Notes on Distinguished Speakers

Chandler Davis

Dr. Chandler Davis received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1950 under the direction of Garrett Birkhoff. After teaching at the University of Michigan and Columbia University, he has spent almost 50 years at the University of Toronto, where he is presently Professor Emeritus. Dr. Davis is an expert on linear algebra and operator theory in Hilbert spaces, and has also made contributions to numerical analysis, geometry, and algebraic logic. He has 80 publications on such topics as the Cauchy-Schwartz inequality and eigenvalues for self-adjoint operators, and in work with collaborators is responsible for the theorems of Davis-Kahan, Davis- Knuth, and Bhatia-Davis. In 1946, Chandler Davis published his first science fiction story in Astounding Science Fiction, and in 1960 Dr. Davis spent six months at the Danbury Federal Correctional Institution for refusing to cooperate with the House Unamerican Activities Committee.

Igor Rodnianski

Dr. Igor Rodnianski received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Kansas State University in 1999 under the direction of Lev Kapitanski. Dr. Rodnianski has been a professor at Princeton University since then; he was the Thomas D. Jones Professor of Mathematical Physics in 2007-2008, and he is presently the Henry Burchard Fine Professor of mathematics. Dr. Rodnianski was a Long-Term Prize Fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute during 2002-2004, and has been a visiting professor at MIT, the University of Cambridge, and several other institutions. Dr. Rodnianski is an expert on partial differential equations and analysis, and he has 57 papers on such topics as the Einstein vacuum equations, black hole stability, and metrics with bounded curvature flux.