Owen Ekblad received his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Michigan State University in June 2026. He studies mathematical quantum physics, with a particular focus on disordered systems. He was born and raised in Michigan in the Ann Arbor area, and enjoys spending time outdoors on hikes and long walks.
We rely on maps to make sense of the world around us. This isn’t just true for sailors navigating the oceans or families taking to the highways on vacations; it’s true for scientists who use maps of spacetime to study how empty space behaves around celestial objects such as black holes.
But for most maps, points of extreme irregularity pop up. Those points are called singularities.
What are singularities?
Singularities are geometric points where maps break down into distortions.
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.
Wein and Iyer's NSF CAREER awards. Krener recognized with Quazza Medal. Shkoller and Fraas speak at ICMP 2024. Jacob et al win 2024 Frontiers of Science Award. Vazquez elected AAAS Fellow. De Loera, Schilling, and Thomas recognized for teaching and leadership. Xu wins INFORMS award. Casals awarded MCA Prize. Shkoller to lead COMPASS team.
On April 9, 2025, the Department of Mathematics in collaboration with the Department of Theatre and Dance and the College of Letters and Science at UC Davis hosted the play "Diving into Math with Emmy Noether." Wyatt Pavilion Theater was packed with faculty, students and staff from all over campus. The play complemented classroom learning by showing the struggles Emmy Noether faced during her life and the context in which her mathematics was created.
Swati Patel and Axel Saenz Rodriguez are Assistant Professors in the Mathematics Department at Oregon State University (OSU) in Corvallis, OR. Saenz Rodriguez and Patel were both graduate students in the Math and Applied Math Department at UC Davis, where they first met. They are now married and have two beautiful and energetic children. Patel works in math bio, modeling systems arising from evolution, disease dynamics and ecology. Saenz Rodriguez works in probability and math physics, analyzing universal probabilistic objects for one-dimensional interacting particle systems.
Craig was my first graduate student. He has had an extremely productive and distinguished career. Over the decades since I first met Craig we have shared many adventures together. It is hard to believe that he is retiring.
I retired on July 1, 2019 and immediately started a long trip: seven countries in seven months. (I had needed to stay in Davis since 2012.) I visited the Simons Center (Stony Brook, NY), the Institute for Theoretical Physics (Sao Paulo, Brazil), IHES (Bures-sur-Yvette, France), Skolkovo (Moscow, Russia), MPIM (Bonn, Germany), a conference in Luxembourg, Hebrew University (Jerusalem, Israel), Weizmann Institute (Rehovot, Israel), and University of Warwick (UK).
