Our Department is so large and active that many
of us may be unaware of some news and activities of interest to
us. For this reason I thought that it would be helpful to expand
the coverage of Charlie Sims's
undergraduate newsletter to all the
Department's programs and activities. The Chair, the Undergraduate
Vice-Chair, the Graduate Director,
representatives of the graduate students, undergraduate majors,
and alumni will thus have opportunities to bring items of interest to
the attention of the extended Department.
In this issue, I want to announce some honors,
awards, donations, and retirements, as well as the lecturers and
topics of our memorial lecture series. A broad spectrum of information
about the Department, both current and from past years is available
on the Mathematics Department
web site. In particular, honors awarded to faculty in
previous years may be found on the
faculty honors page and honors received by undergraduate and
graduate students in previous years may be found on the
Mathematics Department prizes and awards page.
Felix Browder, current president of The
American Mathematical Society, will receive the National
Medal of Science from President Clinton at the White
House on March 14th. In announcing the award to
Felix and eleven others (two of whom are Nobel Laureates),
President Clinton stated that their innovations had
"sustained US leadership across the frontiers of
scientific and technical knowledge thereby enhancing our
ability to shape and improve our nations future."
Felix joins Martin Kruskal as the second member of the
Mathematics Department to win the National Medal of Science, the
highest research honor the United States grants to its
citizens. (More details can be found
here).
At this coming summer's meeting of the
International Association of Mathematical Physics, Joel
Lebowitz will be one of three to be awarded a Henri
Poincaré prize. His citation will read as follows:
For his important
contributions to various aspects of equilibrium
and nonequilibrium statistical physics:
stability of matter, correlation inequalities, phase
transitions, and approach to equilibrium, to mention
a few. In addition to this he has set his deep
knowledge of science and tireless energy to the
service of our community by running the semi-annual
statistical mechanics meetings and the Journal of
Statistical Physics. For many decades, Joel
Lebowitz has been the soul of statistical mechanics.
Joel has also been recognized for his efforts to improve human rights and
scientific freedom. In 1996, he received the Heinz R. Pagels Human Rights of
Scientists Award of the New York Academy of Sciences and in 1999 received the
AAAS Scientific Freedom and Responsibility Award.
JEAN TAYLOR, PRESIDENT OF THE
ASSOCIATION OF WOMEN IN MATHEMATICS THIS YEAR
This is only one of several honors
and awards Jean has recently received. Last year she was
elected a Fellow of the Association for Women in Science
and of the American Academy of Arts and
Sciences and received the Rutgers Class of l962
Presidential Public Service Award.
Amy, who currently serves as the
Undergraduate Vice-Chair and the treasurer of the Association of
Women in Mathematics, will receive this medal in June
for outstanding service to the Douglass community,
especially in the area of math and science education for
Douglass students. Last year, Amy was named Outstanding College or
University Teacher of the Year by the Mathematical Association
of America's NJ Section.
KRUSKAL 2000, a Conference on Integrable Systems in
celebration of Martin Kruskal's 75th birthday was held at the University
of Adelaide, Adelaide, Australia in January. In addition, this summer Martin
will be awarded an honorary degree of Doctor of Science from Heriot-Watt
University.
HECTOR SUSSMAN'S PAPER CHOSEN ONE OF
TWENTY-FIVE SEMINAL PAPERS IN CONTROL
Hector Sussmann's paper (with V. Jurdjevic)
"Controllability of Nonlinear Systems" was selected to appear in the IEEE
volume Twenty-Five Seminal Papers in Control, which contains annotated
reprints of twenty-five papers in control theory published in the 20th century
that have had a major impact on the field.
The Mathematics Department is in the first year
of a five year grant of almost two and one-half million dollars
through the National Science
Foundation's VIGRE (Vertical InteGration of Research and
Education) program. The Rutgers project,
"Extending and
Renewing the Education of Mathematicians", is changing the
way that postdoctoral fellows and graduate students interact with
faculty, undergraduates, and each other. The goal is to
bring new research areas to the graduate and undergraduate
curriculum, better prepare beginning mathematicians for the
variety of career paths available to them, and increase access of
students to mathematical research at the
highest level. Five research groups - discrete mathematics,
number theory, control theory, non-linear partial differential
equations and mathematical physics - have particular involvement
in the program. The Principal Investigators for the grant are
Michael Beals, Amy
Cohen, Gerald Goldin, Stephen Greenfield and
Peter Landweber. See our
VIGRE home page
for more information. (Reported by Michael Beals.)
