 Welcome and thank you for attending our first level virtual undergraduate award ceremony. My name is Antoine Mele. I am the chair of Undergraduate Studies for the Mathematic 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 nonetheless. 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 communities 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 just about 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 in 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 will 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 manage 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 online 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 have 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 for 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. By 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 diagram it said he loved good food, good wine, and good conversations. 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 University of Chicago, David Bindle 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 undergrad at the University of Maryland graduating in 1967 and 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 firestaff's elliptic functions. You name it. Anyone who's done numerical work in mathematics has probably come across Abramowitz's name in his context. 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 negotiated 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 for 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 the many of us who was impressed by and influenced by Dan's work and he endowed the Dan Shanks Award in Dan's honor. Virtual Equations and Imple Systems and 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 over this hurdle. He was a truly super teacher and the Dan Sweet Memorial Fellowship is named in his memory.