Summer 1999 Newsletter

Contents

• Special Conferences:
  • Harmonic Analysis and Applications, a conference in honor of John J. Benedetto, October 7-10, 1999.
  • Operator Theory Day in honor of Seymour Goldberg, November 5, 1999.
  • An International Congress on Differential Geometry in memory of our late colleague Alfred Gray (1939-1998) is being organized at the Universidad del Païs Vasco, Bilbao, Spain, September 18-23, 2000.
• Faculty Awards:
  • Ben Kedem has been elected a fellow of the American Statistical Association. He will be formally inducted on August 10th at the annual meeting of the ASA in Baltimore.
  • John Benedetto has been selected a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher for 1999-2000, one of 5 on the whole campus.
  • Stuart Antman was awarded The Theodore von Kármán Prize of SIAM in May 1999 for his work on Viscosity in Solids.
  • David Lay has been chosen to give a Plenary Talk at the winter meeting of the Canadian Mathematical Society in December 1999.
• Alumni Awards:
  • Tonghai Yang (Ph.D., 1995) has been awarded an AMS Centennial Fellowship for 1999-2000. Only four of these prestigious fellowships were awarded nationwide this year. Tonghai did his thesis work under the supervision of Steve Kudla and has been an Assistant Professor at the State University of New York in Stony Brook since 1998.
• Student Awards:
  • Bryan Osborn, an undergraduate mathematics major, has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for the 1999-2000 academic year. The Barry M. Goldwater scholarships are nationally funded merit-based scholarships in mathematics, science, engineering, and computer disciplines, and are highly competitive.
  • The UMCP team came in 19th in the country in the 1998-99 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition. Congratulatiuons to our team members.
• Retirements: We salute our five colleagues who retired at the end of academic year 1998-99: Seymour Goldberg, Umberto Neri, Jerry Sather, Ryszard Syski, and Mishael Zedek.
• News from the Graduate Program:
  • Recent graduate degree recipients.
  • Our graduate program is listed in a four-way tie for 21st place among all mathematics Ph.D. programs in the country in the 1999 US News rankings of Math Ph.D. programs for 1999.
  • Bruce Kellogg has stepped down from the job of MAPL Director and has been replaced by Robert Pego.
• News from the Undergraduate Program: Scott Wolpert has stepped down from the job of Associate Chair for Undergraduate Affairs and has been replaced by Bill Adams.
• Spotlight on New Faculty: Meet our newest faculty members, just hired in 1998-99:
  • Niranjan Ramachandran, formerly at the University of Michigan, joins us as an Assistant Professor. His specialties are algebraic geometry and number theory.
  • Stephen Halperin, formerly Chair of the Mathematics Department at the University of Toronto, joins UMCP as Dean of CMPS. Professor Halperin's research specialty is algebraic topology, especially rational homotopy theory and related topics in algebra.
  • David Levermore, formerly at the University of Arizona, has accepted a position as a full Professor, though he will not join us till the academic year 2000-2001. His specialties include partial differential equations and their physical applications, especially the study of kinetic theory and nonlinear wave equations.
  • Dennis Healy, formerly at Dartmouth College and at ARPA, has accepted a position as a full Professor, though he will not join us till the academic year 2000-2001. His specialties include computational harmonic analysis and applications to image processing.
  Also Assistant Professor Bo Li, hired last year, will finally be joining us in person.

 
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Last modified: Thu., June 17, 1999