Three of our colleagues have retired, or will be
retiring, after many years of valuable contributions to the
Department. Antoni joined the Department in 1966, as a
member of our group in topology and was Department Chair from
1993 until 1999. José, a member of the Department since
1968, works in analysis, and was Graduate Director from 1991
until 1996. Bill came to the Department
in 1971, also joining our analysis group, and served as Graduate
Director from 1979 until 1986 and as Head Undergraduate Advisor
from 1994-1999. The Department is fortunate to retain much of
this expertise, since both Antoni and José remain affiliated with
the Department in half-time positions for several more years.
The Department's two distinguished lecture series, offered in
memory of two of our colleagues, will be offered as usual this Spring. The
Lewis lectures, covering image processing, the role of cancellations in
non-linear problems, and the Navier-Stokes equations will be given by
Professor Yves Meyer of École Normale Supéríeure de
Cachan. The D'Atri lectures, covering two-dimensional parametric variational
problems and uniqueness results for minimal surfaces with free boundaries will
be give by by Professor Stefan Hildebrandt of the Mathematisches Institut der
Universität Bonn. Times and locations of the lectures may be found at the
following web sites:
D'Atri
lectures and
Lewis lectures.
The undergraduate enrollment in mathematics totaled 10,500
this past Fall 1999. Handling the administration of this massive
enrollment would not have been possible without the splendid assistance of
Deputy Vice-Chair for Undergraduate Affairs Enriqueta R. Carrington and staff
members Diane Apadula, Carla Ortiz, David Irvine, and Ellie Creeden.
Encouraging the early development of the talent
of our undergraduates is an important activity of the Department.
We have two programs devoted to such development in place;
The REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates) for
development of research ability, and the Senior Peer Mentoring
Program for development of teaching ability.
The REU program, which is supported both by
DIMACS and VIGRE, offers students the opportunity to work on a
research project with the guidance of faculty members, postdocs,
and graduate students, in small teams. János Komlós
is serving as coordinator of this activity.
The Department currently employs sixty undergraduates, not
necessarily majors in math, as peer mentors in calculus workshops. About
a half dozen of these, seniors with very high grades and strong performances
as peer mentors in previous semesters, have been selected as Senior Mentors,
who teach their own recitation section of precalculus. These young teachers
are gaining very valuable experience and it has been gratifying to see the
increase in the number of academically strong students who are going into
secondary school teaching. More details can be found on the
Peer Mentor homepage.
Several new developments have taken place in our
undergraduate courses. Roe Goodman has designed a version of Math 250, Intro
to Linear Algebra, incorporating the use of computing using MATLAB. Two
sections of MATLAB 250 are offered this spring, one by Roe and the other by
Yasmine Sanderson. Michael Weingart, a first-year VIGRE graduate student, is
assisting in the Math 250 MATLAB experiment, helping to develop the computer
projects and also giving a weekly problem session (outside scheduled class
time). This course is part of the Department's continuing effort to upgrade
offerings for our math, science and engineering students and was developed in
consultation with colleagues in engineering. The MATLAB software is available
to students in all public computer labs and in the DSV Lab of the School of
Engineering. More details may be found on the Math 250 web page.
Beginning in the Fall 1998 semester, Math 252 -- the Differential Equations
course for math majors -- was changed to emphasize modeling and qualitative
methods. Practice working with these topics is in the form of projects
requiring two or three weeks of effort on the part of the students. This
effort has been led by Richard Bumby and Eduardo Sontag. Details, including
descriptions of some of the projects, can be found on the
Math 252
web page.
The two undergraduate math courses which have shown the
greatest growth in the last 5 years, both absolutely and relatively, are
Math 250 and Math 103. The latter is "Mathematics for the Liberal Arts",
and teaching an interesting course to students who would generally like to
avoid mathematics is difficult. Steve Greenfield recently received support
from the NSF to devise a course on the mathematics
of communication, one of a group of four courses in four science
disciplines designed to help individuals work and participate in an
increasingly technological society. The course was first offered in the Fall
1999 semester, with students not only learning about cryptography and
its mathematical foundations, but also writing and discussing the public
policy questions associated with this field. Steve is trying it again this
semester.
