Doron Levy has been named interim chair of the University of Maryland’s Department of Mathematics and will begin a one-year appointment on July 1, 2019. Levy will be stepping in for current chair, Scott Wolpert, who will take a one-year sabbatical and then return as chair for two years.
“I am very pleased that Doron has agreed to serve as interim chair for the next year,” said Amitabh Varshney, dean of UMD’s College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. “Through his many contributions to the department in research, teaching and service, I know he will be an excellent leader.”
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Starting in 2019, several of our postdoctoral positions will become Serguei Novikov Postdoctoral Fellowships, in honor of our colleague and friend Serguei Novikov. Novikov retired from the mathematics department and IPST in 2017. He came to the University of Maryland permanently as a Professor in 1996 (after first visiting here for four semesters), and was made a Distinguished University Professor in 1997. Novikov is one of the greatest mathematicians and mathematical physicists in the world today. His honors include the Lenin Prize of the U.S.S.R. in 1967, election first as a Corresponding Member (1966) and then as a full Member (1981) of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (now the Russian Academy of Sciences), the Fields Medal of the International Mathematical Union (1970), the Lobachevskii Prize of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R. (1981), election as a Foreign Associate of the National Academy of Sciences of the U.S.A. (1994), the Wolf Prize in Mathematics (2005), and the Euler Medal of the Russian Academy of Sciences (2013). A list of the Novikov postdoctoral fellows can be found here.
The second in our series of Distinguished Lectures in Geometric Analysis will be given on October 31 and November 2, 2018, by Professor Bo Berndtsson from Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden. The topic will be Complex Brunn-Minkowski theory.
The College of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences welcomed 19 new tenured/tenure-track faculty members to the University of Maryland this fall. The brief introductions to the new faculty members can be read on CMNS website.
Our long-time colleague Professor Eneritus David Lay passed away October 12, 2018.
David earned his BA at Aurora College in 1962, and his PhD at UCLA in 1966. He then came to Maryland where he rose through the ranks to Professor in 1977. A gifted teacher, he won the campus Distinguished Scholar-Teacher Award in 1997. A vibrant member of the department’s functional analysis group, he published nearly 40 research articles in the area of functional analysis, in addition to authoring or co-authoring 6 books. His very popular book Linear Algebra and its Applications has been translated into (at least) French, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese, and Korean. He also served on many committees in the Mathematics Department, on campus, and in the mathematical community. In the late 1990’s, David worked in the Dean’s office, then retired because of medical issues in 1999. He was a wonderful colleague.
A mathematical biography of Lay has been written by Harm Bart, and can be read here (pages 37-40).
The Canadian Journal of Statistics Award is presented each year by the Statistical Society of Canada to the author(s) of an article published in the journal, in recognition of the outstanding quality of the methodological innovation and presentation.
This year’s winner is the article entitled “Bayesian analysis of a density ratio model.” (Volume 45, no. 3, pp. 274-289) by V. de Oliveira and B. Kedem.