## Andrew Ranicki

From MFO (Oberwolfach)

Andrew Ranicki has died. Ranicki was a topologist, with particular expertise in algebraic surgery.  Indeed, Ranicki had the unusual title of Professor of Algebraic Surgery at the University of Edinburgh.  (Andrew was a special case for almost everything.)  His two papers on surgery in Proc. London Math. Soc. [MR0560997 and MR0566491 (*)] were among his most cited papers.   He was also familiar to many for his work in $K$-theory, including his work as an editor for leading journals in the subject.  Continue reading

## Juan Meza, new Director of DMS

Juan Meza has been appointed as the new director of the Division of Mathematical Sciences (DMS) of the NSF, as of February 20, 2018.  Meza works in scientific computing and numerical analysis. Before coming to the NSF, he was at University of California Merced where he was the Dean of Natural Sciences.  Earlier, he was in the  High Performance Computing Research group at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and was at Sandia National Laboratories.

Meza did his PhD (find his thesis here) in the Computational and Applied Mathematics Department at Rice University with Bill Symes. (CAAM is in Duncan Hall, which is an exquisite building.) Symes did his PhD at Harvard with Phillip Griffith in algebraic geometry, though the vast majority of his publications are in PDEs and inverse problems.

## May we suggest…

MathSciNet now has an auto-suggest feature for Author Searches and Journal Searches.  The feature uses the databases themselves to help you with your searches.  Continue reading

## Mathematical Reviews at the JMM in San Diego

Mathematical Reviews will be at the JMM in San Diego.  There is always a lot going on at the meetings:  invited lectures, special sessions, editorial meetings, exhibits, and the chance to connect with old friends.  Mathematical Reviews is planning several activities during the meetings.  Most will be at the Mathematical Reviews area of the AMS booth in the exhibit hall: Hall B, San Diego Convention Center.  Everyone is encouraged to stop by the booth for conversation with editors, questions about MathSciNet, questions about reviewing, impromptu demos, giveaways, and more.   We will be glad to see you. Continue reading

## MathSciNet is now a cloud atlas to the mathematics literature

We are moving to the cloud.  Continue reading

## Gravitational Waves

Credit: NASA/C. Henze

The 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded to Rainer Weiss, Barry C. Barish, and Kip S. Thorne for their work on the detection of gravitational waves. (See Note 1.)  The physics and engineering that go into this accomplishment are truly impressive.  However, before anyone could imagine setting up the experiment, some mathematical questions needed to be answered.  There are two articles in the August 2017 issue of the AMS Notices that give an overview the mathematics of gravitational waves.  In this post, I crib from those two articles and provide a literature tour of some of the significant papers by relying on MathSciNet. A longer article by Bieri just published in the AMS Bulletin goes into more detail on a selection of the topics.   Continue reading

## Emmanuel Candès – MacArthur Fellow

Emmanuel Candès (Source Wikimedia)

Emmanuel Candès has won a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship.  The official announcement is here.  The LA Times has a nice write-up.   Both the Los Angeles Times and the MacArthur announcement highlight Candès’s work on compressed sensing.  Terry Tao has a spot-on reaction to this work, quoted in the LA Times, typical of most mathematicians when you first hear about the method:  you can’t be getting be getting something for nothing.  This can’t work.  But it does!  Tao finally came around to believe it, as has the rest of the world.   Continue reading

Posted in Announcements, Mathematicians | 1 Comment

## Job Posting – Associate Editor at Mathematical Reviews

Mathematical Reviews is hiring!  We are looking for a new Associate Editor to start in late spring or summer 2018.  The new editor should have expertise in algebra and an interest in a range of algebraic topics, such as representation theory, nonassociative algebras, and group theory.  The job announcement is on the AMS website:  http://www.ams.org/about-us/AssociateEditor.pdf.  The position is posted on mathjobs.org: https://www.mathjobs.org/jobs/jobs/10667, which is also where you can submit an application.

Mathematical Reviews is a great place to work.  You get to do something important and useful.  You would also be working with great people.  A list of the current editors is here.  And here is a picture of some of us observing the eclipse in August 2017.

If you have any questions, drop me a line.

Maryam Mirzakhani is known for her work on moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces.  Some of her most cited work looks at the moduli space of a genus $g$ Riemann surface with $n$ geodesic boundary components.  In two of her papers, she computes the volume of these moduli spaces, with respect to the Weil-Petersson metric (see below).  In another, she provides a means for counting the number of simple closed geodesics of length at most $L$. Mirzakhani is also known for her work on billiards (see the review of her paper with Eskin and Mohammadi below), a subject closely related to moduli space questions.  Teichmüller theory and the geometry of moduli spaces are famously deep subjects.  Making progress requires mastering large areas of analysis, dynamical systems, differential geometry, algebraic geometry, and topology.  I can only appreciate Mirzakhani’s work superficially, as I have not mastered those subjects.   Instead, some reviews of her work are reproduced below.   Continue reading