Honors & Awards

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Carl de Boor receives Hilldale Award and an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Technion (Israel)

Carl de Boor, Chebyshev Professor of Mathematics and Computer Science and Steenbock Professor of Mathematical Sciences has been awarded UW-Madison's Hilldale Award in the Physical Sciences, given in recognition of distinguished contributions to teaching, research, and extension/outreach. Carl is a worldwide leader and authority in the theory and application of splines. Splines play a central role in computer-aided design and manufacturing, in the production of printers' typesets, in automated cartography, in applications of computer graphics (e.g., animation in movies), as well as in the general areas of signal and image processing.

Carl has written about 150 papers and five books. He is an excellent teacher and mentor, who has encouraged many young researchers during his 30 year careers in Madison. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Leopoldina Academy in Germany, and a foreign member of the Polish Academy of Sciences.

In accepting the Hilldale Award, he said: ``I came to Madison almost thirty years ago, because this was the capital of splines, due to the fact that Iso Schoenberg had been active here since the early sixties. Iso Schoenberg is widely recognized as the father of splines; as he was kind enough to dub me his successor, this makes me, perhaps, the son of splines. I also came to Madison because of the superb and entirely unfettered working environment offered here at the Mathematics Research Center. True, that was barely two years after the bombing of MRC, but I join many other applied mathematicians, all over the world, in their gratitude, to this university and to the Army Research Office, for their strong support then of that first-rate center of research in applied mathematics. I am deeply honored by this Hilldale award, and am very grateful for it, as I am for the many ways in which my departments, mathematics and computer sciences, have helped me in my work, with special thanks to my colleagues in Computer Sciences for proposing, and my colleagues in Math for supporting, this award for me, and for many things besides.''

Last summer Carl de Boor was awarded an Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Technion. The citation for this degree read in part: Ïn recognition of your outstanding contribution to approximation theory and numerical analysis and, in particular, for your developments in the theory of spline functions and their applications. Your work on spline theory produced essential mathematical ideas and algorithm tools used in a myriad of applications in science and technology.'' Carl had previously received an honorary doctorate from Purdue University.

Alejandro Adem wins Vilas Associates Award

Professor Alejandro Adem, who was our department chair from 1999 to 2002, has been named by the Graduate School as a Vilas Associate for 2003-05. This award provides summer salary support for two years and a flexible fund to be used for support of his research and other scholarly activities. Alejandro's research specialities are topology and algebra, and he is interested in such topics as Cohomology of groups, Sporadic simple groups, Group actions, Arithmetic groups K-theory, and Orbifolds.

Professor Adem joined our Mathematics Department in 1989, and previously received a NSF Young Investigator Award and a Romnes Faculty Fellowship from UW-Madison. In the last several years he has held visiting positions at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, University of Paris 13, and the Centre de Recerca Matematica in Barcelona, Spain. Alejandro has been the organizer of many meetings, most recently an ICM Satellite Conference on Stringy Manifolds, in Chengdu, China in August 2002, and an AMS-IMS-SIAM Joint Summer Research Conference on Groups, Representations and Cohomology in Mount Holyoke in June, 2002. He was also the local organizer for the meeting of the AMS Central Section held in Madison last fall. With J. Aguade of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona and Eric Friedlander of Northwestern University, Alejandro is organizing a special session on Algebraic Toplogy at the first joint meeting between the American Mathematical Society and the Real Sociedad Mathematica Española in Seville, Spain in the summer of this year.

Alejandro has given a great many invited lectures in the last ten years. A recent special lecture was one given on Finite Group Actions on Acyclic 2-complexes in the Bourbaki Seminar in Paris in 2001. He is coauthor (with R. J. Milgram) of the book Cohomology of Finite Groups published by Springer in 1994.

Alexandru Ionescu Wins Sloan Award

Alexandru Ionescu has been named an Alfred P. Sloan Fellow for 2003-05. These extraordinarily competitive awards, which recognize past research accomplishments and future potential, are given only to the best young scientists in the country.
Alex studied as an undergraduate at MIT, and received the PhD from Princeton University in 1999. He was a member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT before joining our faculty as an assistant professor in 2000-01. In 1991, Alex was a gold medalist at the International Mathematics Olympiad.
Professor Ionescu's research interests lie in harmonic analysis, especially Carleman inequalities and unique continuation properties for Schrödinger operators with rough potentials. He is also interested in real-variable aspects of analysis on semisimple Lie groups and symmetric spaces, and in discrete methods applied in harmonic analysis. This past year Alex was an invited lecturer at the Oberwolfach meeting in Harmonic Analysis and the first joint international meeting between the American Mathematical Society and the Unione Matematica Italiana in Pisa, Italy. Also he was one of the organizers of the special section on harmonic analysis of the regional meeting of the American Mathematical Society held in Madison last year.