News | Department of Mathematics

Announcements

2025

UCSB ranks fifth in prestigious Putnam Math Competition
Goldwater Scholarship Awards: Pico Gilman (CCS Math) was one of four that were awarded the very prestigious 2025 Goldwater scholarship.
Mychelle Parker has won the UCSB Academic Senate Outstanding TA Award in 2025

Colloquia, Conferences, and Seminars

Applied Mathematics/PDE/DS Seminars -- Fridays 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m. -- SH 4607 or Zoom
Differential Geometry Seminar, Fridays 3:00 p.m. - 4:00 p.m., SH 6635 or Zoom (check the link for details)
Discrete Geometry and Combinatorics Seminar , Wednesdays 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m. SH 4607B
Geometry, Topology and Physics, Fridays 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm SH 6635
Graduate Algebra Seminar, Fridays 2:00 p.m. - 3:00 p.m., SH 6617
Graduate Student Seminar, Wednesdays 3:30 p.m. - 4:45 p.m. SH 4607
Graduate Topology Seminar, Tuesdays 11 am SH 6617
Hypatian Seminar, Mondays 3 p.m. - 4 p.m. SH 6635
Mathematics Colloquium , Thursdays 3:30 p.m. -5:00 p.m. Rm. 6635
Quantum Topology Seminar, Wednesdays 11 a.m. SH 6635
Seminar on Geometry and Arithmetic, Thursday 4:30pm-6pm, SH 6635
Teaching & Learning Seminar, Thursdays 1:00 - 2:00 p.m., SH 4607

Featured Events

All News

News

UCSB Mathematics welcomes three new faculty members

The University of California, Santa Barbara Mathematics Department is pleased to introduce three new faculty members: Karel Casteels, Davit Harutyunyan, and Hanming Zhou. See the full article for more about these new professors.

GRIT Talk - Katy Craig

The math of swarming robots, superconductors, and slime mold

Monday, June 26, 5:30 pm

Hatlen Theater

Abstract: Systems of interacting agents arise throughout the natural world and are studied in such varied disciplines as engineering, physics, and biology. What is the optimal way for a swarm of robotic bees to pollinate a bed of crops? How can we use vortex motion in superconductors to develop new technologies for renewable energy? How does a colony of slime mold communicate using chemical signals? Prof. Katy Craig will describe the mathematics underlying systems of interacting agents and how such systems can be analyzed using an age old scientific technique: what happens if we poke it?

Nathan Schley Wins 2017 GSA Excellence In Teaching Award

Congratulations Nathan Schley - 2017 GSA Excellence in Teaching Award recipient! The Graduate Student Association (GSA) Excellence in Teaching Award recognizes graduate students who have shown excellence and gone above and beyond as teachers at UC Santa Barbara. Nathan has distinguished himself among the more than 200 graduate students nominated from all campus departments, and we are delighted to claim him as our very own! Thank you, Nathan, for sharing your talents with so many Mathematics students. Congratulations!

SIAM Seminar: David Cattan (PhD Defense)

Time: Monday, June 5, 2:00 pm

Title: Fluvial Landscapes: The Next Generation

Location: South Hall 6635

The Smith and Bretherton model is a family of partial differential equations that model the transport-limited case of erosion. With the use of appropriate numerical schemes, simulations of these equations contain large and small scale dynamics crucial to the validity of the model. Even with modern processing power and parallelism, these simulations take a significantly long time to run. In this talk I will discuss these necessary scaling dynamics, the numerical schemes used to simulate these equations, some minor changes that were made to the numerics to accelerate computations, methods to "artificially" generate these eroded surfaces, and how these artificial surfaces altered our understanding of the small scale dynamics.

SIAM Student Seminar: Kyle Mylonakis (Mathematics)

Time: Monday, May 15, 2:00 pm

Title: Towards an Atomistic Theory of Heat

Location: South Hall 6635

At the macroscopic scales it intuitively makes sense to talk about the temperature at a point, but when one zooms into the scale of individual atoms, the definition of local temperature breaks down. In this talk I will discuss my research in collaboration of Carlos and Xiantao Li at Penn State where we attempt to define and model temperature at the atomistic level.

Colloquium: Dr. Steve Railsback, Lang, Railsback & Associates, Water Resource Research and Management

Time: Thursday, April 13, 3:30 - 4:30 PM

Location: Souith Hall 6635

Title: Modeling Populations of Adaptive Individuals

"...How do we model a population of individuals that all make tradeoff decisions, when the options and payoffs available to each individual depends on the behavior of all the other individuals? We have explored one solution, which is to model individual decisions as approximations, based explicitly on simple predictions, that produce good but not optimal behavior and are updated routinely as the world changes."

POWERS 2017: Problem Solving for Women to Encourage Research in STEM

April 22nd -- A day full of fun activities for female high-school students.

The UCSB AWM (Association of Women in Math) student chapter is organizing a full day of activities for female high-school students in the Ventura-Santa Barbara-Santa Maria area. The activities will include a panel with UCSB undergraduate and graduate students in different STEM areas, a talk by a female mathematician, fun seminars led by female scientists, a problem solving competition, lunch at the lagoon, and more.

Geometry and Analysis on Manifolds Conference 2017

The Geometry and Analysis on Manifold conference (GAMSB17) will be held at the Department of Mathematics of University of California at Santa Barbara From April 7, 2017 to April 9, 2017. The lectures will be held in South Hall 6635.

Graduate students, fresh Ph.D.s and under-represented minorities are especially encouraged to join our meeting. Partial financial support is available.

The conference is supported by the Research Training Groups (RTG) in Topology and Geometry funded by the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and College of Letter and Science, University of California at Santa Barbara.