with Jason Metcalfe.  They presented their research at the 2023 UNC Celebration of Undergraduate Research.
    • Xiao-Ming will graduate with honors with a thesis titled “Local energy estimates for damped waves”.  Xiao-Ming will enroll in the graduate program in mathematics at the National University of Singapore.
    • Yizhou will enroll at the University of Michigan in statistics.  She was one of this year’s recipients of the Archibald Henderson Mathematics Medal and received recognition at the 2023 Chancellor’s Awards Ceremony.

We are extremely proud of these students, provide deep congratulations on their graduations, and wish them much luck in their new endeavors.

High school researchers

The members of the RTG’s first cohort of high school researchers are nearing the end of the senior year.  And we congratulate them on their enrollments at outstanding universities.

Liam Buttita has been studying with RTG faculty member Casey Rodriguez.  Liam worked on obtaining helical equilibrium states for a Cosserat rod model recently introduced by Rodriguez and Rajagopal.  These equilibrium states are obtained via solving for certain relative equilibria of a Hamiltonian system that expresses balances of forces and couples in the rod.  In the fall, Liam will attend the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

Zubin Narayan has been working with RTG faculty member Jason Metcalfe and RTG graduate student Ben Bechtold.  They have examined global existence for wave equations satisfying a null condition with initial data that may be large in the energy space.  Zubin will be departing for Carnegie Mellon University come the fall.

We thank Liam and Zubin for all of their hard work and congratulate them!

RTG Member’s AIM Square Project

RTG group members Yaiza Canzani and Jeremy Marzuola recently returned from their last week-long SQuaRE (Structured Quartet Research Ensembles) at the the American Institute of Mathematics in San Jose, CA.  The two RTG members, along with their collaborators Greg Berkolaiko and Graham Cox began this journey in 2018, when their original collaborative proposal was approved by this NSF funded institute that specializes in bringing small groups together for focused collaboration.  Each team is approved for three annual meetings to solidify the collaboration and allow for deeper discussions over a long period of time.  The team has been working on projects related to properties of eigenfunctions in a variety of settings, as well as on the notion of equipartition for domains and manifolds.  They have found beautiful connections between properties of spectral equipartitions and the corresponding Dirichlet-to-Neumann map for the given partition.

Research roundup

We will regularly announce newly posted articles and newly accepted articles within the group.  We are proud to announce the following updates from the past few months.

Arunima Bhattacharya, Assistant Professor

    • Newly posted: J. Bernstein and A. Bhattacharya: Colding-Minicozzi Entropies in Cartan-Hadamard Manifolds
    • Upcoming invited talk: Geometric Analysis Seminar, University of Chicago (February 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Gauge Theory, Geometric Analysis, and Low-Dimensional Topology, Special Session of an AMS Sectional Virtual Meeting (April 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Geometric and Analytic Methods in PDE, Special Session of an AMS Sectional Meeting (April 2023).
    • Upcoming invited talk: Differential Geometry/PDE Seminar, University of Washington (May 2023).

Madelyne Brown, Graduate Student

    • Presentation: Analysis Seminar, University of Rochester (September 30, 2022)
    • Presentation: Analysis Seminar, University of Wisconsin (October 18, 2022)
    • Attended the Chern-Weil Symposium at the University of Chicago (October 7-9, 2022)
    • Upcoming invited talk:  Analysis and PDE Seminar, Johns Hopkins University (March 6, 2023)

Yaiza Canzani, Associate Professor

    • Newly posted:  Y. Canzani, J. Galkowski, and B. Keeler (former UNC graduate student): Asymptotics for the spectral function on Zoll manifolds.
    • Newly accepted: Y. Canzani and J. Galkowski: Weyl remainders: an application of geodesic beams.  Invent. Math., to appear.
    • Presentation: Münich-Aahrus-Santiago Seminar in Mathematical Physics (virtual) (December 5, 2022)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Geometria em Lisboa Semina (virtual) (January 17, 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Analysis Seminar, Princeton University (February 20, 2023)
    • Upcoming invited talk: Spectral Geometry in the Clouds Seminar (virtual) (March 6, 2023)

Hans Christianson, Professor

Jeremy Marzuola, Professor

Jason MetcalfeProfessor

    • Newly accepted: J. Metcalfe and T. Rhoads (former UNC graduate student): Long-time existence for systems of quasilinear wave equations. Matematica, to appear.
    • Newly accepted: M. Facci (former UNC undergraduate student and current UNC graduate student), A. McEntarffer (former UNC undergraduate student), and J. Metcalfe: An r^p-weighted local energy approach to global existence for null form semilinear wave equations.  Involve, to appear.
    • Presentation: Analysis Seminar, University of New Mexico (virtual) (October 2022)

Casey Rodriguez, Assistant Professor

Michael Taylor, William R. Kenan Distinguished Professor

Jian Wang, Postdoctoral Fellow

 

Welcome Arunima Bhattacharya

We are excited to welcome our newest faculty member, Arunima Bhattacharya.  Arunima earned her Ph.D. in 2019 from the University of Oregon where she worked with Micah Warren.  She subsequently held postdoctoral positions at the University of Washington and SLMath.  Her research focuses on geometric analysis and nonlinear PDE.  Her office will be PH304A.  Please join us in welcoming Arunima to the department and to the group.

Developmental Training Groups

The first year of the Developmental Training Group, which was designed and led by Yaiza Canzani, just wrapped up.  This led to eight applications by students for the NSF Graduate Research Fellowship Program.  This is more than double the number of applications that is typical.  The students were surveyed and the program received unanimous praise.  We are very proud of the work of Yaiza and the students and are looking forward to the results of the applications.

2023 Brauer Lectures by Carlos Kenig

We are delighted to announce the return of the Brauer lectures within the Department of Mathematics at UNC.  The 2023 lectures will be given by Carlos Kenig, Louis Block Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics at the University of Chicago.

Carlos earned his PhD at the University of Chicago in 1978 under the direction of Alberto Calderon.  After holding positions at Princeton and Minnesota, he returned to the University of Chicago in 1985.  Carlos’s recognitions include the Salem Prize (1984), the Bocher Prize (2008), three time ICM speaker (1986, 2002, 2010), elected member of the National Academy of Sciences (2014), and current President of the International Mathematical Union.  Carlos is an expert in harmonic analysis and partial differential equations, and he is an excellent expositor and lecturer for both specialized and general audiences.

The lectures will take place February 6-8, 2023.  And the titles of the talks are:

  • Lecture 1: Asymptotic simplification for solutions of nonlinear wave equations
  • Lecture 2: Wave maps into the sphere
  • Lecture 3: Soliton resolution and channels of energy

Stay tuned to the Events page for more specifics on the times and locations of the lectures.

Local AWM events

The local chapter of the AWM (Association for Women in Mathematics) is holding a number of fascinating events.  We want to encourage all of our group to participate.  See https://math.unc.edu/events/awm-lecture/.  This evening’s event (Monday, October 24) is a panel discussion on jobs for mathematicians outside of academia.  There is an upcoming panel on REU opportunities.  Both of these are outstanding opportunities.