Mathematical Sciences Blog

Category: News

Dr. William Keith Recognized with Springer Nature Editorial Award

Published
By
Dr. William Keith

Dr. William Keith

Congratulations to Associate Professor William Keith in the Department of Mathematical Sciences on receiving the 2026 Springer Nature Editor of Distinction Award (the Editorial Contribution category) for The Ramanujan Journal.

This award recognizes Prof. Keith’s role in “assessing new submissions and rigorously managing the peer review process, safeguarding the scientific accuracy of the published record, and ensuring authors’ work commands the highest level of trust.”

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Keith for this well-deserved distinction.

Continue Reading →

Kliakhandler sponsors A Workshop on Applied and Numerical Mathematics

Published
By
View of campus from across the Portage Canal with buildings reflecting off the water.

The Department of Mathematical Sciences hosted A Workshop on Applied and Numerical Mathematics, sponsored by generous gifts from Igor Kliakhandler and the Applied Mathematics Department at University of Colorado Boulder. The workshop was held June 8 – 10, 2026 in the U.J. Noblet Forestry Building. Held to celebrate the 80th birthday of renown mathematician, Bengt Fornberg, the workshop brought together leading international experts from across the field of numerical analysis, with a central focus on high-order methods for solving partial differential equations. The workshop was structured with a strong educational emphasis, particularly aimed at graduate students and early-career researchers across STEM disciplines. The mornings were devoted to lectures on modern high-accuracy numerical techniques, while the afternoons featured research talks covering a broad range of topics, including, but not limited to, recent advances in the discretization of differential and integral operators, as well as methods based on rational functions, radial basis functions (RBFs), and finite difference approaches.

Continue Reading →

October 9 Kliakhandler Lecture: Dr. Bruce Sagan

Published
By
Dr. Bruce Sagan

We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Bruce Sagan  from Michigan State University to deliver the eighth of our Kliakhandler Lectures.

Dr. Sagan specializes in enumerative, algebraic, and topological combinatorics, with his book “The Symmetric Group” being considered a classic. He has published over 100 research papers, and given over 300 talks in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. These included keynote addresses at the International Conference on Formal Power Series and Algebraic Combinatorics (2006), the British Combinatorial Conference (2011), and Permutation Patterns (2015). Dr. Sagan is also a folk musician playing music from Scandinavia, England, and Bulgaria on traditional instruments. He has recorded four albums, is working on a fifth album, and has composed over 30 tunes.

Dr. Sagan presents the public Kliakhandler Lecture Thursday, October 9 at 5 p.m. in Fisher Hall 138. The lecture (5–6 p.m.) will be followed by an interactive Q&A session with the speaker (6–7 p.m.).

Continue Reading →

Rodica Curtu Named New Mathematical Sciences Chair

Published
By

Michigan Tech’s College of Sciences and Arts welcomes Rodica Curtu as the new chair of the Department of Mathematical Sciences, effective July 1. Curtu comes to Michigan Tech from the University of Iowa, where she recently brought the math graduate program into the Internship Network in the Mathematical Sciences and served as faculty senate president.

“As the new chair of mathematical sciences, Professor Curtu leads a department with a strong record of accomplishments in research and teaching,” said LaReesa Wolfenbarger, dean of the College of Sciences and Arts. “I look forward to working with Rodica as she leverages her skills and experience with interdisciplinary and multi-institution research collaborations to lead the department to even greater accomplishments as MTU moves forward as an R1 institution.”

Curtu’s expertise is in mathematical biology and computational neuroscience. She earned her PhD in Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh in 2003 and worked during her informal postdoctoral studies as a visitor exchange scientist with researchers from the Center for Neural Science at New York University.
She said she looks forward to stepping into a leadership role where she can guide the math department toward further growth by developing online courses and expanding existing master’s degree and PhD programs.

Curtu said she’s passionate about student-focused teaching, championing the approach at the University of Iowa, where it was well received by students. Having worked on teams with neuroscientists, biologists, and engineers to apply math to real-world problems, she was drawn to Michigan Tech’s interdisciplinary research opportunities.

“I love working on interdisciplinary teams,” said Curtu. “In order to solve complicated problems we need to talk more with each other and share perspectives from different fields. Michigan Tech is a great place to come for that collaboration.”

“Mathematics is everywhere!” Rodica Curtu, Chair, Department of Mathematical Sciences, Michigan Tech College of Sciences and Arts

As chair, Curtu plans to work with the department, dean’s office, and across the University to facilitate dialogue and help align goals. She describes her approach to leadership as “working at the speed of trust” with the intention to start by listening. Her goals include growing the department’s graduate programs and embracing Michigan Tech’s R1 classification. She looks to support students through more diverse training opportunities, interview preparation, and guidance in pursuing industry and government jobs and internships. Curtu will also encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between mathematical sciences and other departments on campus.

Continue Reading →

Dr. Susanne Brenner to Deliver Kliakhandler Lectures

Published
By

We’re delighted to welcome Dr. Susanne Brenner to deliver the seventh of our Kliakhandler Lectures. Dr. Brenner is a Boyd Professor, a leading researcher in numerical analysis, and an IAM, AMS, AAAS, and ASM fellow who serves on multiple publication editorial boards. She was also appointed to the NSF Advisory Committee for Mathematical and Physical Sciences. Additionally, she is a former SIAM president.

