Team UCLA Bruins placed as a semi-finalist in the 2019 Society of Actuaries Student Research Case Study Challenge. All except one of the undergraduate team members were freshman including Bingcui (Violet) Guo, Calvin Ng, Roger Yuan, and Xijuan Liu.

Last summer, Profs. Jun Yin (UCLA) (and Ph.D. student Fan Yang), Paul Bourgade (New York University) and Horng-Tzer Yau (Harvard University) published a series of paper that proves the existence of a mathematical signature called “universality” which certifies that a material conducts electricity.

Dr. Matthew Jacobs is a recipient of the 2019 Institute for Digital Research and Education (IDRE) Postdoctoral Fellowship. For the last two years, he has been a postdoc in the UCLA math department and his postdoc mentors are Stan Osher and Andrea Bertozzi.

It is with great regret that the Mathematics Department must note the passing last week, at age 81, of our colleague Professor Emeritus and Distinguished Research Professor Veeravalli Seshadri Varadarajan.

Former IPAM Director and UCLA Professor of Mathematics Russel (Russ) Caflisch is one of 100 new members to be elected into the National Academy of Sciences in 2019.