Annual Newsletter of the University of Wisconsin Math Department

Other News

Alejandro Adem has been elected to a three year term on the Physical Sciences Divisional Committee of UW-Madison. He succeeds Andreas Seeger who served in 2000-2003.

Carl de Boor and Alexander Nagel were among the 29 UW-Madison faculty who, according to a survey by the citation indexing company Thomson ISI, are the most cited researchers in their fields. Citations of published research are key indicators of the influence of scholarly work.

Nigel Boston is giving a series of four 2-hour lectures in Taiwan this summer at a coding theory workshop, flying there directly from speaking at Frey's 60th birthday conference in Essen, Germany. He is also invited to speak in Berlin and England in early summer and to visit the MAGMA Computer Algebra group in Sydney, Australia. Here in Madison he is coorganizing the Computational Sciences Lecture Series with others in his interdisciplinary cluster. Plans are to have about 3 mini-conferences each year for four years (supported by a Cluster Enhancement grant), each with three speakers from different disciplines speaking on some common theme. The first has already taken place and it was on computational vision; the second will be on February 19, 2004 and will be on graphical models (aka Bayesian networks). For details (and posted video of the talks), see http://www.engr.wisc.edu/CSLS/ The cluster group is also starting an informal lunchtime multidisciplinary seminar series to be held in Union South, with the first on January 30, 2004 featuring Moo Chung of Statistics and Rob Nowak of ECE, talking about medical imaging.

Richard A. Brualdi has been elected as the Chair of the Editorial Boards Committee of the American Mathematical Society for 2004.

Jerry Keisler, Professor Emeritus since May of 2002, has moved to New Hampshire to be near his children and grandchildren. He keeps in touch with the department electronically and is continuing his research.

Steffen Lempp gave an invited Association of Symbolic Logic (ASL) address ``The proof-theoretic strength of some combinatorial principles'' at the annual meeting of the American Mathematical Society in Phoenix (Arizona), January 7-10, 2004. He then gave a tutorial at a workshop in computability in Nelson, New Zealand, where he says that the advertised beach hotel sounds really great on a cold day.

Paul Milewski is the incoming TA Coordinator replacing Bob Wilson who is retiring from that position.

Ken Ono is now the new Graduate Coordinator replacing Don Passman who has stepped down from this position.

Peter Orlik delivered a series of 8 lectures on Arrangements of Hyperplanes in the Scandinavian Summer School at Nordfjordeid, Norway (Sophus Lie's birthplace) in the program Algebraic Combinatorics. The other lecturers were Sergey Fomin and Volkmar Welker.

Joel Robbin is incoming associate chair replacing Dietrich Uhlenbrock who is stepping down and who will be on sabbatical this coming academic year.

The affiliate appointments in the Department of Mathematics for Eric Bach (Computer Science), James Bucklew (Electrical and Computer Engineering), Amos Ron (Computer Science), and John Strikwerda (Computer Science) were renewed for another three years. In addition, Jin-yi Cai (Computer Science) was give a three year affiliate appointment in the Department of Mathematics.

George Andrews (Penn State University) and ``Wisconsin Friend'' has been elected to the National Academy of Sciences.