Author: Heather Powers

This years awardees for the Graduate Student Government Merit Awards have been decided. A total of 88 nominations were received from departments all across campus. The decision process was not an easy one as there was a very strong pool of nominations this year. We are very grateful to all of our nominees for all of the work they put in to improve and enrich the life of our graduate students.

Without further ado, here are the award winners:

• Exceptional Staff Member – Claire Wiitanen, Administrative Aide from the Physics Department
• Exceptional Graduate Mentor – Victoria Bergvall, Associate Professor of Linguistics, Humanities
• Exceptional Student Leader – Jacob Blazejewski, a PhD student from Mathematical Sciences
• Exceptional Student Scholar – Nancy Henaku, a PhD student from Humanities

Congratulations to our winners and all you have done for our graduate students!

Matthew Songer, (Biological Sciences ’79) and Laura Songer (Biological Sciences ’80) have generously donated funds to the College of Sciences and Arts (CSA) to support a research project competition for undergraduate and graduate students.

Remembering their own eagerness to engage in research during their undergraduate years, the Songers established these awards to stimulate and encourage opportunities for original research by current Michigan Tech students. The College is extremely grateful for the Songers’ continuing interest in, and support of, Michigan Tech’s programs in human health and medicine.

Any Michigan Tech student interested in exploring a medically related question under the guidance of faculty in the College of Sciences and Arts may apply. Students majoring in any degree program in the college, including both traditional (i.e., biological sciences, kinesiology, chemistry) and nontraditional (i.e., physics, psychology, social science, bioethics, computer science, mathematics) programs related to human health may propose research projects connected to human health. 

Submit applications as a single PDF file to the Office of the College of Sciences and Arts by 4 p.m. Monday, March 30. Applications may be emailed to djhemmer@mtu.edu.

Read more about the Songer Research Award here.

Nick Trefethen, professor of numerical analysis at Oxford University and Global Distinguished Professor at New York University, will deliver the fourth-annual Kliakhandler Public Lecture at 5 p.m. Thursday, Oct. 4, in Dow 641. The title of his lecture is “The Mathematics of the Faraday Cage.”

Trefethen has received many honors for his research in Numerical Analysis: Fellow of the Royal Society, Member of the National Academy of Engineering, the Gold Medal from the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (UK), the Naylor Prize from the London Mathematical Society, etc. He is also past-president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. His previous lecture at Michigan Tech, “Discrete or Continuous”, has the distinction of being perhaps the only standing-room-only mathematics lecture ever given at the University.

Trefethen describes his talk as follows: “Everybody has heard of the Faraday cage effect, in which a wire mesh does a good job of blocking electric fields and electromagnetic waves. Surely the mathematics of such a famous and useful phenomenon has been long ago worked out and written up in the textbooks? It seems to be not so, and indeed, one of the few treatments to be found in the textbooks, by Feynman, is incorrect. The shielding effect turns out to be not as simple as one might expect: it depends on the wires having finite radius. Nor is it as strong as one might imagine: it improves only linearly as the wire spacing decreases. This talk will explain how the Faraday cage works and tell the story of the surprises Jon Chapman, Dave Hewett and I encountered along the way.”

Everyone is invited.

Trefethen will also deliver a research colloquium to the Department of Mathematical Sciences at 4:05 p.m. Friday, Oct. 5, in Fisher 138. The presentation is titled “Random functions, random ODEs, and Chebfun.”

What is a random function? What is noise? The standard answers are nonsmooth, defined pointwise via the Wiener process and Brownian motion. In the Chebfun project, we have found it more natural to work with smooth random functions defined by finite Fourier series with random coefficients. There are plenty of conceptual challenges in this subject, starting with the fact that white noise has infinite amplitude and infinite energy, a paradox that goes back in two different ways to Einstein in 1905.