Karen Uhlenbeck Becomes First Woman To Win Abel Prize in Mathematics

Karen Uhlenbeck (formerly of University of Texas at Austin and now at Princeton's Institute for Advanced Study) has become the first woman to win the Abel Prize. The Abel Prize has been awarded since 2003 by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters and comes with a check for 6 million Norwegian kroner (about US$700,000).

Uhlenbeck, 76, is cited for her "pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics."

The American Mathematics Society states:

Uhlenbeck is a former MacArthur Fellow, a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a recipient of the National Medal of Science (2000) and the Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research (2007), and a member of the inaugural class of AMS Fellows. She is the first woman mathematician to be elected to the National Academy of Sciences (1986) and the second woman to give a plenary lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians (1990—Emmy Noether was the first). In "The Abel Prize Laureate 2019," Uhlenbeck observes that she is a role model but "it’s hard, because what you really need to do is show students how imperfect people can be and still succeed. ... I may be a wonderful mathematician and famous because of it, but I’m also very human.” Uhlenbeck was the Sid W. Richardson Foundation Regents' Chair in Mathematics before retiring from the University of Texas at Austin in 2014, and is now a visiting senior research scholar at Princeton University and a visiting associate at the Institute for Advance Study. See more about her work in the March Notices article, "Karen Uhlenbeck and the Calculus of Variations," by Simon Donaldson,  and on the Abel Prize website, which has the full prize citation, her biography, descriptions of her work, and a video of the announcement of the prize.

Congratulations to Professor Uhlenbeck!

NSF Awards $9M To Advance STEM Leadership at HBCUs

The National Science Foundation has awarded up to $9 million to support the Center for the Advancement of STEM Leadership's goal of broadening participation by underrepresented minorities in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Specifically, the Division of Human Resources Development in the Directorate for Education and Human Resources has approved a 4-way collaborative award to Fielding Graduate University (1818424), North Carolina A&T University (1818459), University of the Virgin Islands (1818425) and the American Association of Colleges & Universities (1818447) to 1) examine how intuitive, unwritten codes of excellence in leadership result in the broadening participation success of HBCUs and to integrate this knowledge into STEM higher education reform; 2) provide a community of scholars with a world-class leadership development program that integrates personal and institutional histories into broadening participation research and practice; and 3) assimilate the HBCU institutional narrative into the national undergraduate STEM reform knowledge base through mainstream outreach and knowledge transfer outlets.

Here's a quote from the press release announcing the award:

The University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), which houses several other NSF-funded projects, will lead the research component of the project. The research will focus on studying the nature of the leadership styles and strategies associated with the stellar record of HBCUs in graduating African Americans in STEM and in being national leaders in preparing African Americans for doctoral study in STEM. 

“Our faculty and students have perfected various models of success that must be researched, studied, compared to others and disseminated throughout the nation,” said Dr. David Hall, President of UVI. “The future of the U.S. and world economy turns on the work that is occurring in various STEM fields, and HBCUs play a critical role in attracting, developing and inspiring future leaders in this field. This is an awesome and humbling task that we and our partners are ready and willing to undertake.” 

North Carolina A&T State University, a leading HBCU research university in the STEM fields, will team with Fielding Graduate University, long known for its leadership studies programs, to conduct leadership development programming in broadening STEM participation for emerging academic leaders. Based on CASL’s research findings, this effort will seek to establish the foundation for informing HBCUs and all of American higher education on the research-based strategies for producing new leaders to broaden STEM participation. 

“Fielding is proud to be a part of advancing leadership in the STEM fields through the establishment of this collaborative national Center,” said Fielding President Dr. Katrina Rogers. “Since its founding, Fielding and its faculty have pioneered a model of quality graduate education that links research and practice in support of social change and justice. Receiving support from the National Science Foundation for CASL is an affirmation of this legacy and its promise for the future.” 

“As an institution with a long history of leadership in STEM disciplines, North Carolina A&T State University is truly excited about the timely creation of this new center for STEM leadership,” added Chancellor Harold L. Martin Sr. “As we and so many of our peer institutions scale up to meet the growing national demand for highly educated, well-prepared graduates in STEM professions, the work of this center will provide meaningful support for these efforts. Having well-prepared leadership for this important work is essential, both now and well into the future.” 