The VIGRE program is starting to have a major impact on the
graduate program. There are six first year students engaged in VIGRE
rotations. The rotations are coordinated by Steve Greenfield. Students work
closely with faculty members with various goals: they may learn topics rarely
covered in standard introductory graduate courses, they may read research
papers, or they may assist in innovative instructional activities. All of this
has been done. Each VIGRE trainee will have rotations with at least three
different faculty members during this year.
The VIGRE seminar, run by Amy Cohen, meets on Fridays at 3 PM. Its topics
will run the gamut from mathematics and its communication (the ideas and
the methods, when teaching, in print, and on the web), to discussions of
educational issues, and career opportunities. We hope some recent graduates
will return and tell the students and us about jobs and how getting a
doctorate in mathematics has affected what they do. We invite
correspondence and suggestions! An additional six VIGRE trainees are
expected to be recruited to the program for Fall 2000.
Three of our graduate students have received
honors:
Xin Guo, who received her Ph.D. in 1999 under the direction
of Larry Shepp,
was awarded the 1999-2000 Goldstine Fellowship in Mathematical
Sciences. She gave the Herman H. Goldstine Fellowship Inaugural Lecture
in November 1999 at the IBM T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights
NY. Xin received her Ph.D. in October 1999. Her thesis, a
development of a new model for stock transactions, has attracted wide
attention from both academia and industry.
Daniel Kling, who received his Ph.D. under the supervision
of Feng Luo in l997, has been awarded a Third Place
Innovation Grant by Merrill Lynch, based on the innovative
applications of the work of his dissertation "Doubly-periodic
Flat Surfaces in Three-Space". This award will result in a
$5,000 contribution to the Mathematics Department as well as $10,000
for Dan's own use.
Michael Malisoff, a
student of Hector Sussmann who received
his Ph.D. in January 2000, was the recipient of the 1999 CDC Student Best
Paper Award for a paper he gave at the 38th IEEE Conference on Decision and
Control in December 1999 (over 1000 papers were accepted for presentation at
the conference and publication in the Proceedings).
The Department is in the process of setting up a Summer Internship program for
our graduate students. The objectives are (a) to expose them to industry and
government career alternatives, and (b) to familiarize those students opting
for traditional academic careers with "real life" applications of mathematics.
Researchers from several NJ industrial labs, including Lucent, AT&T, NEC, RW
Johnson Pharmaceuticals, Telecordia, Mitre, Merck, and others, as well as from
national labs such as Sandia, NIST, and Los Alamos, expressed great interest
in considering our graduate students as interns, and offered descriptions of
specific projects and basic prerequisites. This information is regularly
provided to graduate students in e-mailed newsletters.
We invite those readers of this newsletter who may be willing to host interns
at their institutions, or who have information leading to possible internship
opportunities, to contact our internship coordinator, Eduardo Sontag
( sontag@math.rutgers.edu).
The Pizza Seminar is a weekly talk given by a
graduate student to an audience of graduate students. The
talks are informal and give students the opportunity to practice
the important art of communicating mathematical ideas before a
nonjudgemental audience.
A wide variety of topics are covered. Last
semester, two of the speakers introduced us to their research and
outlined their recent results; three more provided overviews of
the basic ideas in their areas of interest, while the remaining
three speakers chose to present items of recreational interest
that would not normally be seen in classes.
The weekly seminar is occasionally replaced by a
Faculty Research Glimpse: a meeting during which three or four
faculty members speak about their current research interests.
The Faculty Research Glimpses provide graduate students with an
opportunity to hear first-hand what problems are currently being
thought about here at Rutgers. Two of these "Faculty
Research Glimpses" were given this Fall and three more are
scheduled for the Spring. The Pizza Seminar home page, listing
previous and forthcoming talks, is at
http://www.math.rutgers.edu/~dgalvin/pizza/
The Mathematics Department is very interested in hearing from
its alumni/alumnae from either the undergraduate or graduate program, about
where they are and what they are doing. One aim is to set up a
Department website that would facilitate contacts among former graduates and
serve as a source of contacts for our current graduates. We would be
especially interested to know if you are employed in a company that hires
mathematics graduates at any level, since we are seeking summer internship
opportunities for our students and also occasionally look for individuals
willing to come to campus to speak about job opportunities in industry for
mathematics majors. Please let us know if you would be willing to
participate in such activities.
