2004 Trjitzinsky Awards

The AMS has made $24,000 in awards to nine undergraduate students through the Waldemar J. Trjitzinsky Memorial Fund. The fund is made possible by a bequest from the estate of Waldemar J., Barbara G., and Juliette Trjitzinsky. The will of Barbara Trjitzinsky stipulates that the income from the bequest should be used to establish a fund to assist needy students in mathematics, in honor of the memory of her husband.

For the 2004 Trjitzinsky awards, the AMS chose six geographically distributed schools to receive one-time awards of $4,000 each. The mathematics departments at those schools then chose students to receive the funds to assist them in pursuit of careers in mathematics. The schools are selected in a random drawing from the pool of AMS institutional members.

Below are the names of the selected schools for 2004, the student recipients, and brief biographies of the recipients.

Beloit College: Laura Wolfram

Wolfram grew up in Madison, and graduated from Madison West High School. One of the reasons she chose Beloit College was because the college offered interaction with its professors. She became interested in mathematics during her sophomore year at Beloit. That interest has grown as the complexity and rigor of the classes has increased. Her studies have included geometry, math modeling, and vector calculus. She plans on incorporating the mathematical knowledge and problem solving she has obtained at Beloit in her future career.

Professor David Ellis, Chair of the Beloit College Department of Mathematics, says "Our department members have been uniformly impressed by the work that Laura has done in her courses. She has demonstrated both talent and tenacity in her studies."

Lafayette College: Prince Chidyagwai, Ekaterina Jager and Blerta Shtylla

Prince Chidyagwai
Chidyagwai is a senior at Lafayette College. He was born in Zimbabwe and came to the United States to Lafayette College as a freshman, beginning as a computer science major. During the summer after his freshman year, Chidyagwai was intrigued by mathematics in Lafayette College’s Excel Research Program, so he decided to become a double major in math and computer science. Chidyagwai is a member of Pi Mu Epsilon, and works as a teaching assistant in the Math Department. He is planning to pursue a Ph.D. in applied mathematics.

Ekaterina Jager
Jager is from Uzbekistan, where she got her high school education. It had always been her dream to go to an American college. Jager chose Lafayette College because of its small size, dedication to undergraduate students, research opportunities and location. As she learned more about mathematics - while a freshmen engineering student - she became more and more fascinated with it and decided to major in math. Currently she is pursuing a double degree in mathematics and electrical and computer engineering at Lafayette. She is the founding president of the Lafayette math club and is a regular member of the Putnam Exam team. Her work with Prof. Gary Gordon has been submitted for publication, and her work with Prof. Derek Smith has been accepted for publication in the International Journal of Theoretical Physics. Last winter she presented a poster at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Phoenix. She plans to go to graduate school in mathematics and make mathematics her career.

Blerta Shtylla
Shtylla was born in Albania, where she attended high school for the first three years. She spent her senior year of high school in Switzerland, after being awarded a scholarship to study there. She came to Lafayette College as a passionate premed student and upon discovering her love for mathematics, she decided to major in mathematics. Her curiosity in sciences led to a minor in bioengineering. Shtylla has done exciting research in knot theory under the Excel scholar program in the mathematics department. Last summer, she participated in a two-week seminar at the Institute for Advanced Study's Program for Women in Mathematics. The remainder of her summer was spent at the Mayo Clinic, where she received a summer research fellowship. While there, she conducted research in automated motion correction in MRI in the bioengineering department at the Mayo graduate school. Her work with Prof. Louis Zulli has recently been accepted for publication in the Journal of Knot Theory and its Ramifications. She hopes to enroll in a graduate program in applied mathematics.

Michigan State University: Antonio Veloz

Veloz has come a long way in his mathematics career. After graduating from the Detroit public school system, Veloz was placed in remedial mathematics, a course in which he struggled. As he eventually encountered the calculus, however, he caught sight of the beauty and power of mathematics and pulled himself up to the point where he now receives almost straight A's in his advanced mathematics courses. He plans to go on to graduate study in mathematics.

University of Pennsylvania: Daniel Pomerleano

Daniel is a sophomore at the University of Pennsylvania and a native of Falls Church, VA where he attended the acclaimed Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Daniel made use of the resources offered by Jefferson by taking upper-level math classes and as a result has already begun to take graduate courses. He is planning to combine his degree in mathematics with a degree in finance from the Wharton School of Business. Daniel has research experience in the simulation of stochastic processes as well as differential games. In addition, Daniel has achieved the title of master in chess. He is especially interested in a mathematical representation of chess and applies his current theories against the highest level of competition with reasonable success. In the remainder of his undergraduate life, Daniel hopes to expand his mathematical horizons and explore through research the relationship between mathematics and finance.

Portland State University: Kathryn Carr and Cass Bath

Kathryn Carr
Carr is a senior at Portland State University. Starting next fall, she will be volunteering in the Peace Corps hoping to go to West or Southern Africa to focus on health education particularly with HIV/AIDS. After the Peace Corps, she intends to return to the US and enroll in a Master's program for statistics or a graduate teaching program with a focus on advanced math. Her experience in the Math Excel program has made it clear that she truly enjoys teaching mathematics, so a career as a high school or community college teacher looks promising.

Cass Bath
As a double major both in mathematical sciences and women’s studies, with a minor in psychology, Bath combines her mathematical skills with her interests in social issues. She loves the concept of combining research in the social sciences with statistics to better understand the world. One option that she is particularly interested in is gender equity in the math and science fields. This includes all facets: from the discrepancy in how math is taught to different genders in grade school through upper-level graduate school, to misrepresentation in the math and science fields in “the real world.” She would love to broaden understanding of every sort of inequality in the math and sciences. She works part-time in the math department as an undergraduate assistant in the Math Excel program. Next year, she plans to go to graduate school to get a Master’s degree in Statistics and then a Ph.D. in the same field.

The Portland State University Department of Mathematics and Statistics added matching funds totaling $1000 to the awards.

Santa Clara University: Olivia Gistand

Gistand is in her third year at Santa Clara University. Originally a computer science major, she decided to change her major to math after taking a few math classes because it fascinated her. She plans to become an actuary and also became interested in teaching high school math after tutoring at the local high school. Professor Robert Bekes, Chair of the Mathematics and Computer Science Department, says that Gistand, "is bright … and highly motivated. In addition, she is one of only a few African-American students to have majored in math or computer science at Santa Clara in the last 15 years."

The Santa Clara University Department of Mathematics and Computer Science added matching funds of $500 to the award.

Waldemar J. Trjitzinsky was born in Russia in 1901 and received his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1926. He taught at a number of institutions before taking a position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he remained for the rest of his professional life. He showed particular concern for students of mathematics and in some cases made personal efforts to insure that financial considerations would not hinder their studies. Trjitzinsky was the author of about sixty mathematics papers, primarily on quasi-analytic functions and partial differential equations. A member of the AMS for 46 years, he died in 1973.

For further information, contact:
Annette Emerson or Mike Breen
Public Awareness Office
American Mathematical Society
201 Charles St.
Providence, RI 02904
Email: paoffice at ams dot org
Phone: 401-455-4000
Fax: 401-331-3842

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Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 29,000-member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.