Rate My Professor Matthew Boylan

Matthew Boylan is a Professor and Assistant Chair in the Department of Mathematics at the University of South Carolina. He received his B.S. in Pure Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1999 and his Ph.D. in Pure Mathematics from the same institution in 2002, with a dissertation titled “Congruences for the Fourier Coefficients of Modular Forms with Applications,” advised by Ken Ono. From 2002 to 2005, he served as NSF VIGRE Visiting Research Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Boylan joined the University of South Carolina in 2005 as Assistant Professor, was promoted to Associate Professor in 2009, and to Professor in 2015. He has held the position of Director of Graduate Studies since 2017.

A number theorist with primary interests in modular forms and their applications, Boylan has delivered more than 50 invited talks at institutions worldwide. His research has been funded by multiple National Science Foundation grants, including solo principal investigator awards such as NSF DMS-0901068 for Harmonic Maass Forms (2009–2012) and NSF DMS-0600400 for Modular Forms and Number Theory (2006–2009). He co-founded the Palmetto Number Theory Series (PANTS) with colleagues at USC and Clemson, securing continuous NSF and NSA funding, and serves as principal organizer for the Southeast Regional Meeting on Numbers (SERMON). Notable publications include "Arithmetic properties of the partition function" with S. Ahlgren in Inventiones Mathematicae (2003); "Coefficients of half-integral weight modular forms modulo ℓ^j" with S. Ahlgren in Mathematische Annalen (2005); "2-adic properties of Hecke traces of singular moduli" in Mathematics Research Letters (2005); "Central critical values of modular L-functions and coefficients of half-integral weight modular forms modulo ℓ" with S. Ahlgren in American Journal of Mathematics (2007); "Congruences for the partition function modulo prime powers" with J. Webb in Transactions of the American Mathematical Society (2013); and "U_p-operators and congruences for Shimura images" in Journal of Number Theory (2020). His honors include the University of South Carolina Rising Star Award (2011), Project NExT Fellow (2005–2006), and West Coast Number Theory Conference Selfridge Prize (2003).