Academics

Mission Statement

The mission of the Department of Applied Mathematics and Statistics is:

• to promote the sound use of theories, methods, and applications in applied mathematics (AM) and statistics (S) on the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and
• to provide service to the campus, the surrounding community, the state of California, and the professions of applied mathematics and statistics,

through excellence in research and teaching.

Areas of Excellence

AMS strives to achieve excellence in various areas including:

• Dynamic mathematical modeling, fluid dynamics and optimization and control theory with applications to astrophysics, biology, earth and marine sciences, engineering, and geophysics; and
• Bayesian nonparametric methods, Bayesian inference, prediction, and decision-making with applications to bioinformatics, computational biology, machine learning, visualization and the environment

AMS is committed to teaching excellence. For undergraduates, we offer a variety of courses at the lower and upper division levels, which can be used to cover Quantitative (Q) or the Introduction to Discipline (IN) requirements. This includes an ongoing collaboration with the Mathematics department in teaching Math11A and Marth11B. We have also introduced a minor in Applied Mathematics & Statistics and plan to start a major in Applied Mathematics & Statistics sometime in the future. At the graduate level, we offer a program in Statistics and Stochastic Modeling (with the posibility of an annotation on Applied Mathematics), as well as a number of courses that are regularly taken by graduate students in other programs.