News

The Mathematics Department at The City College of New York is pleased to announce that Siobhán O'Connor, CCNY mathematics instructor and PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, has been selected to participate in this year’s Inside the CUNY Graduate Center: A Dissertation Showcase.

O'Connor will represent the field of mathematics, sharing her doctoral research with a general audience as part of this fast‑paced, celebratory event. She is the only representative from Mathematics who will participate, and one of only three from science departments.

Siobhán O'Connor successfully defended her thesis on Algorithmic Problems in Automorphic Orbits of Free Groups this April. The thesis was completed under the guidance of her advisor, Professor Vladamir Shpilrain.

Congratulations Siobhán!

Congratulations to undergraduate student Christopher Barbosa, who will be participating in an REU at Iowa State University this summer, using temporal logic to improve autonomous driving. The project uses the RoboRacer autonomous driving research infrastructure and will explorie how to incorporate temporal logic to detect when a vehicle is violating rules, and/or to preempt a vehicle from taking actions that may violate rules. This project will draw upon Christopher's interest in non-classical logics and experience in constructive foundations and intuitionism to apply the tools to a modern application. The project is supervised by Prof. Kristin Rozier of the Departments of Aerospace Engineering and Computer Science.

His REU funding has a $5000 stipend, and also covers travel to and from Iowa, room and board in Iowa, and travel to Mathfest in Boston in August. Christopher will be working with a distinguished mentor and a select group of students from around the country with similar interests.

The William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition is a nationwide mathematics examination, held each December, requiring exceptional ability and creativity to achieve a non-zero score.

Two CCNY undergraduates, Rehan Mannan (Sophomore) and Melika El Wadany (Senior) represented CCNY in the prestigious Putnam Math competition on Saturday, December 6th. Congratulations to Rehan and Melika! Dr. Auth leads the CCNY Putnam Team and students interested in competing or preparing should contact Dr. Auth.

The Artino Mathematics Tutoring Center in NAC 1/511 has tutoring hours for F25 Final Exam Week:

In-Person & Remote Tutoring Available:

• 12/16 Tuesday 10:30 AM - 7:00 PM (In-person & Zoom)
• 12/17 Wednesday 10:30 AM - 7:00 PM (In-person & Zoom)
• 12/18 Thursday 10:30 AM - 7:00 PM (In-person & Zoom)
• 12/19 Friday 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM (In-person & Zoom)
• 12/20 Saturday 12:00 PM - 5:00 PM (Zoom only)
• 12/21 Sunday 5:00 PM - 10:00 PM (Zoom Only)
• 12/22 Monday 10:00 AM - 3:00 PM (In-person & Zoom)

Prof. Merenkov's MIT-PRIMES student Michael Iofin from Trinity School in New York was awarded the Gold Medal in Mathematics as well as the Grand Prize at the 2025 S.T. Yau High School Science Award competition held at Tsinghua University in Beijing, China on December 6-7. MIT-PRIMES, where Prof. Merenkov is a mentor since 2014, is a program for research in mathematics, engineering and science for high school students, organized by MIT. In order to qualify for the Beijing Final, Michael Iofin competed in the North America Yau event held at Columbia University last November, and also received the Gold Medal there. The Yau High School Science Award is established in honor of Prof. Shing-Tung Yau, a Fields Medalist, having done research in differential geometry at IAS, Stanford, UCSD, and Harvard before returning to China after retiring. To win the Grand Prize, Michael successfully competed with Gold Medalists from the other five participating divisions: Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Computer Science, Economics and Financial Modeling. Michael's winning project is titled "Quasiconformal Normalization of Random Meromorphic Functions", and it was suggested and mentored by Prof. Merenkov.