With the United States taking its place as a global power after World War I, scholars began exploring questions that would develop into a discipline known as American studies in the 1930s. Over the next several decades, American studies programs were created across the United States, including in 1969 at UC Davis. The program, a department in the College of Letters and Science since 2016, is celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. It is the only Department of American Studies in the University of California system.
About 200 million years ago, much of the life on Earth was wiped out in the end-Triassic mass extinction. The catastrophe may have been caused by climate change related to massive volcanic eruptions.
Craig Tracy, distinguished professor of mathematics, and Professor Harold Widom of UC Santa Cruz will receive the 2020 Steele Prize for Seminal Contributions to Research from the American Mathematical Society.
New measurements of the rate of expansion of the universe, led by astronomers at the University of California, Davis, add to a growing mystery: Estimates of a fundamental constant made with different methods keep giving different results.
A breakthrough by UC Davis mathematicians could help scientists get three or four times the performance from supercomputers used to model protein folding, turbulence and other complex atomic scale problems.
The UC Davis College of Letters and Science has established a new prize to recognize and support faculty whose research, teaching, and service exemplifies the transformational intellectual and human value of the liberal arts and sciences. For 2019-20, the prize will include a privately funded award of $10,000.
Work to restore the natural flow of Alameda Creek into the San Francisco Bay involving two design department faculty is moving forward with $31.4 million from the State of California.
What does space look like at a really, really small scale? Answering that question could resolve one of the most difficult problems in modern physics, the huge mismatch between Einstein’s General Relativity, quantum theory and the measured acceleration of the expansion of the universe.
