Spring 2003 Newsletter

Funding News:

• The Department of Mathematics has been awarded a VIGRE grant from NSF, expected to total about $2.8 million over 5 years. This grant provides for support for research activities by undergraduate and graduate students, as well as postdoctoral fellows.
• The Department of Mathematics has been awarded a Graduate Rewards Program grant to work with a collection of affiliated colleges and universities to create a well-supported pathway to bring students from underrepresented groups to careers in the mathematical sciences. This grant provides for a Summer Institute, mentoring activities, and graduate fellowships.
• Ruth Davis, Ph.D. Mathematics, 1955, formerly director of the Institute for Computer Sciences and Technology at the National Bureau of Standards, and President and CEO of The Pymatuning Group, Inc., a Virginia firm specializing in industrial modernization and technology development, has made a generous grant to endow a Ruth Davis Chair in the department.

Faculty News:

• Distinguished University Professor James Yorke has been named one of the two winners of the Japan Prize for 2003, awarded by the Science and Technology Foundation of Japan. See this article in the Washington Post.
• Assistant Professor Konstantina Trivisa has won a prestigious 5-year CAREER award from the National Science Foundation.
• Professor Richard Schwartz has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for 2003.
• Professor Larry Washington received the distinguished teaching award of CMPS at the College ceremony in May.

Staff News:

• Delores Forbes, Director of Administrative Affairs, has decided to retire, effective June 30,2003, after 36 years of dedicated service to the university, the last 23 of which have been in the Mathematics Department. Delores was honored by the Exempt Staff Award at the annual CMPS award ceremony in May, and also at a special reception at the Rossborough Inn. See pictures of that event.
• Kim Ozga, Undergraduate Advising Coordinator, was honored with the "Thelma M. Williams Advisor of the Year" award at the annual CMPS award ceremony in May.

Student News:

• Undergraduate student Andrew W. Snowden received the J. Robert Dorfman Prize for Undergraduate Research at the annual CMPS award ceremony in May.
• For mathematics department undergraduate student awards, see here.
• Nine graduate students, Gabriella Cohen-Freue, Angela Grant, Cory Hauck, Ning Jiang, William Jimenez, Joe Kolesar, Shirin Malekpour, Aram Tangboondouangjit, and Samuel Younkin, have been recognized as "Distinguished Teaching Assistants" for 2003 by the Center for Teaching Excellence.

Personnel Changes:

• Mike Boyle is stepping down this summer as Associate Chair for Undergraduate Studies, after two years in that position. His replacement starting 2003-2004 will be Denny Gulick.
• Bob Ellis and Hsin Chu are retiring from the department. They will become Professors Emeriti. Chu was honored at a special session of the annual spring dynamics meeting.
• Lori McKay is taking over July 1, 2003, as the new Director of Administrative Affairs. She comes to us after 7 years in a similar position at the Department of Microbiology and Immunology at the UMD School of Medicine.

Obituaries:

• We are sorry to report that Professor Leon Greenberg passed away suddenly on August 31, 2003. Professor Greenberg was born on September 8, 1931, in New York City. He recieved his B.S. from City College of the City University of New York in 1953, and his M.A. in 1955 and Ph.D. in 1958, both from Yale University. He joined the faculty of the University of Maryland in 1964. Greeenberg's early research career dealt mostly with Riemann surfaces and Kleinian groups. More recently, his research interests shifted to the numerical solution of eigenvalue and Sturm-Liouville problems. Greenberg's collaborator Marco Marletta has written an appreciation of his recent work. Greenberg also had many interests and hobbies outside of mathematics, including music, dancing, hiking, bird watching, and theater. He is survived by his wife, four children, and four grandchildren.
• We are sorry to report that Associate Professor Tzong-Yow Lee passed away on October 14, 2003, after a long illness. Professor Lee was born in Taiwan on 21 October 1958, received his B.S. degree at National Taiwan University in 1980, and then came to the Courant Institute of New York University, where he received his M.S. in 1984 and Ph.D. in 1986. He was an Instructor at Princeton from 1986-1989, and came to Maryland as an Assistant Professor in 1989. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1993. He had one Ph.D. student (Fred Torcaso, 1998) and several Masters students. Most of his research was in probability theory, especially large deviation theory and the study of Brownian motion, though in recent years, he also worked on combinatorial problems in geometry.

Alumni News:

• Ruth Davis, Ph.D. Mathematics 1955, who previously received the university's Distinguished Alumnus Award in 1993, was named distinguished alumna of the department at the CMPS honors ceremony in May.
• Undergraduate alumnus (and son of Prof. Michael Brin) Sergey Brin recently appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine, and will be the university's commencement speaker in December, 2003. Brin is one of the founders of .
• The April 2003 issue (vol. 16, no. 2) of the Journal of the American Mathematical Society, one of the most prestigious of all mathematics journals, features articles by three recent Mathematics Department Ph.D.'s, Igor Belegradek, Vitali Kapovitch, and Ed Swartz.
• Alumnae Elizabeth Arnold (Ph.D., Mathematics, 2000, now at the Mathematics Dept., Texas A&M University) and Kimberly Sellers (M.A., Mathematics, 1998, now at the Statistics Dept., Carnegie Mellon University) have won an inaugural Affiliates Proposal Development Fund Award from the National Institute of Statistical Sciences for the project "Getting Something from Nothing--Assessing Information Gain from Lack of Information Due to Cell Suppression".