TUFTS UNIVERSITY - Key Persons
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Director of the Data Intensive Studies Center and Stern Family Professor
- Director of the Data Intensive Studies Center and Stern Family Professor, Data Intensive Study Center / Professor, Mathematics / Professor, Computer Science
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Assistant Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor and Department Chair of Education
- Professor, Education / Chair, Education / Professor, Mathematics
The psychology of mathematical thinking, teachers' and students' understanding and use of inscriptions, multiplicative reasoning, applications of psychometric modeling for assessment and research in mathematics education.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor
- Professor, Mathematics
Dynamical systems: Hyperbolicity, invariant foliations, geodesic flows, contact flows, and related topics - Hasselblatt's research, undertaken with colleagues from several continents, is in the modern theory of dynamical systems, with an emphasis on hyperbolic phenomena and on geometrically motivated systems. He also writes expository and biographical articles, writes and edits books, and organizes conferences and schools. His publication profile can be viewed at https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/author?authorId=270790 (with a subscription). Former doctoral students of his can be found in academic positions at Northwestern University, George Mason University, the University of New Hampshire, and Queen's University as well as among the winners of the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.
Hasselblatt's research, undertaken with colleagues from several continents, is in the modern theory of dynamical systems, with an emphasis on hyperbolic phenomena and on geometrically motivated systems. He also writes expository and biographical articles, writes and edits books, and organizes conferences and schools. His publication profile can be viewed at https://mathscinet.ams.org/mathscinet/author?authorId=270790 (with a subscription). Former doctoral students of his can be found in academic positions at Northwestern University, George Mason University, the University of New Hampshire, and Queen's University as well as among the winners of the New Horizons in Mathematics Prize.
Education
PhD, Mathematics, California Institute of Technology, USA, 1989
MA, Mathematics, University of Maryland, United States, 1984
Diplom-Vorprüfung (BS), Physics, Technische Universität Berlin, Germany, 1981
Biography
While studying physics at the Technische Universität Berlin, Boris Hasselblatt was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship, which took him to the University of Maryland in College Park, where he obtained an M.A. in mathematics with a scholarly paper on dynamics before moving to the California Institute of Technology for doctoral work on dynamical systems. He has been at Tufts University since completing his doctorate in 1989. Among his 5000 published pages is Introduction to the Modern Theory of Dynamical Systems, the standard text and reference and among the most cited mathematics books. He has held numerous visiting appointments at leading universities and research institutes: the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zürich, the University of Tokyo, the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques near Paris, the Institut de Recherche Mathématique Avancée and the Collège Doctoral Européen in Strasbourg. He was the first US mathematician to hold the Jean Morlet Chair at the Centre International de Rencontres Mathématiques in Marseille. In the Faculty of Arts, Sciences and Engineering at Tufts he chaired numerous standing faculty committees as well as School and University committees created for accreditation and for strategic planning. His administrative roles at Tufts University have been chair of the Department of Mathematics and Associate Provost. He has been serving the profession within the governance of the American Mathematical Society, the American Statistical Association and the Mathematical Association of America, on the Steering Committee of the Boston Higher Education Innovation Council, and as the eleventh Secretary of the American Mathematical Society. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Modern Dynamics and the Founding Editor-in-Chief of Mathematics Research Reports.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor
- Professor in the Department of Mathematics
- Professor, Mathematics / Professor, Computer Science / Professor, Physics & Astronomy
Applied dynamical systems, applied probability theory, kinetic theory, agent-based modeling, mathematical models of the economy, theoretical and computational fluid dynamics, complex systems science, quantum computation Current research emphasis is on mathematical models of economics in general, and agent-based models of wealth distributions in particular. The group's work has shed new light on the tendency of wealth to concentrate, and has discovered new results for upward mobility, wealth autocorrelation, and the flux of agents and wealth. The group's mathematical description of the phenomenon of oligarchy has also shed new light on functional analysis in general and distribution theory in particular. Secondary projects include new directions in lattice Boltzmann and lattice-gas models of fluid dynamics, kinetic theory, and quantum computation.
Bruce Boghosian, PhD, is a professor in the Department of Mathematics with secondary appointments in the Departments of Computer Science and Physics. He also co-directs the Data Analytics program in the School of Arts and Sciences. He was elected to Fellowship in the American Physical Society in 2000, named a Distinguished Scholar of Tufts University in 2010, a Fellow of the Jonathan M. Tisch College of Civic Life in 2018, and a Fellow of Tufts' Data Intensive Studies Center in 2019. He served as Chair of the Department of Mathematics at Tufts University from 2006 to 2010, and as President of the American University of Armenia from 2010 to 2014. Prior to coming to Tufts, Boghosian had professional experience in academia, industry, and a national laboratory, as described below. Prior to that, he received BS and MS degrees from MIT (1978), and a PhD from the University of California, Davis (1987).
