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Featured from our Fall 2021 Newsletter

View the full PDF of the Fall 2021 newsletter.

May 2021 graduates (from left to right) Juliana Bukoski, Elizabeth Carlson and Su Ji Hong will bring the number of women who have earned the Ph.D. from the Nebraska mathematics department to 100

Three May graduates will share honor of 100th Ph.D. to a woman in mathematics

Fifty-eight years after the first woman earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, the honor of the 100th Ph.D. will be shared by three women graduating in May 2021. Juliana Bukoski, Elizabeth Carlson and Su Ji Hong will bring the number of women who have earned the Ph.D. from the Nebraska mathematics department to 100. Prior to the 21st century, only 24 Ph.Ds. in mathematics had been earned by women at UNL. Taran Funk and Robert Huben join Bukoski, Carlson and Hong as May 2021 Ph.D. recipients from mathematics. Read More

Jim Lewis visits with Bob Wilhelm, Nebraska’s vice chancellor for research and economic development and Matt Larson, associate superintendent for instruction at Lincoln Public Schools on Nov. 18.

Lewis reaches 50th year at UNL

When Jim Lewis first arrived at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln to begin his job as an assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics in 1971, Richard Nixon was in his first term as president, the city of Lincoln was about half the size it is today, and the Nebraska football team was busy pursuing its second national championship. At the time, he likely did not envision that 50 years later he would still be teaching students, securing grants, improving mathematics education, and serving the department in myriad ways. Over the last half century, Lewis has laid the foundation for the department to flourish for decades to come. Read More

Alumna Julia Read-LaBelle and her husband, Pete, enjoy a trip to the Grand Tetons. Read-LaBelle (BS ’83), has worked at Nike for 22 years.

Alumni news: Roles at Nike beget new experiences

Mathematics and customer service cooperate as a balancing act. Julia Read-LaBelle, in her role as global supply and inventory analyst at Nike, uses her background in mathematics to make sure the products that customers want are available to them when they need them. During her 22 years at Nike, Read-LaBelle has woven together experiences working in areas from the database and warehouse lead to director of sustainable audit, seeing and analyzing the company’s business practices from different vantage points. Now, she decides how to best coordinate inventory supply with Nike’s worldwide supply chain partners, considering environmental sustainability and balancing consumer demand with cost reduction measures. Read More

Alumni Conrad “Connie” Rennemann Jr. and his wife, Annette (Luebbers)

Alumni news: Husker by luck gives back for 64 years

Alumnus Conrad “Connie” Rennemann Jr. of Dayton, Ohio, has made annual gifts to the College of Arts and Sciences Department of Mathematics at UNL since 1957, starting just six years after completing his studies. He received bachelor’s and master’s degrees from Nebraska, majoring in chemistry and mathematics and mathematics and physics respectively. Read More

Jack Jeffries, assistant professor of mathematics at Nebraska, has earned his department’s first-ever Faculty Early Career Development Program award from the National Science Foundation. He will use the $400,000, five-year grant to advance his research in commutative algebra.

Jeffries earns NSF Faculty Early Career Award grant

Jack Jeffries, assistant professor of mathematics, will use the $400,000, five-year grant to advance his research in commutative algebra, a field of abstract algebra that, at its heart, is focused on polynomials in many variables. More specifically, he will study singularities — points at which a mathematical object, or geometrical shape, is not “well-behaved” in some way — using differential operators and p-derivations. Read More

Third-year UNL student Cleve Young is majoring in mathematics and minoring in statistics.

STEM CONNECT: Young exploring new avenues at Nebraska

Before joining the STEM CONNECT program, Cleve Young encountered few opportunities to explore programming or research. Now, as a third-year student majoring in mathematics and minoring in statistics, Young said the support offered by faculty at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln made those experiences an easy transition. Read More

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