 Hello and welcome to the annual Math Department Undergraduate Ceremony. My name is Antoine Melle, I am the Undergraduate Chair for the Math Department and I will just say a few words to get this ceremony started. First, this is a very important moment for our program. We are here to celebrate and recognize the spectacular achievements of some of our Math majors. The students who will be recognized today were nominated by the Instructors and selected for these awards by the Undergraduate Award Committee. They have distinguished themselves among more than 800 Math majors that we have in our program and this year particularly they have done so in very difficult circumstances. So I hope that the fact that this ceremony is once again being held online rather than in person will not take anything away from this celebration. I also want to thank the work of the Undergraduate Award Committee, Larry Washington, Radoo Balan and Jim Shepard who looked through countless nominations to make these award recommendations. But of course most of all I want to congratulate the students as well as any parents, family, friends who contributed to their successes or this way deserve the awards. So let's get this ceremony started and we will start with a word from our Chair, Doran Levy. Hello everybody. My name is Doran Levy and I'm the Math Department Chair. It is a great honor to welcome you to the 2021 Undergraduate Award Ceremony. This is a very special time of the year when we recognize the achievements of our very best. The 2021 academic year has been a year like no others with a pandemic, remote teaching, health concerns, academic challenges and many other issues that greatly affected all of us. It is remarkable to see such a wonderful group of students that manage to do so well in spite of all these challenges. As we end the year I would like to use the opportunity to congratulate our graduating seniors and to wish you all the best with whatever comes next. For those of you that will be returning to us next year I hope to be able to see you and congratulate you in person. I would like to send very special thanks to the parents, siblings, extended family, friends and everyone else that deserves thanks for supporting you and helping you to be where you are now. Congratulations Award Winners. We are very, very proud of you. We have two awards for our top graduating seniors. One is the Outstanding Senior Award. The other is the Built in the Brom Woods Award. Past winners include Charles Feppermann, the Fields Medalist, Sergey Brin, the co-founder of Google. So who was Milton the Brom Woods? 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 firestross elliptic functions, you name it. Anyone who's done numerical work in mathematics has probably come across Abramowitz's name in his context. Aziz's 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, 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 Beckerman, who's a professor at University of Chicago, David Bindle, who's a professor at Cornell, Bianca Vare, she's a professor at University of Washington. The award is named after Robert Higginbotham, who was a truly excellent undergrad at 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. 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. Both John and Sabrina Contner were students at 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 of mathematics. Dan Shanks received his PhD from the University of Maryland in the mid-1950s. He spent most of his career working in 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 Owings, 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. Dan Sweet was a specialist in differential equations and dynamical 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.