Department of Mathematics Newsletter
Last Year's News
The department has hired several new faculty members. Maria Cameron is joining the
department as Assistant Professor, effective Fall 2010. Her research
interests include PDE and numerical analysis applied to problems in
earth science. Amin
Gholampour will join the department as Assistant Professor, effective
Fall 2011. His research interests include Gromov-Witten and Donaldson-Thomas
invariants. Patrick
Brosnan will join the department as Professor, effective
Fall 2011. His research is in algebraic geometry. And
Pierre-Emmanuel
Jabin will also join the department as Professor, effective
Fall 2011. His research is in partial differential equations and
kinetic theory.
We regret to announce the passing of Professor Emeritus James
Hummel on June 23, 2010, at the age of 82. Professor
Hummel was for many years
an active member of the research group in complex analysis.
He was also an accomplished singer. He received his bachelor's
degree at Cal Tech in 1949, a master's at Rice in 1953, and his
Ph.D. (also at Rice) in 1955. He came to Maryland in 1958
after a postdoctoral position at Stanford. His reminiscences on the
history of the department may be found here.
Jim Hummel retired in 1993.
Professor Ronald Lipsman officially retired
at the end of the 2009-2010 academic year, after a very distinguished
career including research on group representations and noncommutative
harmonic analysis, many administrative jobs within the department,
over 10 years as Associate Dean of CMPS, and leadership in the SCHOL
curriculum reform effort. Ron will be making use of his work on
computer-based course materials when he teaches MATH 246 in 2010-2011.
Department members William Goldman (Geometry)
and Ricardo Nochetto (Numerical Analysis and
Scientific Computing) were among the invited speakers at the
International Congress of
Mathematicians at Hyderabad, India, in August 2010.
We are saddened by the untimely passing (on September 20,
2010) of alumna Angela Grant,
who received her Ph.D. in the department in 2005, under the supervision of
Brian Hunt. Since that time she had been at the Mathematics Department
at Northwestern University, where she was a Boas Assistant Professor
and then a Weinberg College Adviser and Lecturer.
There is a memorial
page here.
We regret to announce the passing of Professor Emeritus Mishael Zedek
on December 14, 2010, at the age of 84. Professor Zedek worked in approximation
theory and complex analysis. He received his Ph.D. in 1956 under Joe Walsh at Harvard,
and came to Maryland in 1958. A while after his retirement in 1999 he moved to
Brookline, MA, where he lived until his death.
Assistant Professor Maria Cameron is the winner of a
prestigious Sloan Research
Fellowship for 2011. Congratulations!
Christian Zickert,
currently at the University of California,
Berkeley, has accepted an offer of an assistant professorship in the department,
starting academic year 2011-2012. His research is in geometry, topology,
and algebraic K-theory.
Professor Ricardo Nochetto was
selected as a SIAM Fellow for 2011, in recognition of his
contributions to the study of free boundary problems
and phase transitions.
Congratulations to Professor Larry Washington, who has been selected as a
Distinguished
Scholar-Teacher
for 2011-2012.
We regret to announce the passing of Professor Emeritus
John E. Osborn on May 30, 2011,
at the age of 74. Professor Osborn served with
distinction as Chair of the Department 1982-1985 and as Acting
or Interim Dean of CMPS, 1989-90 and 1998-99.
He received his Ph.D. in 1965 at the University of Minnesota
and spent his entire career at Maryland, where he specialized
in numerical analysis and elliptic partial differential equations.
He was also instrumental in the SCHOL project to update
our undergraduate curriculum.
A conference in his honor on Finite Element Analysis and Eigenvalue Problems
was held in September, 2000. Professor Osborn
officially retired at the end of the 2007-2008 academic year,
but he continued to be an active participant in department seminars
and affairs up until this year. An
obituary has appeared in the Washington Post.
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