Rate My Professor Nigel Pitt

Nigel J. E. Pitt serves as Professor and Chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics within the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Maine, Orono. His academic career includes leadership roles in the department, where he has overseen faculty and programs in Neville Hall. Pitt earned his Ph.D. from Rutgers University, New Brunswick, in 1992, under the advisory of Henryk Iwaniec. His doctoral dissertation, titled "Convolutions of Automorphic L-series," focused on topics central to analytic number theory. His research specializations encompass analytic number theory, automorphic forms, and harmonic analysis, with interests extending to applications in hyperbolic geometry, including interactions between pairs of closed geodesics.

Pitt was a Member Scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study from January to July 2011, advancing his studies in automorphic functions and their connections to other mathematical areas. He has contributed key publications to the field, including "On an analogue of Titchmarsh's divisor problem for holomorphic cusp forms" in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (2013) and "On cusp form coefficients in exponential sums" in the Quarterly Journal of Mathematics (2001). These works address convolutions, exponential sums, and divisor problems related to cusp forms. As department chair since around 2014, Pitt has managed departmental operations amid university budget adjustments. He co-organized the Maine/Québec Number Theory Conferences in 2013 and 2017 at the University of Maine, fostering collaboration among number theorists. Pitt has served on committees such as the Faculty Senate and contributed to graduate education as a thesis committee member for works on linking numbers in knot theory (2016), Sperner's Lemma and fair division (2016), and uniform distribution of Hecke eigenvalues (2017). He is listed as interdisciplinary thesis research faculty for data science and engineering programs. Pitt engages publicly, as seen in his 2023 WABI-TV interview on Mega Millions lottery probabilities.