The Association of American Colleges and Universities, recognized nationally and internationally as the leading association dedicated to advancing the quality, vitality, and public standing of liberal education and inclusive excellence in higher education, will lead the knowledge transfer and outreach efforts of CASL. It will leverage its research findings to rightfully place HBCUs at the center of our nation’s effort to produce a more diverse and competitively trained STEM workforce. 

“CASL is exactly what we’ve needed in undergraduate STEM education reform for a very long time,” says AAC&U President Dr. Lynn Pasquerella. “This important work is in perfect alignment with AAC&U and our more than 1,400 member institutions who recognize that HBCUs are vital to sustaining our competitive edge in scientific discovery and innovation. I applaud the CASL leaders for their vision and foresight.” 

Although I used to work at the NSF, I had nothing to do with this award (I was in a different division in the same Directorate) but I think this is a great development! I hope CASL is successful at achieving its goals.

NEWS: United States Places First In International Mathematics Olympiad

The U.S. team won first place at the 59th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), which took place in Cluj-Napoca, Romania on July 3-14, with 116 countries and 615 students participating. The USA Mathematical Olympiad Team cosisted of: Adam Ardeishar, Andrew Gu, Vincent Huang, James Lin, Michael Ren, and Mihir Singhal.  Individually they also took home five gold medals (Lin scored a perfect 42) and one silver medal. Gu, Huang, and Lin are returning IMO team members from 2017. Teams from Russia and China placed second and third, respectively

Hat/tip to American Mathematics Society and Mathematical Association of America.

#NSF REPORT: U.S. Doctorate Recipients At Near All-Time High (2016 Data)

The National Science Foundation has released its annual Survey of Earned Doctorates and there are some interesting nuggets in the data (up to 2016):

• The largest share of doctorates awarded in 2016 was in the life sciences (nearly 23 percent), followed by engineering (17 percent), and psychology and the social sciences (16.5 percent). All fields of humanities and arts made up 10 percent of doctorates awarded.
• The time between students entering graduate school and receiving doctorates has fallen in all fields of study over the past 20 years, but, on average, it still takes years longer to earn a doctorate in non-S&E fields than in S&E fields.
• The number of S&E doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens and permanent residents grew 2 percent since 2015 and 39 percent since 2006. The number of doctorates in S&E fields awarded to temporary visa holders grew 2 percent since 2015 and 20 percent since 2006.
• The number of doctoral awards to temporary visa holders is highly concentrated -- 10 countries accounted for 71 percent of the doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders from 2006 to 2016. The top three countries -- China, India and South Korea -- accounted for 54 percent of the doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders.
• Women have earned a slight majority of all doctorates awarded to U.S. citizen and permanent residents each year since 2002, and women have earned more than 30 percent of all doctorates awarded to temporary visa holders over that period.
• From 1996 to 2016, the number of women earning degrees in S&E fields increased by 84 percent.
• The number of doctorates awarded to blacks or African Americans who are U.S. citizens or permanent residents increased by 32 percent from 2006 to 2016. For the same period, the proportion of doctorates earned by Hispanics or Latinos increased by 67 percent.

One key take-away for me is that 1) Latino doctoral recipients now outnumber African-American and that the gap between male and female STEM doctorates is actually slightly widening, even as both numbers increase (see the graphics at the top of this page).

Hat/tip STEMPROF newsletter edited by Mark Connolly.

Harvard University Mathematics Department Hires SECOND EVER Female Tenured Full Professor

Harvard University is considered the acme of most things academic, with its 37 billion dollar endowment and its perennial placement at the top of the college rankings. The  Mathematics department at Harvard is not the very best in the country (that distinction usually goes to Princeton University) but it is definitely well-known. The fact that they have been atrocious in the area of doversity for so long is widely known.

This week comes news that things are starting to change at Harvard, as they announced they have hired their second ever tenure female full professor, ending a six-year stint in which they literally had zero tenured female professors (by contrast Princeton has had two senior female math professors for years: Maria Chudnovsky and Sun-Yung Alice Chang).

The Daily Crimson reports:

University of California at Berkeley math professors Lauren K. Williams ’00 and Denis Auroux will join Harvard’s math department as senior faculty at the start of the next academic year, Department Chair Curtis T. McMullen said in an interview last week. 