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Lecturer, Mathematics
Enumerative and probabilistic combinatorics, graph theory, Markov chain Monte Carlo
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Lecturer
- Lecturer, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor, Mathematics
computational geometry, design and analysis of algorithms, computational complexity
Dirk Struik, a highly respected analyst and geometer, and an internationally acclaimed historian of mathematics, was a good friend of the Mathematics Department at Tufts, and of the Tufts alumnus Norbert Wiener. The two were colleagues at MIT from 1926 until Wiener's death. Struik was born in the Netherlands in 1894. He attended school and obtained his doctorate there and married in 1923. The Struiks went to Rome and Göttingen where they met Norbert Wiener, who in 1926 got Struik to come to MIT.
Education
Dirk Struik was born in Rotterdam on September 30, 1894, the same year as Norbert Wiener. In 1906 he entered the Hogere Burgerschool, which allowed entry to the university system after passing additional examinations. In 1912 he entered the University of Leiden, becoming the first in his family to attain a University education. He studied mathematics and physics with the intention of becoming a high school teacher. He took courses from H. A. Lorentz and de Sitter. Lorentz retired in 1912, and Paul Ehrenfest was appointed to his chair. It was he who pulled Struik into the academic world. Struik was strongly influenced by Ehrenfest and attended his weekly seminar. At this time mathematics and physics had close ties, and aside from being exposed to world class faculty (Lorentz and Kamerlingh Onnes were Nobel laurates by then) Struik heard guest speakers such as Curie, Rutherford, and Einstein. Indeed, Ehrenfest was Einstein's closest friend among physicists, and therefore he was aware of the importance of tensor calculus. Thus, Leiden became a center of research on general relativity, which Einstein visited frequently. In 1917, while working on a dissertation, his funds ran out and he left the university to take up a post teaching mathematics at the Hogere Burgerschool in Alkmaar, north of Amsterdam.
However, in November of that year he received a letter from J. A. Schouten in Delft asking if he would like to become his assistant. He did, and in 1922 he earned his doctorate with J. A. Schouten in tensor analysis and differential geometry. He was an assistant at the Technical University in Delft from 1917 to 1924.
Job Titles:
- Research Interests
- Science Foundation ( NSF ) Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Dr. Mirjeta Pasha is a National Science Foundation (NSF) Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Department of Mathematics at Tufts University working with Professor Misha Kilmer. As a computational and applied mathematician, she develops algorithms and numerical methods for large scale inverse problems and data analysis. Her research is strongly focused on numerical linear algebra, but she also uses techniques and tools from statistics, numerical optimization, machine learning, and partial differential equations.
Research interests: Large-scale and high dimensional (tensor) data analysis, inverse problems, uncertainty quantification, and machine learning.
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor, Electrical and Computer Engineering / Professor, Computer Science / Professor, Biomedical Engineering
Signal and image processing, tomographic image formation and object characterization, inverse problems, regularization, statistical signal and imaging processing, and computational physical modeling. Applications explored include medical imaging and image analysis, environmental monitoring and remediation, landmine and unexploded ordnance remediation, and automatic target detection and classification.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor
- Professor, Mathematics
Noncommutative harmonic analysis, representations of Lie groups, integral geometry, and Radon transforms
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor
- Professor, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Lecturer, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor
- Professor, Mathematics
Scientific computing and numerical analysis: Efficient computational methods for complex fluids, plasma physics, electromagnetism and other physical applications.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Assistant Professor
- Assistant Professor, Mathematics
Machine learning, harmonic analysis, statistical learning, graph theory, data science, computational mathematics, image processing, signal processing
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor of Citizenship and Public Service, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Researcher, University of Geneva, and CEO, FlowKit
