Stony Brook University - Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics

News

1) Applied Math Chair James Glimm Completing Term as President of the American Mathematics Society

2) Stony Brook team places first in 2009 national student supercomputing competition

3) New York acquires 100 teraflop Blue Gene supercomputer (6th fastest in the world when installed in fall, 2007)

4) Frey Family Foundation endows Chair in Quantitative Finance; Robert Frey earned B.S., M.S., and Ph.D. from our Department

5) High School Student Team Mentored by Professor Wei Zhu Wins Award in Intel Science Competition

6) For Today's Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics, The New York Times Front page article

1) AMS Chair, James Glimm, has recently completed a two year term as President of American Mathematical Society

Professor Glimm's two-year term began in 2007. Glimm is one of the outstanding mathematicians of recent times. He has made deep and original contributions in a variety of areas in both pure and applied mathematics. His early work in the theory of operator algebras was seminal, and today the "Glimm algebras" that bear his name continue to play an important role in this vibrant area of research. In mathematical physics, Glimm worked on problems in quantum field theory, quantum statistical mechanics, shock wave theory, and scientific computation. He represents a new breed of mathematicians who see no boundaries between purely theoretical research and practical applications.

2) Stony Brook team wins Student Cluster Competition at premier supercomputing conference

SC is the premier international conference for high performance computing, networking, storage and analysis. It draws over 11,000 researchers, scientists, engineers, and computing experts from around the world. The conference features a Student Cluster Competition, in which undergraduate-student teams compete against each other to perform benchmark runs and scientific application codes on clusters that the students integrate and install using vendor-sponsored hardware, all under strict power requirement of no more than 3120 Watts.

This year, SC09 was held on November 14-20, 2009 in Oregon Convention Center in Portland, OR.
Seven teams submitted proposals to compete in the Student Cluster Competition, and four teams participated in the final live competition at SC09: Stony Brook University, Arizona State University, Purdue University, and University of Colorado. The Stony Brook team was the overall winner of the competition. The team has particularly excelled in applications runs as well as presentation and visualization of the results.

The faculty coach of the Stony Brook team was Professor Xiangmin (Jim) Jiao of the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Department. The captain of the team was Aaron Pellman-Isaacs, Senior in Biology. Other members of the team were: Anthony Biondo, Freshman in Computer Science, William Chan, Senior in Applied Mathematics, Yuwei (Ethan) Gui, Senior in Computer Science, Jan Kasiak, Freshman in Computer Science, and Xincheng Zhang, Sophomore in Mathematics and Computer Science. The Stony Brook team was sponsored by AMD, Dell, and Mellanox.

3) Stony Brook and Brookhaven Lab Unveil New York Blue Supercomputer That Leverages New York State Investment In Computational Sciences

Stony Brook University and the U.S. Department of Energy’s Brookhaven National Laboratory recently acquired one of the most powerful supercomputers in the world. The IBM Blue Gene supercomputer, named New York Blue and located at Brookhaven Lab, is the world’s fastest supercomputer for general users and ranked among the top ten fastest computers in the world at the time of its installation.
“Supercomputing power - the ability to perform massive numbers of calculations at high speed - is essential for our research into alternative energy sources and many other critical uses,” said Stony Brook University President Shirley Strum Kenny. “Nanotech scientists, nuclear physicists, and computational biologists, among others here, are all working on research devoted to finding new sources of energy, trying to unlock mysteries of disease, and deepening our understanding of the world around us. New York Blue will be a critical engine of discovery for these scientists, a common platform for collaboration.”

For more information go to: http://www.newyorkccs.org/

4) Frey Family Foundation Establishes $1.5M Endowed Chair In Quantitative Finance. SBU Research Professor,
Dr. Robert J. Frey, says fund will be used to recruit and retain preeminent scholar, support research and more

STONY BROOK, NY, May 12, 2008 – Robert J. and Kathryn B. Frey, on behalf of the Frey Family Foundation, announced today a gift of $1.5 million for establishment of the “Frey Family Endowed Chair in Quantitative Finance” in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics in the College of Engineering and Applied Sciences (CEAS) at Stony Brook University. A rapidly growing field of study, quantitative finance is a cross-disciplinary applied science, an engineering discipline, dealing with the application of mathematics and computer science to develop or exploit financial opportunities for return enhancement and risk control. The gift, along with $500,000 in matching funds from the Stony Brook Foundation, will create a $2 million endowed chair that will be used to recruit a preeminent scholar in quantitative finance. Dr. Frey is a research professor, director and developer of the Program in Quantitative Finance in the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics at Stony Brook. He spent 25 years as an applied mathematician in industry, the last 15 of which were spent as a managing director with a well-known hedge fund. According to the Frey Family “Our objective in creating the Program in Quantitative Finance was to produce individuals who would achieve the highest levels in the field. We wanted our graduates to be applied mathematicians whose area of practice was finance, rather than finance professionals with ancillary training in mathematics.”

5) High School Student Team Mentored by Professor Wei Zhu Wins Award in Intel Science Competition

Lennie Zhu and Jason Rudin of the Half Hollow Hills High School West, Dix Hills, New York, have won third award in team projects at the 2009 Intel International Science and Engineering Fair held May 10-15, 2009 in Reno, NV with their project entitled "Uncovering Interneuronal Genetic Pathways through Partial Correlation Network Analysis" mentored by AMS Professor Wei Zhu. The Intel ISEF (http://www.societyforscience.org/ISEF/) is the world’s largest international pre-college science competition, annually provides a forum for more than 1,500 high school students from over 50 countries to showcase their independent research. Each year, millions of students worldwide compete in local and school-sponsored science fairs; the winners of these events go on to participate in Intel ISEF-affiliated regional and state fairs from which the best win the opportunity to attend the Intel ISEF. Previously, Lennie and Jason had won first place as a team in the 2009 New York State Science and Engineering Fair.