- Home
- Science & Mathematics
- Academic Departments
- Mathematics
- Research & Impact
Menu
Research & Impact
Research interests of members of the department include representation theory, differential geometry, combinatorics, optimization, probability, statistics, computational biology, hydrology, neuroimaging, and mathematics education.
Faculty in the department publish their research in prestigious journals, and participate actively in conferences and workshops. The department organizes regular research seminars.
Publications
Download a list of the most recent publications from the UMass Boston Department of Mathematics.
For a more comprehensive list, click here. (Last Update: October 19, 2023)
Mathematics Department Colloquium Series
The presentations cover a large variety of topics and are intended for a general math audience. The colloquia usually take place on Wednesday afternoons in the Mathematics Department Seminar and Common Room (W03-154-28). For more information, please see below:
Fall 2025 Colloquia
Date: Wednesday, September 17th, 2025 from 4:00 - 5:00pm
Speaker: Daniel Álvarez-Gavela (Brandeis University)
Title: Does the Symplectic Topology of a Cotangent Bundle Remember the Smooth Topology of the Base?
Abstract: If two smooth manifolds are diffeomorphic, then their cotangent bundles are symplectomorphic, i.e. they are not just equivalent as smooth manifolds but also as symplectic manifolds. Whether the converse holds is a major open problem in symplectic topology. I will give a survey of known results in this direction, as well as for related problems such as the nearby Lagrangian conjecture, and present some recent progress joint with M. Abouzaid, S. Courte and T. Kragh.
Date: Wednesday, September 24th, 2025 from 4:00 - 5:00pm
Speaker: Agniva Roy (Boston College)
Title: Fillings of Contact manifolds -- From symplectic to Stein
Abstract: Contact and symplectic geometry is a branch of mathematics that is born from classical mechanics and optics. Contact structures arise on the boundary of symplectic domains, and in some cases this symplectic structure comes associated with a Stein structure. There are natural inclusions on the notion of fillability of a contact manifold, with a Stein filling being the strongest notion -- in this case the contact manifold is the sublevel set of a Stein manifold, a complex manifold that properly embeds into standard complex space for high enough dimension. The fillability of contact 3-manifolds has been studied using pseudoholomorphic foliations, as well as techniques coming from algebraic geometry, singularity theory, and low-dimensional topology. In this talk I will give an overview of these ideas and present some of my own work, joint with Hyunki Min (UGA) and Luya Wang (IAS), in studying and classifying fillings using a new technique called spinal open books.