News
The team of Luke Daignault (physics/math), Sameer Premji (math), and Gabriel Weredyk (math) won the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) award in 2025 in the Mathematical and Interdisciplinary Contest in Modeling.
Three PhD students and three undergraduate mathematics majors were honored with the Founders Award of Excellence at the Honors Convocation in October 2025. The Founders Award of Excellence recognizes students who embody scholarship, creativity, discovery, and leadership. About 1% of the RPI student population are honored each year. These students have not only demonstrated strong academic performance (top 10% of their class), but also leadership skills, originality, and imagination.
Two graduate students in the Department of Mathematical Sciences, Chanaka Mapa Mudiyanselage and Muhammed Talha Azis, have been recognized for their research at the 65th Sanibel Symposium, a leading international conference in the quantum theory of atoms, molecules, and materials.
Alumna Mallory Gaspard ’18 (dual major in mathematics and applied physics) paid a return visit on April 21-23 to the departments of chemistry, physics, and mathematical sciences in which she had engaged in educational, extracurricular, and research experiences while an undergraduate at RPI. At a mathematical sciences colloquium entitled “When is Camouflage Useful?
John Schotland, the Zhao and Ji Professor in Mathematics at Yale University visited RPI on April 7 and 8, 2026 as this year’s honorary Class of ’27 lecturer. His opening colloquium on “Nonlocal PDEs and Quantum Optics” gave a general overview of a novel formulation of the equations of quantum electrodynamics for light interacting with excitable atoms as a system of nonlocal partial differential equations.
Alumnus John E. Evans’06 returned to RPI as a Strauch Family Endowed Faculty Fellow in the Smead Department of Aerospace Engineering Sciences at the University Colorado Boulder and chair-elect of that department. His visit from October 14 to 16 was primarily sponsored by the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering (MANE), where he had conducted multiple research projects as a student, and was co-hosted by the Department of Mathematical Sciences, where he earned his B.S. and M.S. degrees.
Prof. Dr. Frank Sottile from Texas A&M University visited the Department of Mathematical Sciences on September 29 to deliver the 2025 Richard C. DiPrima Lecture, “Galois Groups in Enumerative Geometry.” The DiPrima Lecture honors and remembers a former faculty member who, through his research, teaching, and service as department chair, was instrumental in the transformation of our department in the 1950s-1980s to a prominent center for the application of mathematics to science and engineering concerns. Stemming from a family of Sicilian immigrants, Dr.
Professor Yuri V. Lvov, Ph.D., and a team of oceanographers develop a first-of-its-kind model of internal wave dynamics that lays the foundation for new, more reliable models of ocean circulation.
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute’s Fengyan Li, Ph.D., professor of mathematical sciences, has been selected as a 2025 Fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM). AWM Fellows demonstrate a sustained commitment “to encourage women and girls to study and to have active careers in the mathematical sciences, and to promote equal opportunity and the equal treatment of women and girls in the mathematical sciences.”
As Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute celebrates its Bicentennial, we reflect on the many great minds, pioneers, entrepreneurs, and game-changers who are Rensselaer alumni. In 1995, the Rensselaer Alumni Association, with the full endorsement of the Institute Board of Trustees, created the Rensselaer Alumni Hall of Fame to preserve and celebrate the exceptional heritage of alumni accomplishments throughout the years. Honorees are chosen by a selection committee based on reputation, professional achievements, service and career contributions, and uniqueness.
