Congratulations to Professor Conley for winning the 2012 UNT Mathematics Department Faculty Teaching Award. Praised by students for his clarity and organization, Professor Conley is one of the math department's most gifted teachers. Students also appreciate the additional context that Dr. Conley brings to his classroom discussion of mathematics, better motivating the material and mathematical ideas. Dr. Conley is known for asking his students to solve challenging problems, problems which expand his students' problem solving skills.

Dr. Conley has a masters degree in physics from Caltech and a Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA done under the direction of Professor V. S. Varadarajan. Dr. Conley's general area of research is the representation theory of Lie algebras. Lie algebras are algebraic structures encoding the infinitesimal structure of vector fields and have been indispensible in advancing our understanding of physics. Put another way, Lie algebras are the infinitesimal manifestations of symmetry groups, for example, the ordinary Euclidean symmetries of three space or the Lorentz symmetries of Einstein's theory of space-time. The discovery of quarks, in part, came about as a result of mathematicians' classification of representations of certain Lie groups and algebras.

During the Fall 2012 semester, Dr. Conley will be sharing his mathematical insights as the instructor of our graduate level "modern algebra" course.