New faculty at Wisconsin

We’re fortunate enough at Wisconsin to have an administration that understands countercyclical hiring, and as a result I’m happy to report we have four new faculty members joining us next year.

• Scott Armstrong works in PDE.  He gave a beautiful job talk explaining how to construct viscosity solutions f to an equation with some boundary conditions by probabilistic means; f is the expected stopping time of a “Brownian motion game” in which two players “push” a Brownian process, the game ending when one player successfully pushes the process to the boundary.
• Tullia Dymarz is a geometric group theorist who is a master of the coarse geometry of groups (that is, the properties that are preserved by quasi-isometries.)  Her job talk featured Cayley graphs made out of multicolored pipe cleaners.
• Shamgar Gurevich is a geometric representation theorist who likes to talk about representations of Lie groups, perverse sheaves, and … wait for it… applications to signal processing and structural analysis of proteins!
• Richard Kent is a topologist specializing in hyperbolic geometry and mapping class groups.  On his web page you can find, behind a link only slightly smaller than the one for his publication list, his recipe for “Holy Crap Coleslaw.”

A great list of young mathematicians.  Gurevich and Kent will be here in the fall, Armstrong and Dymarz are on leave until 2011.

Update: I completely forgot to mention that we have one more offer outstanding!  Should “number 5” accept, I’ll make another post.