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2026 Newsletter

A message from our Department Head, Dr. John Harding:

Another academic year starts. We are welcoming our new TT Stats faculty Jiajun Tang and our new CT faculty Sungmin Won. Alex Waugh is a new postdoc here to work with Prasit. New visiting people include Vinh Nguyen (who works in commutative algebra), Kenat Calleros (our recent graduate), and Dylan Borchart (who works in stats). Among the longer-term face that are not returning are Joel Lucero-Bryan and Arvind Kumar (who got a tenure-track position at an IIT institute in India).

We have 8 new graduate students joining us this fall, 3 Master’s and 5 PhD, equally split between domestic and international. We were quite lucky with visa’s for our international students, everyone got here okay. Many departments had a lot of problems.

Our new BSc in Statistics for Data Science offered through Global has officially opened and we have our first students. I believe it is one or two, but don’t have the data yet. Undergrad enrollment is stable, but still at a lower level than we would like. The university collected data on salaries for undergraduates who graduated from 2010 - 2025. It turns out that Math graduates had the highest median salary among all departments in A&S and essentially the same salaries as Engineering graduates, see https://math.nmsu.edu/prospective-students/salary-data-for-nmsu-graduates.html Due to the generosity of various donors, the department is able to fund an undergraduate scholarship program. We have our first three Math Majors entering our program with a scholarship valued at $1500 per year through a 4-year course of study.

This year we have been hit with a series of challenges in terms of staffing. We have 5 faculty on leave for all or part of the year, have an ongoing deficit in terms of retirements of tenure-track faculty and not being given permission to fill their lines, issues with visas for some new hires, and increasing demands in terms of Main Campus and Global classes. One of the faculty on leave is me, I am on sabbatical until January. Dante is acting Department Head until then and is doing an amazing job in keeping the wheels from completely falling off amid this crisis.

All in all, we have a great group of people coming in and are looking forward to a good year.

About the Department

The department offers courses in mathematics and statistics leading to the Bachelor’s, Master’s and Doctoral degree. At the Bachelor’s level we have several options for career preparation, such as applied mathematics and actuarial science.

Our faculty has research groups in many areas of pure and applied mathematics, and in mathematics education. Strengths lie in commutative algebra, logic and foundations, probability and statistics, dynamical systems, mathematical biology, variational methods in partial differential equations especially relevant to materials science, and applied and computational harmonic analysis with applications to machine learning and data analysis.

We provide courses for other disciplines throughout the NMSU main campus. This includes the sciences, engineering, social sciences, humanities, agriculture, business, and education. This includes preparatory and general education courses that ensure every student has the quantitative and reasoning skills needed every career now demands.

The department’s mission is to provide core education in mathematics and statistics that prepares graduate and undergraduate students to be knowledgeable and responsible citizens of the world.

Our Math Tutoring Center is closed indefinitely.

New Mexico State University

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Department of Mathematical Sciences

Welcome to the Department of Mathematical Sciences

News

A message from our Department Head, Dr. John Harding:

About the Department

Department of Mathematical Sciences

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