Susanne Brenner
Dr. Susanne Brenner visits campus October 3-4.

Dr. Brenner presents the Public Kliakhandler Lecture Thursday, October 3 at 6 p.m. in Fisher Hall 139. Her public lecture focuses on the history as well as the current challenges and opportunities offered by computational mathematics. Mark your calendars to attend this highly anticipated mathematics event—spread the word! Let’s give Dr. Brenner our best UP welcome!

Then, on Friday, October 4, Dr. Brenner presents her Mathematics Department research colloquium. This presentation, titled “Novel Finite Element Methods for Elliptic Optimal Control Problems with Pointwise State Constraints,” is at 1 p.m. in Fisher Hall 230. Faculty, staff, and students make sure to attend this memorable event.

To read more details on the events and on our esteemed guest, please see the College of Sciences and Arts blog.

About the Mathematical Sciences Department

Mathematicians at Michigan Technological University conduct research and guide students in applying concepts to fields like business, engineering, healthcare, and government. The Mathematical Sciences Department offers undergraduate degrees in business analytics, mathematics, mathematics and computer science, and statistics and graduate programs with degrees in mathematical sciences, applied statistics, and statistics. Students supercharge their math skills at Michigan’s premier technological university and graduate prepared for successful careers in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business environment.

Questions? Contact us at mathdept@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook.

Continue Reading →

In Print: Pinelis Paper Published in the Journal Electronic Communications in Probability

Published
Image if Iosif Pinelis who published in the journal electronic communications
Dr. Iosif Pinelis
Professor, Mathematical Sciences

Congratulations to Iosif Pinelis. Dr. Pinelis is the author of a paper published in the Journal Electronic Communications in Probability. The paper is titled “Asymptotics of the rate function in the large deviation principle for sums of independent identically distributed random variables.”

Dr. Pinelis is a professor of mathematical sciences whose main interests are in exact inequalities and limit theorems and extremal problems in probability theory. Other interests include optimization, evolutionary modeling, and operations research.

About the Mathematical Sciences Department

Mathematicians at Michigan Technological University conduct research and guide students, applying concepts to fields like business, engineering, healthcare, and government. The Mathematical Sciences Department offers undergraduate and graduate programs with degrees in mathematical sciences, applied statistics, and statistics. Students supercharge their math skills at Michigan’s premier technological university. They graduate prepared for successful careers in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business environment.

Questions? Contact us at mathdept@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook or read the Mathematical Sciences news blog for the latest happenings.

Continue Reading →

Ong Closes Contract from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory

Published
Benjamin Ong
Associate Professor Benjamin Ong

Benjamin Ong is the principal investigator (PI) on a project that has received a $45,000 research and development contract from the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, entitled “Systematic Approaches to Construct Coarse-Grid Operators for Multigrid Reduction in Time.”

Multigrid Reduction in Time (MGRIT) [2] uses multigrid reduction techniques to enable temporal parallelism for solving initial value problems. It is known that the convergence rate of MGRIT [3] depends in part on the choice of time-stepping operators on the fine- and coarse-grid, which we call the fine-grid operator and coarse-grid operator respectively. An “ideal” coarse-grid operator is the fine-grid operator applied to approximate the solution on the coarse time interval.

In practice, the ideal coarse-grid operator is never used as the computational cost destroys any parallel speed-up that could be obtained using MGRIT. Instead, a common choice for a coarse-grid operator is a simple re-discretization of the fine-grid operator, i.e., if a single-step method is used on the fine-grid with time-step size h, then the same single-step method is used on the coarse-grid with time-step size m h, where m is a specified coarsening factor.

Numerical simulations are increasingly important in the study of complex systems in engineering, life sciences, medicine, chemistry, physics, and even non-traditional fields such as social sciences. Dr. Ong is working to solve these large-scale evolution problems on modern supercomputing architectures by using a hierarchy of space-time grids to accelerate the solution on the finest time grid.

References

Time permitting, Dr. Ong will explore the connection between the proposed sequences of generated coarse-grid operators to those recently proposed by Vargas et al. [4].

[1] Daniel Crane. The Singular Value Expansion for Compact and Non-Compact Operators. PhD thesis, Michigan Technological University, 2020.

[2] R. D. Falgout, S. Friedhoff, Tz. V. Kolev, S. P. MacLachlan, and J. B. Schroder. Parallel time integration with multigrid. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 36(6):C635–C661, 2014.

[3] Andreas Hessenthaler, Ben S. Southworth, David Nordsletten, Oliver RÅNohrle, Robert D. Falgout, and Jacob B. Schroder. Multilevel convergence analysis of multigrid-reduction-in-time. SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, 42(2):A771–A796, 2020.

[4] David. A. Vargas. A general framework for deriving coarse grid operators for multigrid reduction in time. Technical report, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, 2023.

About the Mathematical Sciences Department

Mathematicians at Michigan Technological University conduct research and guide students, applying concepts to fields like business, engineering, healthcare, and government. The Mathematical Sciences Department offers undergraduate and graduate programs with degrees in mathematical sciences, applied statistics, and statistics. Students supercharge their math skills at Michigan’s premier technological university. They graduate prepared for successful careers in academia, research, and tomorrow’s high-tech business environment.

Questions? Contact us at mathdept@mtu.edu. Follow us on Facebook or read the Mathematical Sciences news blog for the latest happenings.

Continue Reading →