Other News

Alejandro Adem

has been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Committee of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley).

Georgia Benkart,

as the MAA (Mathematical Association of America) Pólya Lecture for the years 2000-02 (See Van Vleck Notes 2001), gave lectures at MAA sectional meetings in New York, Illinois, Kentucky, Wisconsin, and Nebraska-South Dakota. She also gave a joint MAA-AMS invited hour talk at recent annual meetings in Atlanta, Georgia.

Richard A. Brualdi

has been elected to a three-year term on the Editorial Boards Committee of the American Mathematical Society. With Rajendra Bhatia of the Indian Statistical Institute, he is organizing a 10 hour special session on ``The Many Facets of Linear Algebra and Matrix Theory'' at the first joint meeting of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and Indian mathematicians, to take place in Bangalore, India on December 17-20, 2003.

Larry Farnsworth

who has worked in our financial office as Grants and Contracts Coordinator for many years has resigned his position in order to assume a similar position in the Zoology Department. On November 1, 2002, Larry was presented with a ``good luck'' gift in recognition of his important service to the department. There was a cake in the finanicial office with faculty invited to stop by and give good wishes to Larry.

Jeremy Lovejoy,

a VIGRE Van Vleck Assistant Professor, who spent the 2001-02 academic year at the University of Paris VII on a prestigious Chateaubriand Fellowship, has received a permanent 100% research CNRS position in France. These are highly competitive positions, and it is very unusual for a non-French citizen to be offered one. Jeremy is teaching a graduate course on partitions and q-series this semester. He received the PhD at Penn State university in 2000 where he was supervised by George Andrews and Ken Ono.

Alex Nagel

has been appointed to the editorial board of the Transactions of the American Mathematical Society.

Ken Ono

gave an invited lecture in November 2002 at the Beckman Institute of the U.S. National Academy of Science as part of the 2002 Chinese-American Frontiers of Science Symposium. He has selected to be the principal lecturer for an NSF-CBMS (Conference Board of the Mathematical Sciences) Conference. The conference, entitled `The Web Modularity', will be held at the University of Illinois in Urbana in June 2003. As the principal lecturer, Ken will be delivering 10 lectures on modular forms and will also be writing a book in the American Mathematical Society's CBMS Monograph Series. Present or Emeriti UW Madison faculty who have been CBMS lecturers include Walter Rudin, Mary Ellen Rudin, Richard Askey, Peter Orlik, Donald Passman, and Paul Rabinowitz. In addition, Ken will be giving the Milton Brockett Porter Lectures (four lectures) at Rice University in Houston, Texas in March 2003. Previous Porter Lecturers include S.T. Yau, Arthur Jaffe, Peter Sarnak, Michael Atiyah, and Janos Kollar.

Peter Orlik

is one of the organizers of the Fall 2004 program on Hyperplane Arrangements and Applications at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (Berkeley).

James Propp

gave an invited lecture at a conference on Combinatorics and Solvable Lattice Models held in July, 2002 at the Australian National University in Canberra. The conference was in Australia, but Jim gave the talk via phone-link, and with computer support, from his kitchen in Cambridge, Massachusetts! Jim will be giving an invited lecture at a conference on Number Theory and Combinatorics in Physics in March, 2003 at the University of Florida, Gainesville. After a two year absence, Jim is looking forward to returning to Madison (and we are looking forward to having him back among us).

Arun Ram

has been appointed as an editor-in-chief of the Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics and as an advisory editor of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series A.

The Walter Rudin Student Series in Advanced Mathematics

has been announced by the Mathematics & Statistics Publishing Group of McGraw-Hill Higher Education. The editor-in-chief of this new textbook series is Steven G. Krantz of Washington University in St. Louis.

Timo Seppäläinen

received the prize ``Prix Institut Henri-Poincaré / Gauthier-Villars'' for the best paper in the Probabilités and Statistiques series of the journal Annales de l'Institut Henri Poincare published in the year 2000. The title of his paper is: Strong law of large numbers for the interface in ballistic deposition. The prize included a medal and 1500 euros. The award ceremony took place at the Institute in June 2002, and included presentations by the recipients for the different series, along with a champagne reception and a fancy dinner. Timo also gave an invited plenary lecture at NORDSTAT 2002, the 19th Nordic Conference on Mathematical Statistics in June, 2002.

Marshall Slemrod

will spend two months (May/June 2003) at the Isaac Newton Mathematics Institute in Cambridge, participating in the special program on Nonlinear Hyperbolic PDE's.

Robert Turner

is in Pisa this winter. As part of the program at the Scuola Normale he is giving a month-long course ``An Introduction to Neural Dynamics.'' The aim of this short course is ``to acquaint the listener with the ionic basis for voltage variations in single neurons and to discuss models of small numbers of interconnected neurons.''