Ryan Hynd, a professor of mathematics in the School of Arts & Sciences, was selected to give the 2026 Hrabowski-Gates-Tapia-McBay (HGTM) Lecture, which he delivered at this year’s Joint Mathematics Meetings, held on January 4-7. The HGTM Lecture is an annual award and a talk that funds honorees to deliver a lecture on the topic of their choosing.

The award is presented by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA), Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), and American Mathematical Society (AMS). In an announcement, the organizations noted that the honor of giving the lecture is “presented annually to an individual who helps to systematically recruit, welcome, encourage, mentor, and support individuals from underrepresented groups in the U.S.”

Launched in 2016, the HGTM Lecture is named after four prominent scientists of color: Freeman Hrabowski, president emeritus of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Sylvester J. Gates, Jr., University of Maryland, College Park; Richard Tapia, Rice University; and Shirley McBay, founder and former president of Quality Education for Minorities. It became a jointly sponsored event in 2018, garnering the backing of the three organizations now involved.

Dr. Hynd’s research falls within a branch of mathematics called partial differential equations, with a focus on how those crop up in models like fluid mechanics, control theory, finance, and with eigenvalue problems. His HGTM Lecture focused on geometry, spotlighting the Reuleaux polyhedra, a three-dimensional shape formed by congruent spheres intersecting.