hiking

The last time UC Davis saw me was when graduated in the summer of 2018 with a Ph.D. in Mathematics. My dissertation was in low-dimensional topology under Abby Thompson, focusing on Heegaard splittings of knot complements in the 3-sphere (with additional mentorship of Javier Arsuaga in the application of knot theory to molecular biology, particularly the folding of chromosomes in yeast). Only a few months prior to that, I had accepted an offer to join the faculty at University of the Pacific (UOP) in Stockton, CA, as a tenure-track assistant professor of applied mathematics.

We mourn the passing of our colleague Craig Tracy. 

Craig Tracy was an American mathematician known for his contributions to mathematical physics and probability theory. Born in 1945 in England to a British mother and an American father, Craig was raised on a farm in Missouri. After obtaining a B.Sc. in Physics from University of Missouri (1967), he studied at Stony Brook University, where he obtained a Ph.D. in Physics with the thesis Spin-Spin Scale-Functions in the Ising and XY-Models (1973), advised by Barry M. McCoy. 

Jared Krandel is a new KAP who will be starting at UC Davis in January 2025. He graduated from Stony Brook University in Spring 2024 and is spending this Fall as a postdoc at SLMath in Berkeley. Most of his work so far has been in an area of geometric measure theory called quantitative rectifiability. He studies geometric properties of rectifiable curves and surfaces through things like analyst's traveling salesman problems, characterizations of uniform rectifiability, parameterizability problems, and more. 

Anna Zarkh received her Mathematics Education Ph.D. in May 2024 from the University of California, Berkeley. She holds B.A. and M.A. degrees in Mathematics from Bar Ilan University in Israel. Anna’s research focuses on university mathematics education, specializing in socio-cultural theories, discourse analysis, and micro-ethnographic methods. She is interested in the historical development and effects of communication practices in contemporary academic mathematics.