 and welcome and thank you for attending our first ever virtual undergraduate award ceremony. My name is Antoine Mellet. I am the chair of Undergraduate Center for the Mathematics Department here at the University of Maryland. This ceremony is the time when all of us, members of the math department, celebrate our most successful undergraduate math major. First thing ceremony is usually one of the highlights of our end-of-year activities, together with graduation and everything else. So we are sorry that we had to cancel our usual live ceremonies this year. We tried to put together this virtual ceremony to celebrate your achievements and all the rest. Now, of course, we will not be getting the free food that usually comes after the ceremony, but on the plus side, we hope that you will be able to share this moment with more friends and families than ever before. Now, just a word to put your achievement into context. I'll just say this. We have about 800 math majors on campus and you somehow manage to outshine all of them, so you should really be part of yourself. You fully deserve our congratulations for this remarkable success. A quick word to parents and family. We all know that students got to this point since their academic career, mostly because of their hard work and dedication, but also thanks to your support. So I think you deserve some congratulations as well. Finally, to those of you who are graduating this spring, we miss you and we wish you good luck with anything and everything that comes next. We know that you'll continue being successful in whatever career or studies that you choose to pursue. With that, I would like to thank the Undergraduate Award Committee for its hard work identifying our awardees, and I will now give the floor to our department chair, Professor Dorn Levy. Thanks, Antoine. My name is Dorn Levy and I'm the math department chair. It is a great pleasure to welcome you all to this award ceremony, students, families, and friends. We meet today to celebrate your great achievements, whether they're related to your coursework, to research, or even to teaching. It takes many years of training to become a professional mathematician, but all of us remember the days we were undergraduate students. Our undergraduates are the foundation of our department. We have over 800 math majors, but we teach every semester about 10,000 students. Everyone's taking math. It is not an easy task to stick out in such a crowd, but you managed to do so and this is very, very impressive. Congratulations. No one could have imagined at the beginning of the semester that we will be forced to move all our operations unlined due to a pandemic. While this has been an enormously challenging task, the transition did bring out a lot of good things. A collaborative spirit, many innovative ideas, but most of all, it helped us realize how much we all love our profession and our discipline, how much we all are passionate about math. For those of you that are graduating this semester, I would like to use the opportunity to thank you for everything you have done for the department and to wish you the best of luck in whatever you plan to do next. For those of you that are returning to Maryland next year, we look forward to working with you, teaching you, but also learning from you. Once campus resumes normal operations, please stop by my office and say hi. I would like to congratulate every one of you in person. Congratulations, award winners. We are very, very proud of you. The Aziz Mathematics Scholarship is named for Kadir Aziz, who's been a very generous benefactor of the Mathematics Department for many years. Dr. Aziz was born in Afghanistan and spent his early years in Paris, where his father was the Afghan ambassador to France. I guess looking for a more exciting place to live, he came to College Park and earned his PhD in 1958 with a thesis on partial differential equations. He then taught at Georgetown for a while and then moved to UMBC, where he's really one of the founders of the UMBC Math Department. At the same time, he also held a position here in College Park, where he was a very active member of the Numerical Analysis Group. In an obituary of his, I read, it said he loved good food, good wine, and good conversation. I think we can be grateful. He also liked good mathematics and good students and we're very grateful for his support. The Higginbotham Award has a long history, going back to 1971. As with the other awards we give, there's a list of winners on our website and when I looked through the list of winners here, I found several well-known mathematicians. For example, Bob Fefferman, who's a professor at the University of Chicago. David Bindel, who's a professor at Cornell. Bianca Bray, she's a professor at University of Washington. The award is named after Robert Higginbotham, who was a truly excellent undergraduate at the University of Maryland, graduating in 1967. In that year, he won the Abramowitz Award for the Outstanding Senior. Unfortunately, two years later, he died in the Vietnam War and this award is given in his memory. We have two awards for our top graduating seniors. One is the Outstanding Senior Award. The other is the Built in the Abramowitz Award. Past winners include Charles Fefferman, the Fields Medalist, Sergei Brand, the co-founder of Google. So who was Built in the Abramowitz? He was a professor at the University of Maryland back in the 1950s. He also worked at the National Bureau of Standards, now called NIST, up in Gaithersburg. Back in the Dark Ages, before laptops, before calculators, how did mathematicians do calculations? They used mathematical tables. This classic book of mathematical tables was edited by Abramowitz and his colleague, Irene Stegen. You'll find great stuff in here. Tables of trigonometric functions to 23 decimal places, logarithms to 15 decimal places, graphs of Bairstass elliptic functions, you name it. Anyone who's done numerical work in mathematics has probably come across Abramowitz's name in his contents. We're students of the University of Maryland. Sabrina got her bachelor's degree in 1992. John got his bachelor's in 1984 and his master's degree in 1988. In fact, he wrote his master's thesis under my direction in abstract algebra. But I guess that was enough pure mathematics for him. He completely changed direction. So what does he do now? Well, suppose you get a bill from a hospital and it says the hospital wants to charge $10,000 for some procedure. But the negotiating rate is that the insurance company only has to pay $2,000. The middleman who negotiates this rate is John Contner and his company. And they've obviously been very successful at it. And that's why John wanted to endow this scholarship for people who are interested in real-world applications, especially economic applications, mathematics. The Strauss Scholarship is named for Ron Strauss. He was a specialist first in dynamical systems and then in the history of math. And he published books on both subjects. At the time of his death, he was our undergrad chair. I only overlapped with him for one year, back in 1977. But every time I saw him, he was surrounded by students. He was a very popular teacher. And the Strauss Scholarship is named in his honor. Dan Shanks received his PhD from the University of Maryland in the mid-1950s. He spent most of his career working at various naval research laboratories in this area. After he retired, he spent almost 20 years at the University of Maryland. His specialties were numerical analysis and number theory. In the 1960s, he was listed in the Guinness Book of World Records for his computation of pi to 100,000 decimal places. Back then, this was quite an achievement. He was one of the preeminent computational number theorists of his day. And several of his algorithms still have an influence on modern-day cryptography. My former colleague, Jim Owens, was one of many of us who was impressed by and influenced by Dan's work. And he endowed the Dan Shanks Award in Dan's honor. In differential equations and dynamical systems, he taught at the University of Maryland for around 30 years. For a while, he was director of our applied math program. Math 410, real analysis, is regarded as the biggest hurdle for many of our math majors. Dan Sweet was known as the one who would get you all this hurdle. He was a truly super teacher. And the Dan Sweet Memorial Fellowship is named in his memory.