Leonid Kovalev, professor of mathematics, is the recipient of a three-year grant award from the National Science Foundation, supporting ongoing research into metric spaces. “The notion of distance, or dissimilarity of objects, is ubiquitous in geometry, data analysis, image and signal processing, and other disciplines,” says Kovalev, adding that his work draws on the mathematical analysis and differential geometry of Rudolf Lipschitz, a 19th-century, German mathematician. “My project exposes graduate and undergraduate students to these concepts and associated research problems.”