Introduction to CMPS

CMPS research expenditures during the most recent fiscal year exceeded $69 million.

Welcome to CMPS!

The search for new knowledge is one of the most challenging activities of humankind. We search for an understanding of the world around us, and this inevitably leads to remarkable progress in how we live. The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Physical Sciences is at the forefront of this effort, and remarkable indeed is the rapid pace and depth of the knowledge we are creating today.

Educating students is at the heart of our mission, and CMPS provides a unique educational experience formed by faculty whose stellar quality is reflected in the honors they receive and in the rankings of our disciplines -see the map above. Direct participation in the research of our faculty is a special opportunity we offer all our students, and we have made diversity a priority to ensure that minority students are in the game.  It is the reputation of our faculty and the quality of the education we provide that makes a Maryland degree in our disciplines so valuable.

To remain at the edge of scientific discovery in a rapidly changing world requires investment in newly developing fields of inquiry, and so the profile of CMPS has changed dramatically over the last decade. In our geochemistry laboratories scientists are uncovering the history of the evolution of the earth, and our new radio astronomy array in California (joint with Illinois, Berkeley and Cal Tech) is one of the finest in the world. Cross-disciplinarity is everywhere: one simple example is our computational science center where a bio-mathematician, a specialist in networks, a computational plasma physicist, a computational gravity theorist and a leader in applied computational partial differential equations work together. We have just moved into biophysics, with a PhD program under construction, and are recruiting more nano-physicists, who will participate in our undergraduate minor in nanoscience. Bioinformatics and computational cultural dynamics are rapidly growing efforts, as is quantum physics for macroscopic applications. Finally, in earth system science the faculty are combining data about the atmosphere, oceans and the biosphere to predict the climate and environmental changes that will happen in the coming decades.

Ultimately there are only two measures by which to judge an academic college like CMPS: the impact of the knowledge it produces, and the impact of its graduates. Thus it is a pleasure to celebrate all our graduates, and to name just a few: Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google; Herbert Hauptman, Nobel Laureate; George Dantzig, creator of the simplex algorithm and modern linear programming; Paul Butler discoverer of some of the first known extra-solar planets; and Robert Fischell, inventor of the modern stent.

And so, welcome to CMPS!

—Steve Halperin, Dean

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