The Avron Douglis Memorial Lecture

Avron Douglis (1918-1995) received an AB degree in economics from the University of Chicago in 1938. After working as an economist for three years and serving in World War II he began graduate studies in mathematics at New York University. He received his doctorate in 1949 under the direction of Richard Courant. He held a one-year post-doctoral appointment at the California Institute of Technology, and then returned to New York University as an assistant and then associate professor. In 1956 he accepted an appointment as associate professor at the University of Maryland, where he remained for the rest of his career, except for visiting appointments at the Universities of Minnesota, Oxford, and Newcastle upon Tyne. He was promoted to full professor in 1958 and became an emeritus in 1988.

Avron Douglis's research, noted for its depth, precision, and richness, covered the entire range of the theory of partial differential equations: linear and nonlinear; elliptic, parabolic, and hyperbolic. The famous papers he had written with S. Agmon and L. Nirenberg are among the most frequently cited in all of mathematics.

The Avron Douglis Library is housed in the department.

The Avron Douglis Lectures were established by the family and friends of Avron Douglis to honor his memory. Each academic year it brings to Maryland a distinguished expert to speak on a subject related to partial differential equations.

The lectures are held at 3:00 p.m. in room 3206 in the Department of Mathematics.

September 30, 2005

A New Perspective on Motion by Curvature

Robert V. Kohn
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

April 15, 2005

Conservation Laws and Some Consequences

Cathleen Synge Morawetz
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University

March 5, 2004

Hyperbolic Conservation Laws with Dissipation

Constantine Dafermos
Brown University, Division of Applied Mathematics

October 8, 2002

Topology and Sobolev Spaces

Haim Brezis
Universite de Paris VI, Insitiut Universitaire de France, and Rutgers University

April 12, 2002

Navier-Stokes and Other Super-critical Equations

Vladmir Sverak
University of Minnesota

April 20, 2001

Shock Wave Theory

Tai-Ping Liu
Academia Sinica, Taiwan & Stanford University

March 31, 2000

Effective Hamiltonians

Lawrence C. Evans
University of California, Berkeley

April 23, 1999

Some remarks on homogenization

Luis Caffarelli
University of Texas, Austin

April 17, 1998

An Example of Diffusion-Induced Blowup of a Parabolic System

Hans Weinberger
University of Minnesota

April 4, 1997

The Zero Dispersion Limit

Peter Lax
Courant Institute

May 9, 1996

Degree Theory Beyond Continuous Maps

Louis Nirenberg
Courant Institute

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