Kay Whitehead (Kathleen Butcher Whitehead) died on April 18, 2009 in her home at the age of 88. Kay was born on November 9, 1920, in Shelborne, Ontario. She received a BA from Queens University in Ontario in 1942, an M.A. from Smith College in 1943 and a PhD in mathematics from the University of Michigan in 1946, having specialized in topology. In 1947 she married George Whitehead, also a topologist, who served on the MIT faculty 1949-1985, and who died in 2004. Kay held positions at Wellesley 1947-1949, Brown 1949-1950, Smith College 1949-1950, Boston University 1950-1951, and Brandeis 1951-1958 before joining the mathematics department at Tufts University. Here she served as Undergraduate Coordinator. Her appointments were as Lecturer (1960-1962), Assistant Professor (1962-1976) and Senior Lecturer (1976-1985). As of 2012, the Tufts mathematics department has 18 faculty on the tenure track or tenured, and 6 of them are women; in her time Kay was a pioneer. In her case, Tufts University ignored an informal rule against keeping non-tenured personnel for more than seven years. Until the 1970s, she was repeatedly given one-year contracts. Kay retired in 1985 when her husband did. She is well-remembered in the Tufts Department of Mathematics, and the couple returned for occasional visits in their years of retirement.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Department Chair
- Professor and Department Chair of Mathematics
- Professor and Department Chair of Mathematics / Geometric Group
- Professor, Mathematics / Chair, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor in the Department of Computer Science
- Professor, Computer Science / Professor, Mathematics
data science, graph algorithms, distributed algorithms, approximate routing, classification and clustering for high-dimensional data, coloring and its generalizations, computational molecular biology
Lenore Cowen is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at Tufts University, with a courtesy appointment in the Department of Mathematics. After finishing her Ph.D. in mathematics at MIT in 1993, she was an NSF postdoctoral fellow and then joined the faculty of the Mathematical Sciences Department (now the Applied Mathematics and Statistics Department) at Johns Hopkins University. She joined Tufts in 2001 and is a fellow of the International Society for Computational Biology. Her research interests span three areas: discrete mathematics, algorithms, and computational molecular biology.
Job Titles:
- Lecturer
- Lecturer, Mathematics
Job Titles:
- Professor
- Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering / Professor, Biomedical Engineering / Professor, Mathematics
Mathematical models of material behavior; Nonlinear magneto- and electromechanical interactions; Biomechanics of soft materials; Rubber elasticity and inelasticity
Born In Cambridge, Massachusetts, Lun-Yi Tsai, A92, grew up in Paris, where his father, a kinetic sculptor had a studio in New York City's Soho. After Tufts, he received a master's in Mathematics from the University of Pittsburgh and spent six years living, working, and making art in China. In 2008, he was a Karl Hofer Gesellschaft Artist In Residence In Berlin.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor Emerita
- Professor Emerita, Mathematics
Marty Guterman came to Tufts as an Instructor in 1966. After he completed his Ph.D. at Cornell in 1968, he was promoted to Assistant Professor; he became Associate Professor in 1972 and Professor in 1987. Professor Guterman's research was in a branch of mathematics called group theory. Group theory is the study of symmetry, and is of fundamental importance in mathematics and theoretical physics. Professor Guterman's major research papers were part of one of the largest mathematical enterprises in twentieth century mathematics, the classification of finite simple groups, producing a "periodic table" of the "elements" from which all finite groups are composed. This project involved the combined efforts of well over 100 mathematicians by the time it was completed in the mid-1980s. Marty's major contribution to the project was to study the structure of the exceptional Lie groups of type F4F4 defined over a finite field of characteristic two.
Professor Guterman was a truly extraordinary teacher. He was central in initiating many of the courses that are now standard in our mathematics curriculum, including Discrete Mathematics, Number Theory, Linear Algebra, and the graduate-level sequence in Algebra. He helped shape the current differential equations course taken by all engineering majors, which is unusual in its use of differential equations to motivate basic linear algebra, and the associated book he wrote with Zbigniew Nitecki. However, the course that he regarded as his proudest achievement in teaching was "Symmetry", a course for non-technical majors which uses wallpaper patterns and the art of M. C. Escher to introduce students in a concrete way to basic ideas in group theory. At the end of the course, the students produce art projects illustrating some of the different possible types of symmetry in the plane. Professor Guterman's office in Bromfield-Pearson Hall was always filled with spectacular examples of his students' projects. His notes for this course explain sophisticated ideas from group theory to an audience whose exposure to abstract mathematics is minimal. This course, together with "The Mathematics of Social Choice" (another Guterman creation), continues to be the most popular way for students in the arts and humanities to fulfill their mathematics distribution requirement at Tufts.