Auroux has served as a math professor at UC Berkeley since 2009 and has published articles on subjects ranging from “symplectic submanifolds” to “Lefschetz pencils.” Williams, a former math concentrator, won a tenured associate professorship at UC Berkeley in 2013—and a full tenured professor position there in 2016—and has written extensively about cluster algebras and tropical geometry.

As a friend of mine said on Twitter this weekend in commenting on the news. "It's 2018."

REPORT: Boys and Girls Equally Interested In STEM; Boys More Prepared

In a new report from ACT (yes, the organization that runs those other college readiness tests) there is a result that states that all though boys and girls have an equal interest in careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM), it turns out that boys are generally more prepared for them.

Ed Week reports:

To determine readiness, students were assigned a STEM score based on combined results from their ACT math and science tests. ACT test scores range from 1 to 36. A student earning at least the benchmark score of 26 has a 50 percent chance of earning a B or higher in first-year college STEM courses, and a 75 percent chance of earning a C or higher, according to the report. The student is also more likely to stick it out with a STEM major and earn a bachelor's degree.  

The report revealed that just 18 percent of females, compared to 24 percent of males, earned a score of 26. 

The disparity is even larger among students with an interest in STEM: 22 percent of females earned a score of 26 compared to 31 percent of males. Even more surprising, females interested in STEM were less likely than all males (including those with or without an interest in STEM) to meet or surpass that benchmark score (22 percent versus 24 percent). Meanwhile, the overall level of interest in STEM between females and males is nearly equal at 47 percent versus 50 percent, respectively.

The source of the data is from the 2 million students who took the ACT in 2017.

STUDY: U.S. Mathematics Majors Most Likely To Switch To Another Subject

The National Center for Education Statistics at the U.S. Department of Education released a report at the end of last year about students switching majors in college. "Beginning College Students Who Change Their Majors Within 3 Years of Enrollment" has a number of interesting facts about students who change majors while pursuing associate's and bachelor's degrees in the United States:

• About half (52 percent) of students whose original declared major was mathematics switched majors within 3 years. Mathematics majors changed majors at a rate higher than that of students in all other fields, both STEM and non-STEM, except the natural sciences.
  
• Within 3 years of initial enrollment, about 30 percent of undergraduates in associate’s and bachelor’s degree programs who had declared a major had changed their major at least once.
  
• About one-third of students enrolled in bachelor’s degree programs changed majors, compared with 28 percent of those enrolled in associate’s degree programs.
  
• About 1 in 10 students changed majors more than once: 10 percent of associate’s degree students and 9 percent of bachelor’s degree students.

Hat/tip to Voice of America!

Lost Einsteins: New Report Demonstrates Variation In Innovation Opportunity by Class, Race and Gender

There’s an interesting new report (from Stanford’s Raj Chetty) showing how lack of diversity in STEM is leading to reduction in the number of innovations being created in this country, even by low-income children who would be expected to be inventors due to their proficiency in math in school. (Generally proficiency in mathematics is a predictor of patent filing.) The report calls the result of this gap “Lost Einsteins.”

The New York Times wrote about this latest report this week:

The researchers worked with the Treasury Department to link the tax records with patent records. Doing so allowed them to study the backgrounds of patent holders (and the study focused on the most highly cited, significant patents). The researchers — Chetty, Alex Bell, Xavier Jaravel, Neviana Petkova and John Van Reenen — were also able to link these records to elementary-school test scores for some patent holders.

Not surprisingly, children who excelled in math were far more likely to become inventors. But being a math standout wasn’t enough. Only the top students who also came from high-income families had a decent chance to become an inventor.

This fact may be the starkest: Low-income students who are among the very best math students — those who score in the top 5 percent of all third graders — are no more likely to become inventors than below-average math students from affluent families.

Here is a graphic which demonstrates the difference in patent-holding by income level.

Of course there is also variation by race and by gender as well:

This report explains why broadening the participation in STEM is so important. As Chetty says "There are great differences in innovation rates. Those differences don’t seem to be due to innate ability to innovate.”

Our goal should be to make sure that the difference in innovation rates are not related to race, gender or income.

