Graduate student Xuemei Chen won the award for best student paper at the 9th International Conference on Sampling Theory and Applications (SampTA) held at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore in May 2011.

Three graduate students and two undergraduates were recognized at the Department of Mathematics’ annual student awards ceremony held recently. This year’s graduate honors went to Tara Davis and Hang Wang, who tied for excellence in teaching, and to Thomas Sinclair for outstanding research.

The International Symposium in Approximation Theory was held at Vanderbilt May 17-21, in conjunction with the 26th Annual Shanks Lecture. The symposium brought together researchers from diverse areas of approximation theory to stimulate international collaboration and promote the exchange of ideas.

The Department of Mathematics hosted the Ninth Annual Spring Institute on Noncommutative Geometry and Operator Algebras May 9-18, 2011. The theme of the 2011 event was Index Theory and Hopf Algebras. The Spring Institute is a combination of spring school and international research conference.

The fall 2010 edition of Spectrum, the department's biennial newsletter, has just been published. Highlights include our very strong showing in the recent National Research Council report of U.S. graduate programs in mathematics, and the announcement of a brand new award for postdoctoral research.