Many of Professor Guterman's colleagues outside the Mathematics Department came to know him through his energetic and wide-ranging involvement in committee work at Tufts. He also served for many years as the Mathematics Department liaison to the Education Department. Marty took great pride in the achievements of his wife Sonia as a biochemist and more recently intellectual property rights lawyer, and of his daughters Lila, a science writer at the Chronicle of Higher Education, and Beth, a concert violist.
Professor Guterman is remembered with a variety of tributes, notably the Guterman Award and Guterman Lectures, and also the Martin Guterman Library, a collection of mathematical books that is housed in the reading area on the third floor of Bromfield-Pearson Hall. Outside Tufts, a scholarship has been established at the New England Conservatory in Professor Guterman's name to encourage a high-school student in the study of chamber music, about which Marty was passionate and knowledgable.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer Emerita
- Senior Lecturer Emerita, Mathematics
REAL student Matt Weiser's path to Tufts was almost as circuitous as the advanced math he studies-and just as enriching. In his former life as a letter carrier in Brockton, Mass., Matt Weiser really didn't see himself becoming a mathematics scholar. But at Commencement, Weiser, a student in the Resumed Education for Adult Learners (REAL) program, graduated with the Class of 2010 as the top senior in the mathematics department in the School of Arts and Sciences.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor, Mathematics
- William Walker Professor of Mathematics
To each point on a curve, one can often associate in a natural way a line or plane (or higher dimensional linear variety) that moves with the point in the curve. This set of linear spaces is called a vector bundle. Vector bundles appear in a variety of questions in Physics (like the computation of Gromov-Witten invariants) . Moreover, they provide new insights into old mathematical problems and have been used to give beautiful proofs to long standing conjectures as well as striking counterexamples to some others.
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Professor, Mathematics / Professor, Tisch College
Job Titles:
- Fellow
- Fellow, Mathematics
To celebrate our distinguished alumnus, the Tufts University Mathematics Department has instituted the Norbert Wiener Lectures, initially funded by an anonymous gift to the University, as well as the Wiener Award for an especially gifted student.
Norbert Wiener may be the Tufts alumnus of most enduring fame. He was a world-renowned mathematician and founder of the science of cybernetics and made some of the most important contributions to mathematics in the 20th century. Wiener was born in Columbia, Missouri, November 26, 1894. His father, Leo Wiener, was a Russian who became a self-taught philologist of importance, acquiring a chair in Slavic languages at Harvard soon after Norbert's birth. Wiener's mother Bertha was born in Missouri. The father personally took charge of his son's education, and Norbert was home-schooled until enrolling in high school in Ayer, Massachusetts, near his family's home in the rural town of Harvard, Massachusetts.
I work primarily in harmonic analysis, matrix analysis, and frame theory, with applications to signal processing, compressed sensing, machine learning, and the measurement of quantum systems.
PDE analysis and computations, complex fluids, numerical analysis, mathematical modeling in physics and engineering, mathematical modeling in biology and medicine, bioinformatics, fluid dynamics, finite difference schemes.
Job Titles:
- Associate Professor of Physics
Job Titles:
- William Walker Professor of Mathematics Emeritus
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Associate Professor
Job Titles:
- Professor at the University of Colorado
Tadatoshi Akiba is a Japanese mathematician and politician and served as the mayor of the city of Hiroshima, Japan from 1999 to 2011. He studied mathematics at the University of Tokyo, receiving a BS in 1966 and an MS in 1968. He continued his studies under John Milnor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, earning his PhD in mathematics in 1970. He took teaching jobs at a series of universities: State University of New York at Stony Brook (1970), Tufts University (1972-1986), and Hiroshima Shudo University (1986-1997). His research was on topology, with an interest in homotopy groups. While at Tufts, Akiba established the Hibakusha Travel Grant program, which brought several American print and broadcast journalists annually to Hiroshima in August, to craft stories about the city (and typically about the experiences of those exposed to the atomic bomb in 1945).
Job Titles:
- Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin - Madison
Job Titles:
- Senior Department Administrator
Job Titles:
- Advisor
- Associate Professor
- Associate Professor, Mathematics
Scientific computing and numerical analysis; Parallel multigrid and multilevel methods for large-scale coupled systems; Efficient numerical methods for reservoir simulation, fluid-structure interaction, and other applications.
Job Titles:
- Senior Lecturer
- Senior Lecturer, Mathematics
Set Theory, specifically forcing elementary embeddings and large cardinal axioms
Job Titles:
- Professor Emeritus
- Professor Emeritus, Mathematics
Dynamical systems, especially in dimensions 1 and 2; braids; combinatorial/geometric group theory; graphs