Spring 2001 Newsletter
Contents
- Special Conferences:
- Faculty Awards:
- Mark Freidlin was named (in 2000) a
Distinguished
University Professor, the university's highest academic honor,
in view of his world-wide reputation as a distinguished probabilist.
- Stuart Antman
will be named (in 2001) a
Distinguished
University Professor, the university's highest academic honor,
in view of his world-wide reputation as an expert on continuum
mechanics.
- David
Kueker and
Chris Laskowski have been given
Celebrating Teachers
awards by the Center for Teaching Excellence.
- Denny
Gluick is one of two recipients for this year of the
university's Kirwan Undergraduate Education Prize. The
prize recognizes faculty or staff who have made exceptional
contributions to the quality of undergraduate education at the
university. The prize carries an honorarium of $5000 and is awarded at
the campus Convocation each fall.
- Stephen Kudla
has been awarded a Year 2000 Max-Planck-Forschungspreis
by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft and the Alexander von
Humboldt-Stiftung in Germany
for his research in number theory. See the prize citation for a
more detailed description (and to practice your German!).
Kudla gave one of the Issai Schur Memorial Lectures in Tel Aviv
in March, and will be giving a Kuwait Foundation Lecture at
the University of Cambridge in June.
- Sijue Wu
has been awarded the
Satter Prize
of the American Mathematical
Society, which is given every two years to recognize an outstanding
contribution to mathematical research by a woman in the previous five
years. Sijue was honored for "her work on a longstanding problem on
the water wave equation." In articles that appeared in
Inventiones and the
Journal of the AMS, Sijue
established the well-posedness of the full water wave problem. This
resolved a problem in fluid mechanics that had been open and actively
investigated for a hundred years.
- Assistant Professors Jiu-Kang
Yu and
Konstantina Trivisa
have just been awarded
Sloan
Research Fellowships. Only 20 of these prestigious fellowships
are awarded each year to the best mathematicians no more than six years
past the date of Ph.D.
- Four faculty members, Steve
Kudla,
Rich Schwartz,
Dan Rudolph, and
Sijue Wu, have been
invited to address the next
International Congress of
Mathematicians in Beijing in 2002.
- One of the June 2001 talks in the Séminaire Bourbaki
in Paris will deal in part with the research of
D. Levermore on
the Boltzmann equation.
- At the recent CMPS Academic Festival,
Duane Cooper
was awarded the
Outstanding Teaching Award for regular faculty and
Justin
Wyss-Galifant was awarded the Outstanding Teaching Award for
lecturers.
- Ricardo Nochetto has
been awarded one of the SIAM Outstanding Paper
Awards for 2001 for his paper with Pedro Morin
and Kunibert G. Siebert entitled
"Data
Oscillation and Convergence of Adaptive FEM",
SIAM J. on Numerical Analysis 38(2) (2000) pp. 466-488.
- Student Awards:
-
Jason Ernst, an undergraduate mathematics
major, has been awarded a Goldwater Scholarship for the 2000-2001
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 18th
in the country in
the 1999-00 William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, our
second straight year in the top 20 nationally.
Congratulations to our team members. Chad Groft
finished in the top 100 nationally in the individual competition,
and also finished 5th in the Virginia Tech Regional Mathematics Contest.
- Alumni Awards:
- Simon Levin and
Grace Wahba were recently elected to the National
Academy of Sciences.
Simon Levin
received his PhD from our Department in 1964. He is presently
the Moffett Professor of Biology at Princeton University.
Grace Wahba
received a Masters degree from our Department in 1962.
She is the Bascom Professor of Statistics at the University of Wisconsin.
At the CMPS awards ceremony on May 4, 2001, she received the department's
first annual Distinguished Alumni Award.
- Personnel Changes:
- A number of
faculty members left the university at the end of the 1999-2000
academic year: Kevin Coombes, Alessandra Iozzi, Jian-Shu Li,
Jing Qin, and Garrett Stuck. We wish them luck in their future
endeavors.
