Bucknell University Student Receives 2019 Trjitzinsky Award

Jordan Kovacs '20, a senior mathematics major at Bucknell University, is one of eight students
nationally to be a recipient of a 2019 Trjitzinsky Award, awarded by the American Mathematical
Society (AMS). The AMS has made $3,000 awards to eight deserving undergraduate students
through the Waldemar J. Trjitzinsky Memorial Fund, which is made possible by a bequest from
the estate of Waldemar J., Barbara G., and Juliette Trjitzinsky.

Kovacs will be graduating from Bucknell in May with a Bachelor of Science degree in
mathematics with a statistics concentration and a minor in Italian studies. He has loved the field
of mathematics since he was a child and has found comfort in applied fields of statistics.
In his first summers at Bucknell, Kovacs participated in the STEM Scholars Research Program
where he studied spatial healthcare accessibility for people in rural Colorado and also studied the
factors of the spread of the Zika Virus via sensitivity analysis. Now studying to become an
actuary, he had an actuarial internship this summer with Nationwide Mutual Insurance where he
learned about annuity pricing and actuarial industry trends.

The award honors Waldemar Trjitzinsky who taught at a number of institutions before taking a
position at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, where he remained for the rest of his
professional life. He showed particular concern for students of mathematics and in some cases
made personal efforts to ensure that financial considerations would not hinder their studies.
Trjitzinsky was the author of about 60 mathematics papers, primarily on quasi-analytic functions
and partial differential equations. A member of the AMS for 46 years, he died in 1973.