Michael Tait

Hello! I am an assistant associate professor in the Department of Mathematics & Statistics at Villanova University. I grew up a few miles south in Wilmington before doing graduate school at UC San Diego and a postdoc at Carnegie Mellon. Besides math, I spend my time exercising, cooking and eating, reading, watching baseball, enjoying Philadelphia, representing PRTC, grappling, and most importantly hanging out with this mathematician and her recent collaborator .

My research is in extremal combinatorics, mostly in extremal and spectral graph theory and combinatorial number theory.  See my research page or arxiv for my papers. My research is partially supported by NSF award DMS-2245556 (Spectral and extremal graph theory). In 2023, I was awarded the Richard A Brualdi Early Career Prize by the International Linear Algebra Society.

This semester I am teaching Math 2600: Mathematical Proof and Reasoning. Please see the teaching page for more information.

You might see me at the following upcoming meetings:

• • 2026 Joint Math Meetings (January 4-7, Washington DC) 🏛🏛🏛

  • AMS Spring Eastern Sectional Meeting (March 28-29, Boston College)⛵🫖🎉

  • SQuaRE at AIM (May 4-8, Pasadena)🤓🤓🤓

  • ILAS 2026 (May 18-22, Virginia Tech) ⛰️⛰️⛰️

  • Your seminar?? 🤓🤓🤓

If you want to know more about my professional life before coming to Villanova, or if you are preparing to be on the job market, I am happy to share documents that I have written. Please email me and I will send you any subset of: teaching statement, research statement, NSF postdoc proposal, 2 NSF standard grant proposals.