Alejandro Adem gave invited lectures this past year at many
different places
including Princeton, Stanford, Singapore, and Chengdu (China). He spoke in
the BOURBAKI SEMINAR in Paris (November 2001) on "Finite Group Actions on
Acyclic Complexes." In June 2001, he was a Visiting Scholar at Hong Kong
University of Science and Technology.
Melania Alvarez Adem has been promoted from Assistant Researcher to Associate Researcher with the Quantitative Assessment Project.
Anatole Beck is spending the spring 2002 semester collaborating in research with colleagues at the London School of Economics.
Georgia Benkart gave an invited talk ``Going Up and Down'' at the AMS Regional meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
New colleague Lev Borisov is at Columbia University this academic year and will join us in the fall of 2002.
The Council of the Institute of Combinatorics and its Applications (ICA) has chosen Richard A. Brualdi as one of the two recipients of its Euler Medals for the year 2000. According to the citation, the Euler Medal is awarded ``for a lifetime career of distinguished contributions to combinatorial research by a member of the ICA who is still active in research''.
Van Vleck Assistant Professor Jan Bruinier won the prestigious Heisenberg Fellowship and has now returned to Germany.
Thomas Hangelbroek, a student of Amos Ron, is spending a semester the Max Planck Institute (Germany) on a Graduate student visiting fellowship.
I. Martin Isaacs is on leave during the 2002 spring semester, working for the Center for Communications Research of the Institute for Defense Analyses in La Jolla, CA. Marty's 19th student, James Hamblin, will finish his PhD this spring.
Shi Jin was one of the distinguished speakers at the 2001 Chinese-American Frontiers of Science Symposium which was held in Beijing in September 2001. At most one U.S. mathematician is selected each year so this is a special honor.
Steffen Lempp is putting his Vilas Associates Award (see last year's newsletter) to good use. He used the award this past summer to spend three productive weeks at the University of Maryland and six more at the University of Connecticut. Steffen became a U.S. citizen (but kept his German citizenship).
Yong Geun Oh is on leave in the 2001-02 academic year participating in the special program ``Symplectic geometry and holomorphic curves'' held at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton. Yong Geun is one of the editors of the recently published Proceeding of the International Conference ``Symplectic geometry and mirror symmetry.'' The conference was held at the Korea Institute for Advanced Study (KIAS), and the proceedings published by World Scientific Press.
Ken Ono has co-edited with Bruce Berndt [PhD 1966, J. R. Smart] Volume 291 in the AMS Contemporary Mathematics Series. The volume is called ``q-series with applications to combinatorics, number theory and physics'' and appeared in December 2001.
Ken Ono and Yongbin Ruan were both invited speakers at the AMS Central Section Meeting held in Kansas last March. Ken spoke on ``The number theory of partitions: The Legacy of Dyson and Ramanujan'' and Yongbin spoke on ``Stringy geometry and topology of orbifolds''.
James Propp is on leave in the 2001-02 academic year and is running an undergraduate research program called Research Experiences in Algebraic Combinatorics at Harvard (``R.E.A.C.H.''). He hopes to continue with this program next academic year as well.
Arun Ram spent the Spring term (January 6 to July 6, 2001) at the Isaac Newton Institute for the Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge University in England. There he participated in the Special Program on Symmetric Functions and Macdonald Polynomials. Arun gave the Isaac Newton Institute Colloquium for the general public as representative of our program at the Institute. While on the other side of the Atlantic, he also gave lectures in Aarhus and Copenhagen in Denmark, Oberwolfach in Germany, at Seminaire Chevalley at the Institut Henri Poincare and at the Ecole Normale Superieur in Paris, as well as at other institutions in England and Scotland (Cambridge, Oxford, Warwick, ... Arun also gave talks at several international conferences including: ``Centenary conference of the Thesis of I. Schur'' in Gregynog, Wales; ``Combinatorial and Geometric Representation Theory'' in Seoul, Korea; ``Conference on Algebra and Geometry'' in Hyderabad, India.
Jean-Pierre Rosay is teaching and collaborating in research at the University of Grenoble during the 2002 spring semester.
Yongbin Ruan is spending the 2002-02 academic year at the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology.
The Center for Mathematical Sciences (CMS), the successor to the Mathematics Research Center (MRC), has now closed. Its functions and activities have merged with those of the Department of Mathematics. The Applied Mathematics Group in the department is working on plans for a program in applied and computational mathematics incorporating aspects of the main characteristics of CMS.
Last spring the Elvehjem Museum of Art (``LVM'') at UW-Madison had an exhibit of selected woodblock prints from its extensive and famed Van Vleck collection. Edward Burr Van Vleck, who was Professor of Mathematics in our department from 1906 to 1929, began collecting Japanese woodblock prints in 1916 and accumulated an impressive collection. When he died in 1943, his collection passed to his son John Hasbrouck Van Vleck. When the son died in 1980, the bulk of the collection was bequeathed to the ``LVM'' with the remainder given to the ``LVM'' on the death of his widow in 1984. The collection is so extensive and delicate that only a portion of them are exhibited annually. Our 9th floor conference room contains prominent portraits of the two Van Vlecks.
In the annual U.S. News & World Report survey of graduate programs, our program in mathematics is ranked 13th, tied with Columbia University, and our program in applied mathematics is ranked 14th, tied with Northwestern and Rice Universities and the University of Washington.