Mini-Bio of Prof. Eduardo Dueñez

I was born and grew up in Guadalajara, Mexico. I always enjoyed math, science, languages and literature. I learned a lot of math on my own, not just by reading and practicing, but also by programming vintage personal computers during my precollege years.

I finished high school winning the Mexican Mathematics Olympiad (OMM), and participating in the OIM, APMO and IMO competitions. I didn't start my higher math education until two years after finishing high school because I lacked the means. (In Mexico, one cannot borrow money to attend a public university.) After these struggles, I was very fortunate to get a scholarship to attend college at Universidad de Guanajuato (UG), which has an outstanding Department of Mathematics (DEMAT) (formerly Facultad de Matemáticas FAMAT) jointly with Centro de Investigación en Matemáticas (CIMAT). With great support and nurturing from professors and mentors at FAMAT and CIMAT, I continued my studies at the Department of Mathematics of Princeton University, where I earned my PhD in 2001 under the supervision of Prof. Peter Sarnak.

After holding postdoctoral positions at the American Institute of Mathematics and The Johns Hopkins University, I joined the faculty of UTSA in 2004. I am the mentor and coach of UTSA students entering the yearly Putnam Mathematical Competition, in which UTSA’s team has proudly attained Top-50 ranking on several occasions among 500+ institutions of higher education in the US and Canada. I have coached many students entering math competitions at the middle, high-school and college levels. I remain an avid enthusiast solver of mathematical problems. I was editor of Mathematics Magazine's Problems column for a four-year term (2016 to 2019). (If you are curious to see what the Problems column looks like, here is a link to the June 2019 issue. Library login using your UTSA abc123 ID is required.) I belong to the American Mathematical Society (AMS), the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), the Association for Symbolic Logic (ASL), and the Society for the Advancement of Chicanos and Native Americans in Science (SACNAS).

At UTSA, I enjoy working with students committed to receiving the best education in mathematics I can provide. I have supervised, or co-supervised, independent research projects and theses of undergraduate and graduate math students over the years, on topics including cryptography, wavelets, representation theory, L-functions, elliptic curves, random matrix theory, and computational aspects of random matrices. I particularly like teaching foundations of math and analysis as they are closest to my current research, but I enjoy teaching a broad spectrum of courses, from undergraduate courses like calculus, linear algebra and foundations of mathematics, to graduate courses in analysis and number theory. I look forward to teaching courses in our traditional math programs as well as the new undergraduate program (joint between math and computer science) on Mathematics of Data and Computing.