- Celso Grebogi left the university during the 2000-2001 academic year,
in order to take up a new position at Sao Paulo in his native country of
Brazil. We wish him well in his new position.
- Meanwhile, three new Assistant Professors are
joining us: Jiu-Kang Yu,
an expert on number theory, representation
theory, and the Langlands program; Georg Dolzmann, who works on
materials science, nonlinear elliptic PDE, and numerical analysis;
and Konstantina Trivisa,
who works on nonlinear hyperbolic PDE and the calculus of variations.
In addition,
David Levermore and
Dennis
Healy, hired last year, are finally
joining us in person. We welcome all of them to our department.
- Scott Wolpert has been
appointed Associate Dean for Undergraduate Affairs for CMPS,
in view of his long-time
dedication to excellence in undergraduate education.
- Starting this year, we have a new category of faculty, our
Avron Douglis Lecturers. These are recent Ph.D.'s who join us for
two years, while developing both their research programs and
teaching credentials. We are pleased to have two exceptional young
mathematicians to inaugurate this program, Andrei
Maltsev, a mathematical physicist, and Martin
Samabrino, who works on dynamical systems. The Douglis Lecturer
program is named in memory of our distinguished late colleague,
Avron Douglis.
- Reorganization of the Applied Math
Program:
- The Maryland Applied Mathematics (MAPL) Program
has changed its
name to the Applied Mathematics and Scientific Computation
(AMSC)
Program. This change reflects the fact that the Program now offers
Ph.D. and M.S. degrees with concentrations in either applied
mathematics or scientific computation, as well as a post-baccalaureate
Certificate in Scientific Computation. It also reflects that the fact
that the Program now receives substantial support from both the
Department of Mathematics and the new
Center for Scientific
Computation and Mathematical Modeling (CSCAMM). Starting in Fall 2001
the AMSC offices will be located on the third floor of the Mathematics
building.
-
The Concentration in Applied Mathematics basically contains the old
MAPL program. Through this concentration, the AMSC Program continues
to offer students great flexibility in designing a program that
combines a firm foundation in mathematics with advanced study and
research in an area of application. Mathematics will likely remain
the department with the largest connection to this component of the
Program. Historically, about half of all MAPL Ph.D. graduates had
supervisors in Mathematics. Moreover, the vast majority of the
courses taken by MAPL students were taught by Mathematics Faculty.
These patterns are expected to continue for Applied Mathematics
students.
-
The Concentration in Scientific Computation is new. It emphasizes
computation and its use in the physical sciences, life sciences,
engineering, business, and social science. Students will receive
training in the use of computational techniques and associated
information technology with correspondingly less emphasis on
mathematical analysis in comparision to the Concentration in Applied
Mathematics. Every Scientific Computation student is required to
apply the training in computation to a problem in a specific
scientific discipline. Through CSCAMM these students will be supplied
personal laptops and have access to state-of-the-art computational,
visualization and networking facilities. Many of courses taken by
these students will also be taught by Mathematics Faculty. It is
hoped that this new concentration will enlarge the student base for
the Program.
-
The main objective of the Program remains to promote training in
interdisciplinary research. The Program is a unit of CMPS with close
ties to both Mathematics and CSCAMM. There are fourteen participating
departments and institutes on the College Park campus. The Program
hopes to pay academic dividends to each of these units. In addition,
there are links to various area research institutes:
NASA Goddard
Space Flight Center, National Institutes of
Health, National Institute
of Standards and Technology, Naval
Research Laboratory, National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. These links should lead to
greater resources and opportunities for students. For example, NASA
Goddard has already agreed to sponsor four fellowships through CSCAMM
that will be phased in over the next four years.
- Other News:
- Over the summer, construction was completed on a new high-technology
computer lab and classroom in room 3207, across from our colloquium room.
This room is equipped with SUN Ultra 10 computers and can be used for
graduate courses or lecture/demostrations. For this and other "information
technology" news, see the
latest CMPS IT
newsletter.
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© Copyright 2001, University of Maryland Mathematics Department.
Last modified: May 4, 2001
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