Dr. Jesús A. De Loera, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Davis, and current vice president of the American Mathematical Society, will visit the Texas A&M University campus this week to deliver the 2023 Sue Geller Undergraduate Lecture, the sixth in an annual series intended to educate and inspire students in the Department of Mathematics.
De Loera, a recognized expert in computational discrete mathematics and optimization, will present “Easy to State but Very Hard to Solve: My Favorite Unsolved Problems about Polyhedra” on Wednesday, April 19, at 6 p.m. in Room 117 of the John R. Blocker Building. The event will be preceded by a reception at 5:30 p.m.
Although De Loera describes himself as someone who enjoys rethinking mathematics in terms of algorithmic questions and believes in the exciting future of the interdisciplinary problems it has the power to help solve, he readily acknowledges that the general public has little idea what mathematicians actually do. In his talk, De Loera will describe his own research using familiar shapes and common objects — polygons, triangles, cubes, squares and pyramids — with the goal of helping the audience to see that mathematics is all around us and applicable to much more than meets the eye, if not potential misconception.
“Polyhedra and their high-dimensional versions turn out to be widely used in applied mathematics,” De Loera explains in his abstract. “Their beauty and simplicity appeal to all, but very few people know of the many easy-to-state but difficult-to-solve mathematical problems that hide behind their beauty. This lecture will have lots of nice pictures and will introduce the audience to some fascinating unsolved questions at the frontier of mathematical research and its applications. No prior knowledge beyond your memory of elementary school geometry will be assumed.”
Born and raised in Mexico City, De Loera joined the UC Davis faculty in 1999 after receiving his Ph.D. in applied mathematics from Cornell University in 1995. He has held visiting positions at the University of Bonn, University of Minnesota, the Swiss Federal Technology Institute (ETH Zürich), the Mathematical Science Institute at Berkeley, Universität Magdeburg in Germany, the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA, the Newton Institute at Cambridge University and the Technische Universität München. He also has taught courses at universities across the U.S., Mexico, Germany and Switzerland.
De Loera’s research encompasses a diverse set of topics, from fundamental work in convex and discrete geometry, algebraic combinatorics and combinatorial commutative algebra to applied work in combinatorial optimization, algorithms and data science. In addition to more than 100 published research papers, De Loera has co-written two graduate level textbooks: “Triangulations: Structures for Algorithms and Applications'' (Springer, with J. Rambau and F. Santos) and “Algebraic and Geometric Ideas in the Theory of Discrete Optimization'' (SIAM, with R. Hemmecke and M. Koeppe). A fellow of the American Mathematical Society (2014) and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (2019), his career awards to date include a 2014 Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship, the 2010 INFORMS computer society prize, a 2013 John von Neumann Professorship at the Technical University of Munich, the 2017 Mathematical Association of America Golden Section Award and the 2020 Farkas Prize of the INFORMS optimization society.
The Geller Undergraduate Lecture Series was founded in 2016 as the Mathematics Undergraduate Research Lecture to provide a venue for undergraduate students to interact with leading researchers from outside Texas A&M who have also demonstrated a deep interest in and capacity for student mentoring. It was renamed in 2018 to honor Dr. Sue Geller, a longtime Texas A&M mathematician as well as the founder and longtime director of Texas A&M Mathematics Honors, the first department-level honors program at Texas A&M. Known to students as Dr. Sue, Geller has supervised more than 100 masters students and has mentored an uncountable (although finite) number of undergraduates. A 2023 fellow of the Association for Women in Mathematics, her honors include the University Honors Program’s Director's Award (2012), the Texas A&M Women’s Faculty Network’s Outstanding Mentoring Award (2013), the Texas Section of the Mathematical Association of America’s Ron Barnes Distinguished Service to Students Award (2014) and the Texas A&M Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award for Student Relations (2015).
Learn more about the lecture or undergraduate research in Texas A&M Mathematics.