Joesph Hirsh
NSF Graduate Research Fellowship winner
Joseph Hirsh, a student at the Macaulay Honors College at Queens College, has been awarded a 2008 National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship which will provide up to $121,500 for three years in support of his Ph.D. studies in mathematics. Admitted to the Ph.D. program in math at UC Berkeley and the CUNY Graduate Center, Joseph has chosen CUNY for his doctoral studies. While majoring in Pure Mathematics at Queens, Joseph enrolled in 10 doctoral level math classes at the CUNY Graduate Center. He is a recipient of the Queen's Math Department's Thomas Budne Memorial Award for the highest achieving junior. His senior thesis, "A-infinity Algebras and the Maurer-Cartan Equation" was written under the supervision of Professor John Terilla and he will continue his work on homotopy algebras and deformation theory with Professor Terilla this summer. As a sophomore Joseph gave a talk at Brown University's Undergraduate Math Symposium, and he attended Max Planck Institute's conference on the Moduli Spaces of Curves in Bonn, Germany this past January. But math is not Joseph's only love or activity: he has worked 15 hours a week as an Assistant Macaulay Technology Fellow and studied Mandarin while living with a host family in Beijing. He loves cooking - especially baking - and he writes poetry. He also co-founded the Macaulay Honors College book club "The Page Turners."
