Are you inquisitive and persistent?
Alumni Stories
Heather Totten ’19 is an Information Security Operations Analyst at Tempus Labs, Inc.
Amy Armento Lee ’09 is a Quantitative UX researcher at Google. After completing her Math BS at Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½, she completed her MS in Biostatistics at Columbia University.
Kyle Bechler ’06 works as a data scientist with CBRE in Santa Barbara. In 2015, he completed his doctorate in statistics at UC Santa Barbara. His areas of expertise include predictive modeling, machine learning, leveraged credit, and financial modeling.
Manuel Reyes ’05 is an Associate Professor of Mathematics at UC Irving. He gave the 2022 American Mathematical Society and Mathematical Association of America Joint Invited Address on “How Noncommutative Algebra Points Toward Quantum Geometry.â€
Olivia Hughes ’17 is an epidemiologist at ICON plc. After completing her Math BS at Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½, she completed her MS in Biostatistics at Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.
Bailey Hall '24 completed an A3D3 Postbaccalaureate Research Fellow at the University of Washington. She is currently a graduate student and teaching assistant at Northern Arizona University.
Career Opportunities
Interested in pursuing a career based on solving complex problems?
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, employment occupations that require a strong background in math or computer science continues to grow at faster than average rates. Our graduates find jobs in many areas, including:
Education Linguistics Medicine Law Finance Biomedical Research | Software Development Systems Analysis Operations Research Government Service Data Analytics |
Faculty and Staff
Professor of Mathematics, Kathleen Smith Chair of Natural and Behavioral Sciences
Research
The mathematics faculty at Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ are active researchers in their fields and are involved in many fascinating projects!
Dr. Aboud works with a research group studying heat diffusion across fractal domains. Remarkably, the same set of equations governing this process also dictates how information flows across computer networks and also how current flows through an electric network. These connections have led to fruitful and fascinating collaboration between mathematicians, engineers, and theoretical computer scientists.
Nonperiodic tilings, such as the Penrose tiling, have enjoyed fruitful study in Euclidean space where their structure can be studied from the perspective of algebraic topology. Dr. Hansen's research group has extended some of this theory from the "flat" world of Euclidean space to the "curved" world of what are called "nilpotent Lie groups." They plan to compute the cohomology ring of a tiling space on the Heisenberg group in an effort to better understand the properties of such tilings.
An interesting question grew out of an article published by Dr. Howell and three Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ students in the February 2025 issue of the American Mathematical Monthly (doi=).
The research group was able to find a way to associate complex-valued functions with numbers picked at random between zero and one. They also found uncountable collections of such numbers that give rise to functions having a special property--and also an uncountable collection of those numbers that produce functions without that property. They further proved that the probability is either zero or one of picking a number that produces a function with that property. Those results naturally lead to the following question: "What is the probability--zero or one?"
Dr. Hunter researches and experiments with pedagogical methods related to inclusive teaching, active learning, and alternative grading.
Dr. van der Walt combines classical approximation theory with advances in machine learning, and uses these in applications in the medical field and signal processing space. She is also interested in dimensionality reduction and visualization of higher dimensional data.
Undergraduate Research
Dr. van der Walt was recently awarded an NSF grant supporting a research partnership between Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ and Santa Barbara City College (SBCC) designed to engage undergraduate students in mathematics research! Together with Gabriel Pretel (SBCC), Dr. van der Walt is leading a group of seven undergraduate students from Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ and SBCC as they pursue a project using Principle Component Analysis.
MATHEMATICS NEWS
Dr. van der Walt was recently awarded an NSF grant supporting a research partnership between Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ and Santa Barbara City College designed to engage undergraduate students in mathematics research. Together with Gabriel Pretel (SBCC), Dr. van der Walt is leading a group of seven undergraduate students from Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ and SBCC as they pursue a project using Principle Component Analysis.
The Center for Undergraduate Research in Mathematics (CURM) is an NSF-funded grant that provides funding and training for academic-year undergraduate research groups in mathematics. The funding consists of grants given to collaborations between 4+year institutions and 2-year or community colleges for students in their first or second year of college to engage in mathematical research.
Ten students and three faculty members were among nearly 6,000 other mathematicians at the 2024 Joint Mathematics Meetings, hosted by the American Mathematical Society.
Bailey Hall ‘24 is at the University of Washington as a Postbaccalaureate Research Fellow through the Accelerated AI Algorithms for Data-Driven Discovery (A3D3) Institute. The research project she is involved in finds ways to implement variational recurrent neural networks (vRNNs) into FPGA systems for a real-time closed-loop Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) design, focusing on how Latent Factor Analysis via Dynamical Systems (LFADS) can interpret and predict neural activity data.
During Lauren Landa's internships at Toyota Racing Development, she worked on data analysis and automation projects to improve NASCAR race insights. In 2023, she cleaned and transcribed thousands of rows of race data to help train a live summary model and built a NASCAR crash prediction model with 96% accuracy. In 2024, she automated passing analysis with a new dashboard and continued working with live race data, while also meeting industry professionals to learn more about the field.
Kudos to Curtis Barnhart, Sam Tang (current students), and Isaac Jessop '23 who learned that a paper they submitted with Professor Russell Howell was accepted for publication by the American Mathematical Monthly, a highly-selective journal that has less than a 10% acceptance rate. Their paper was based on research that took place last summer with funds from Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ to support their work. Entitled "Flip a Coin, Get an Annular Function?" their article investigates the probability of whether randomly-generated functions of complex numbers (sometimes called imaginary numbers) have a specialized property.
Russell Howell delivered a paper, “Revitalizing Complex Analysis,†at the 21st biennial conference of the Association of Christians in the Mathematical Sciences (ACMS) in Charleston, South Carolina, in June. At that meeting the ACMS board selected Russ to be the editor of their conference Proceedings, which has now become a peer-reviewed journal. Ray Rosentrater gave a talk at the same conference, “Bicycle Routes and Euler Double Paths.â€
On Saturday, February 7, over sixty of the area’s exceptional student “mathletes†from seven high schools participated in the 37th annual Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ Mathematics Field Day. Teams of four represented each school with the contest divided into two groups by grade level. Each year, a clever and colorful t-shirt is provided that connects with the number of the contest, in this year’s case “37.†The contest is run by Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ faculty and undergraduate volunteers.
STUDENT AWARDS & SCHOLARSHIPS
Howell Scholars Program
The Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ Mathematics and Computer Science department will soon be opening applications for the Howell Scholars program for students who are considering attending Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ in the fall of 2026.
This scholarship was created to attract passionate and talented students who want to attend Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ to study mathematics. It is named in honor of Dr. Russell Howell, a beloved professor in the mathematics department who has worked tirelessly to support Â鶹avÓ³»´«Ã½ students in their pursuit of mathematics, including fundraising, pursuing excellence in the classroom, and regularly mentoring exceptional undergraduate research.
2025 Howell Scholars
Congratulations to the 2025 Howell Scholars: Erik Potts, Riley Vaughan, and Asher Agol!