Departmental News

• Current Student News
  • Right now, many of our students are preparing to apply to graduate schools, take the Putnam Exam, compete in the COMAP MCM, and participate in many other exciting activites.
• Alumni News
  • Brian Fitzpatrick, class of 2010, is pursuing a Mathematics Ph.D. at Duke University. He just passed both of his qualifying exams.
  • Jayde Gearing, Class of 2008, passed the second actuarial exam on financial mathematics and is working at EMB.
  • Mark Girard, class of 2010, will be studying at the Institute of Physics at the University of Freiburg in Germany during the 2010-11 academic year. This graduate study is being funded by a grant from the D.A.A.D. (Deutscher Akademischer Austausch Dienst).
  • Travis Givens, Class of 2008, is working as a Marketing Analyst at Profitfuel, Inc. in Austin. This fall, Travis is also beginning graduate study in the Communication Program at UT.
  • Dwight Lutz, Class of 2009, is pursuing graduate study in Statistics at the University of Florida.
  • Matt Maly, Class of 2010, is pursuing a Theoretical CS Ph.D. at Rice Univeristy.
  • Ollie McDonald, Class of 2009, is pursuing graduate study in Statistics at Rice University. He is readying for his qualifying exams, which he takes in January.
  • Tin Nunamaker, Class of 2009, is currently working as an Associate Software Developer for HEB here in San Antonio.
  • Rebecca Perryman (formerly Haas), Class of 2008, is pursuing graduate study in Industrial Engineering at Texas A&M University.
  • Nicholas Purgason, Class of 2007, is pursuing a Masters of Science in Quantitative Financaial Analysis at UT, Arlington. His first album is also in production, and he is currently seeking an awesome quitarist in the greater Arlington area.
  • Dustin Ragan, Class of 2003, defended his Ph.D. thesis in March of 2010 at the MD Anderson Cancer Center at the UTHSC in Houston. He will soon be heading to Washington University in St. Louis as a postdoc.
  • Karan Sarode, Class of 2009, is pursuing a Ph.D. in Economics at UC, Boulder.
  • Jocelyn Stokes, Class of 2008, finished her Master's in Financial Mathematics at Florida State in May of 2010. She si currently workng as a Business Analyst for Capital One.
  • David Stück, Class of 2010, is pursuing a Chemistry Ph.D. at Berkeley.
  • Kate Walker, Class of 2008, recently tranferred to San Diego, CA, where she works as an actuarial analyst for EMB America, LLC.

• 2009 Putnam Exam: The William Lowell Putnam Exam Competition is a yearly mathematics event which is participated in by colleges and universities from the U.S. and Canada. Trinity University came in 31st out of 439 teams in the 2009 Putnam Exam Competition, which was given on December 5th, 2009. Trinity's team this year was comprised of Brian Fitzpatrick, Mark Girard, and David Stück, and 6 other students braved the annual exam as well - Quentin Funk, Loi Le, JJ Lubinski, Xin Ma, Matt Maly, and Mohsin Rahim. The high score was turned in by Brian Fitzpatrick, who got a 28.
• 2010 MCM: The Mathematical Contest in Modeling is held each year over an extended weekend in February. Arranged by the Consortium for Mathematics and Its Applications (COMAP), 2,254 teams participated in this year's contest. Two teams of Trinity students competed this year under the supervision of Drs. Hasfura and Olofsson. Trinity's team of Mark Girard, David Stück, and Faizan Zubair recevied a Meritorious Award (top 19%), and the team of Quentin Funk, Gareth Jones, and Xin Ma received a Successful Participation Award. This is Trinity's second year in a row with a Meritorious Award. More information about this year's competition, including results and problems descriptions, be found here. Both teams worked on Problem A.

• Cabral Balreira had his paper "A Generalization of the Fujisawa-Kuh Global Inversion Theorem" accepted for publication in the Journal of Mathematical Analysis and Applications.  This a joint work with M. Radulescu and S. Radulescu.
• Ryan Daileda and Peter Olofsson wrote a joint paper titled "Budding yeast, branching processes, and generalized Fibonacci numbers," which will appear in a forthcoming issue of the Mathematics Magazine.
• Cabral Balreira has been invited to present his article "A Generalization of the Fujisawa-Kuh Global Inversion Theorem," a joint work with M. Radulescu and S. Radulescu, in the Potential Field Seminar at the Institute of Mathematics in Bucharest. He will also be attending the Archimedes Symposium in Bucharest in June. Cabral had his paper "Incompressibility and Global Inversion" accepted by Topological Methods in Nonlinear Analysis, and he is currently working on several projects on topological methods in global invertibility.
• Ryan Daileda had his paper "Maximal class numbers of CM number fields" accepted by the Journal of Number Theory. Together with Nathan Jones of the University of Mississipi, he is currently studying a re-definition of induced Dirichlet characters, with a view toward unifying the functional equations of the L-functions of both primitive and imprimitive characters.
• Brian Miceli had his paper "m-Partition Boards and Poly-Stirling Numbers" published in the Journal of Integer Sequences. He gave a talk in the discrete math seminar at Texas State, San Marcos in early April. In January, along with Jeff Remmel from UCSD, he co-organized a Special Session in Enumerative Combinatorics at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Francisco. At those meetings, he also spoke about our department's senior project program in a Special Session on Capstone Courses. In November, Brian received a grant from the AIBL to use innovative methods in his spring Number Theory (3341) course.
• Peter Olofsson had many papers accepted into journals this year. "A stochastic model of cell cycle desynchronization", co-authored with former student Thomas O. McDonald, can be found in Mathematical Biosciences, 2010, 223, 97-104, and "Size-biased branching population measures and the multi-type xlogx condition" can be found in Bernoulli, 2009, 15(4), 1287-1304. "Modeling growth and telomere dynamics in Saccharomyces cerevisiae", co-authored with Alison A. Bertuch, is set to appear in Journal of Theoretical Biology, and "Can telomere shortening explain sigmoidal growth curves?" is set to appear in Journal of Biological Dynamics.