University of Colorado Denver Mathematical and Statistical Sciences

06/05/2026

🎉We’re proud to share that recent CU Denver PhD graduate Kayley Smiley has been featured by the CLAS Newsroom for her innovative research using applied mathematics and spatial statistics to advance disease hotspot detection. Her work focuses on helping communities identify disease outbreaks more quickly and effectively.

Kayley’s research is a wonderful example of how mathematical and statistical sciences can be applied to solve real-world challenges and improve lives.

Congratulations, Kayley, on this well-deserved recognition! 🎉

Read the full article: https://clas.ucdenver.edu/newsroom/2026/05/26/how-cu-denver-phd-graduate-kayley-smiley-used-applied-mathematics-advance-disease

06/05/2026

Please join us in congratulating Dr. Farhad Pourkamali on receiving tenure and being promoted to Associate Professor! 🎉

This exciting milestone was officially approved by the Board of Regents at the June 4, 2026 meeting, with the promotion becoming effective on August 10, 2026. This achievement reflects Dr. Pourkamali’s dedication to research, teaching, and service, as well as his valuable contributions to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences.

Congratulations on this well-deserved accomplishment, and best wishes for continued success in the years ahead!🎉

06/05/2026

Congratulations to the CU Denver Math & Statistics OER Team on receiving the 2026 Governor’s Award for Outstanding ZTC Department at the Colorado OER Conference! 🎉

Our OER Team consists of Troy Butler, Joshua French, Stephen Hartke, Daniel Klie, Yongxia Kuang, Yaning Liu, Robert Rostermundt, Adam Spiegler, and Pamela Whitten. They have been making an incredible impact through high-quality, carefully implemented zero textbook cost (ZTC) materials that help students save money while supporting their success.

After winning the Outstanding Bachelor’s Degree award last year, the team has now earned back-to-back statewide recognition with this year’s Outstanding Department award. 👏

Please join us in congratulating the team on this well-deserved honor and thanking them for their dedication to accessible, student-centered education.

Learn more here: https://cdhe.colorado.gov/news-article/governor-polis-celebrates-2026-zero-textbook-cost-challenge-award-recipients-honoring

05/27/2026

📢 Publication Alert 📢

We are excited to share the official publication of “Iterative Data-Consistent Inversion with Multiple Push-Forward Constraints.” This work represents a major advancement in the data-consistent inversion (DCI) framework, strengthening its theoretical foundations while introducing scalable algorithms for complex, multi-source data settings.

The paper presents a novel iterative DCI (iDCI) methodology that provably converges to solutions consistent with observed datasets, while also enabling robust inversion for asynchronous, heterogeneous, and high-dimensional observations. These contributions significantly expand the computational applicability of iDCI and position it as a powerful approach for modern stochastic inverse problems.

Congratulations to the Dr. Troy Butler and co-authors on this outstanding achievement!🎉

More at: https://www.dl.begellhouse.com/journals/52034eb04b657aea,430a9ab664b7b491,22309ac560989c09.html

05/20/2026

Congratulations to Pamela Whitten for being promoted from Senior Instructor to Principal Instructor! Well done and well deserved. Pamela Whitten keeps on demonstrating teaching effectiveness using best pedagogy practices. She is also a leader in constantly finding ways to improve our curriculum delivery methods. Thanks to Pamela Whitten for always putting our students' learning first. Congratulations to Pamela Whitten!

05/15/2026

From left to right: Dr. Stephen Hartnett, Director of the University of Colorado’s College-in-Prison Program, with Samuel Harris, Grace Truong, and Jacob Johns.

On the picture, Dr. Hartnett is handing out the textbooks to Samuel, Grace, and Jacob as they prepare for an exciting Summer 2026 semester teaching MATH 1010 in Colorado prisons.

Grace will be teaching at Colorado Territorial Correctional Facility in Cañon City, while Samuel and Jacob will be teaching at Sterling Correctional Facility.

Wishing them an inspiring and impactful summer as they bring learning, opportunity, and enthusiasm into the classroom and the prisons!

05/13/2026

On Thursday, May 7, 2026, our department came together for the annual 'Spring into Summer Gathering', celebrating another successful year with faculty, staff, students, and graduate students. It was an evening filled with recognition, and celebration. 🎉

We are especially proud to recognize our outstanding students for their achievements:

🏅 Grace Truong received the Spring 2026 Department Outstanding MS in Applied Mathematics Student Award awarded by Florian Pfender.

🏅 Abigail Nix received the Spring 2026 Lynn Bateman Memorial Award for Teaching Excellence by a TA/GPTI awarded by Carlos Martínez Mori.

🏅 Alexander Semyonov received the 2026–27 Lynn Bateman Fellowship awarded by Steffen Borgwardt.

Congratulations to all of our award recipients and thank you to everyone who joined us in celebrating the end of another amazing year! 🌸

05/12/2026

Great article about Ella Addison-Taylor (BS in Mathematics, Spring 2026) on CU Denver news. Ella Addison-Taylor is staying with Department of Mathematical and Statistical Sciences, CU Denver for her MS with the PATH-GDS program. Check the article out!

Ella Addison-Taylor was just a toddler when she first visited CU Denver’s campus. She would come to work with her mom, Professor of English Joanne

05/06/2026

We’re excited to share that Grace Truong, one of our PhD students (who also completed her Master’s degree this semester!), recently presented her Master’s project titled 'Reducibility Using Kempe Chains' at the Research and Creative Activities Symposium (RaCAS) a few weeks ago.

RaCAS is a university-wide event that showcases innovative research, scholarship, and creative work from students across disciplines. It provides a platform for students to share their work, engage with the academic community, and celebrate research achievements.

👏 Please join us in congratulating Grace on this exciting milestone. We also extend our sincere thanks to Professor Stephen Hartke, for his guidance and support throughout her project!

🔗 Learn more about Grace’s presentation here:https://symposium.foragerone.com/2026-racas/presentations/80856

04/30/2026

Join us for Anne Kreeck’s MS in Applied Mathematics Project Presentation on Friday, May 8th, 2026 from 1:00-3:00pm in Student Commons 4017 or over Zoom. Please email [email protected] to request the Zoom link.

Title: A Friendly Introduction to Representations of S3

Abstract: Representation theory studies making abstract algebraic structures concrete and easier to work with by representing group elements as matrices and the group operation as matrix multiplication. Here we follow Bruce E. Sagan's approach in chapter 1 of 'The Symmetric Group: Representations, Combinatorial Algorithms, and Symmetric Functions' and focus on using the symmetric group of degree 3, S3, to introduce fundamental concepts in algebraic combinatorics.
The symmetric group of degree n is is the group consisting of all bijections from {1, 2, ... , n} to itself using composition as the multiplication. We establish the basic ideas of represen-tations of groups using S3 for examples. We then discuss the concept of reducibility and Maschke's theorem, which is critical to the understanding of group characters and induced and restricted representations. Group characters are the trace of a matrix representation of an element of a group. Induced and restricted representations then answer the question of how we determine a representation for a group given a representation for a subgroup or vice versa.