UCI mathematicians featured in Quanta Magazine

In the 1950s, a Soviet mathematician published proofs to a mathematical problem that, proposed by the mathematician David Hilbert in 1900, had, until then, remained unsolved. The math community considered the case closed after the proofs published — but mathematician Benson Farb of the University of Chicago, alongside professor Jesse Wolfson from the UCI Department of Mathematics, think there’s more to the problem, and that it’s not, after all, a closed case. Read more here, in an article written by Quanta contributing writer Stephen Ornes, or listen to in a podcast on the topic. In another piece, one featuring mathematics Professor Asaf Ferber, Quanta’s Kevin Hartnett writes about the idea of chaos through the medium of graphs. The questions on hand are as much philosophical as they are mathematical: Is chaos the fundamental force by which the Universe ticks, or does order inevitably emerge past a certain point? And, Hartnett also covered work by Ferber and others on the points that define a graph. “Having recent research of our faculty so highlighted is a huge visibility boost for us,” said Svetlana Jitomirskaya, a professor in the math department. “Ferber is an assistant professor, and Wolfson was just promoted to tenure, and their new highly prominent work illustrates the strong growth trajectory of the math department and its success in the department’s recent tenure track hiring cycle.”