Overview

The Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics provides a unified home for the mathematical sciences.  It is now the only such comprehensive mathematical sciences department among U.S. universities.  It has 32 full-time faculty plus 34 adjunct faculty with primary appointments in other Stony Brook departments or in federal and industrial research laboratories.

Education: It has close to over 300 graduate students studying at the M.S. and Ph.D. levels in tracks in:

 i)   computational applied mathematics;

ii)   computational biology;

iii)  operations research;

iv) quantitative finance; and

v)  statistics

It awards over 20 Ph.D.’s and 70 M.S.’s a year. 

The department also has an extremely successful undergraduate major, graduating over 200 B.S.’s a year; currently the only Stony Brook departments graduating more majors are Biology and Psychology. For decades, Stony Brook has graduated the highest percentage of Bachelor’s degrees in mathematics—mostly in Applied Math-- of any U.S. public university.

Research:  Applied Mathematics and Statistics faculty work on a wide range of important problems, from designing better drugs to fight AIDS to assessing the effectiveness of foster care programs to helping the FAA route airplanes around weather systems to designing fusion reactors.  An underlying premise of all research is that problems drive the mathematics, as opposed to having theories in search of applications. Almost all research projects involve collaborations with faculty in other disciplines. Almost all faculty have external funding for their studies, averaging over $100,000 a year per professor.

The department has two Frey Family Endowed Chairs in Quantitative Finance and is one of the few mathematical science departments offering a Ph.D. program in quantitative finance.