OCTOBER 23-27 IS #ACTIVELEARNINGWEEK2017

This week is Active Learning Week. If you're a college professor, you can take a pledge.

REPORT: Many Los Angeles Area STEM Jobs In 2016-2021 Will Not Require 4-Year Degrees

Interesting report from the Center for a Competitive Workforce about a potential talent shortage in the Los Angeles county area in the near future. Many people think that STEM technical jobs require a 4-year degree, but this report says that there will be many "middle skills" job openings in the Los Angeles area that will not.

In the region there will be approximately 67,450 job openings over the next five years for the 20 occupations examined in the report.  But, according to the latest data available, from the academic year 2014-15, there were fewer than 27,000 career education award earners in the greater Los Angeles Basin. And only about 7,800 awards were conferred in programs training relevant to the 20 target occupations. 

If this trend continues without our region’s talent development systems and institutions responding in kind, especially the community colleges which are the primary suppliers of this middle skill talent, then the demand in the region will not be met over the next five years.

One key takeaway from the report is that local community colleges in Los Angeles will only provide 58% of the people with associates degrees or certificates that the area will likely need to fill these jobs in the near future.

Hat/tip to KPCC

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Katherine Johnson (from Hidden Figures) Turns 99!

Katherine Johnson, the NASA “computer” whose life story was the primary motivation behind the hit book Hidden Figures by Margot Lee Shetterly turned 99 years old yesterday! She was played by Taraji P. Henson in the movie adaptation (see my review) that was nominated for multiple academy awards earlier this year. Last year NASA renamed a building after her on the occasion of her 98th birthday and before that, President Obama awarded her the National Medal of Freedom.

Hat tip to Vanity Fair

After 21 Year Gap, United States Places First In International Mathematics Olympiad

For the first time in 21 years, the United States has placed first in the prestigious International Mathematics Olympiad. National Public Radio reported:

This week, the top-ranked math students from high schools around the country went head-to-head with competitors from more than 100 countries at the International Mathematical Olympiad in Chiang Mai, Thailand. And, for the first time in more than two decades, they won. 

Po-Shen Loh, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University and head coach for Team USA, says the competition is held over the course of two days. Students work on three math problems each. 

[...] 

The U.S. team last won the Olympiad in 1994. Reports in recent years have raised concerns that American math students are falling behind those in the rest of the world. But, Loh says, "At least in this case with the Olympiads, we've been able to prove that our top Americans are certainly at the level of the top people from the other countries." 

Concerns have also been raised over the years about a persistent gender gap in U.S. math achievement. All six members of this year's winning team are boys. "That is actually something that one hopes will change," Loh says. "The top 12 people in the country on the United States Math Olympiad happen to have two girls in it. One might say, 'Only 2 out of 12, that's terrible.' But I should say in many years, it was, unfortunately, zero." 

Loh says it's important to teach math as more than mere memorization and formulas. He says this is one reason, perhaps, that the subject hasn't attracted as many American students as it could.

I think there are other reasons why mathematics doesn't attract students: there is this overwhelming belief that mathematical ability is some inherent essence that you either have or you don't AND there is no cultural stigma about "being bad at math."

LOOK: How Wet Dogs Dry By Shaking Explained!

This is fascinating stuff! Some scientists and engineers have studied how dogs shake their fur incredibly efficiently to dry themselves and wet and discovered that a  "dog can shake roughly 70 percent of the water from its fur in four seconds."

In fact, it's not only dogs.

So, get this, the process that dogs use is common to many mammals, even if some, like kangaroos and elephants, don't really need to use it for a variety of reasons. And the researchers found something astounding: the animals tuned how quickly they shook to their size. That is to say, the bigger animals shook slower while the smaller ones shook really quickly. That's because they need to exert a certain amount of force on the water droplets to shake them off. For the little guys, that means moving really quickly: a mouse has to shake 30 times per second, a rat 18 times per second, and a cat nine times per second. (Remember the labrador retriever was at about 4 times per second.) 

"The largest animal is 10,000 times heavier than the smallest animal," [David] Hu [of Georgia Tech]  told me, "but the forces on the drops are basically constant across all these mammals."

Check out a wet shaking dog getting dry  in (super slow mo) action:

Pretty cool!