Sabbaticals and Leaves

2002-03 Academic Year

Patrick Ahern,

on sabbatical all year, spent the fall semester working with mathematicians in Marseille, Barcelona and the Canary Islands. It wasn't all work however and certainly one of the highlights of the semester happened during the last week of September when Pat and his wife Kay met Melania Adem in northern Spain and walked for five days with her on the Route of Saint James. (Melania continued for approximately twenty five more days and walked the entire Route, almost 800 kilometers). Pat is based in Madison for the spring semester.

Steffen Lempp

is on sabbatical this year at the University of Heidelberg, Germany, partly supported by a Mercator guest professorship of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. According to Steffen, there is a whole group of logicians who spend between a month and a year in Heidelberg, so it is a great place for him to be. He is teaching one advanced course (in English!) for the Mercator professorship. The students are in German schools and had some problems with the language at first, but now Steffen says they are much better. He gave an invited talk at the European Logic Colloquium in Muenster last August and will attend the next European Logic Colloquium in Helsinki next August. While in Europe, he is giving semininar talks in Wuerzburg, Bonn and Leeds.

Arnold Miller

is also on sabbatical this year. He spent the first semester at the Fields Institute (Toronto) for mathematical research. There was a four month conference on Set Theory, including two workshops on Borel equivalence relations in Descriptive Set Theory and Applications of set theory to the theory of Banach spaces. He reports that it was an extremely productive and exciting semester. For the second semester he will be traveling across the country visiting various set theorists and attending Logic meetings at the University of Florida in Gainesville, Texas Tech in Lubbock, Boise State University in Idaho, and the University of Edmonton in Alberta.

Paul Rabinowitz

was on sabbatical for the fall semester of 2002-03. He spent about half of his time in Madison. In addition he participated in a program in honor of John Mather's 60th birthday at Princeton for one month, gave several lectures in Taiwan, spent some time at Toyko University with a collaborator, and gave a series of lectures at a workshop in Kyoto.

Three faculty members have been granted sabbaticals for the full academic year 2003-04.

Amir Assadi

will spend the academic year in the Department of Neurobiology at Harvard University developing multi-scale theoretical modes of information processing in the human brain. researchers in neurobiology.

Georgia Benkart

will be based in Madison during her sabbatical, finishing the writing of a book ``Combinatorial Representation Theory'' (with Arun Ram). In addition, she will be continuing her work on several research projects, some of which involve co-authors in Korea and Spain, and will spend about a month in each of these countries.

Thomas Kurtz

will lead a year-long program on Probability and Statistics in Complex Systems: Genomics, Networks, and Financial Engineering at the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA) at the University of Minnesota.

Other people on non-sabbatical leave this year are:

Anatole Beck

(spring semester, 2002-03) at the London School of Economics (England).

James Propp

(academic year, 2002-03) at Harvard University.

Yongbin Ruan

(academic year, 2002-03) at Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Hong Kong).

Thanos Tzavaras

academic year, 2002-03, at the University of Crete (Greece).