J. Andrew Newman has won a Presidential Fellowships by the Ohio State Graduate School. Presidential Fellowships recognize truly outstanding scholarship among doctoral students and provide recipients with a full year of support towards the completion of their dissertations. Less than twenty of these very prestigious awards are made every semester among the most outstanding students from 94 doctoral programs across the entire OSU campus. 

Andrew joined our Ph.D. program in 2013 after completing a Master’s degree at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. There he already coauthored his first, now published, research article on so called Turán numbers in graph theory.

Since the beginning of his second year Andrew has been working under the guidance of Professor Matt Kahle in the general area of Combinatorics and Stochastic Topology. During this time he profoundly contributed to the discovery of so called large “torsion bursts” in families of random complexes, a novel phenomenon that has stirred a significant amount of interest among leaders in the scientific community.

In addition, Andrew is the sole author on two more research articles. One of them provides a sharp estimate on the size of complexes with prescribed torsion, much improving on previous results. The other determines the threshold probability for the Linial-Meshulam models with respect freeness of the fundamental group. These results, as well, have earned Andrew recognition and praise from scholars at various universities.