NSF

This is my first year as GGAM Chair and the first time I have the honor of writing this column. I took over from Javier Arsuaga last summer. Javier did an incredible job moving GGAM forward—many thanks to him—and I am grateful to be able to build on and continue that work.

The equations and theorems were sand scribbles written in the beach by Anne Schilling’s father, a physicist who worked at the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). As her father wrote, Schilling absorbed as much of the information as possible before the Atlantic Ocean’s waves washed the mathematics away, the seafoam acting like an eraser on a blackboard.

Melissa Sherman-Bennett does research in algebraic combinatorics, focusing recently on cluster algebras, total positivity, and connections to particle physics. She received her Ph.D. in 2021 from UC Berkeley, under Lauren Williams. Before coming to Davis, she was a President’s Postdoctoral Fellow at UCLA and NSF Postdoctoral Fellow at Michigan and MIT.

After earning her B.S. in Mathematics in 1966,  Joan Marie Peters Ogden was a GS-7 mathematician in the Ships' Engineering section in the U.S. Navy in 1966 and 1967. While there, she helped NASA with mathematic modeling for naval ships, modeling ships motions to drive the hydraulics necesary for keeping the communication dish steady, to keep the dishes trained correctly during the Apollo Program.

George Thomas Sallee died unexpectedly in the early evening of Saturday, June 15, 2019, at the UCD Medical Center of hemorrhagic stroke.

Tom was born in Nyssa, a little farming community in eastern Oregon on the banks of the Snake River. He worked in the sugar beet fields and packing shed, became an Eagle Scout, and enjoyed a very happy childhood.