Washington Post: The University of Maryland has announced that Wallace Loh, currently the provost at the University of Iowa, will assume the presidency of the university’s College Park campus on 1 November. College Park is home to one of the biggest physics departments in the US. According to its website, the Maryland physics department is engaged in more than 30 areas of physics research. Loh was born in Shanghai; grew up in Lima, Peru; and earned degrees in social sciences from Grinnell College, Cornell, the University of Michigan, and Yale.
Modeling the shapes of tree branches, neurons, and blood vessels is a thorny problem, but researchers have just discovered that much of the math has already been done.