For Your Information Fan was a student and collaborator of M. Fréchet and was AMS Establishes Ky and also influenced by John von Neumann and Hermann Weyl. Yu-Fen Fan Endowment The author of approximately 130 papers, Fan made funda- In the fall of 1999, Ky Fan and his wife, Yu-Fen Fan, made mental contributions to oper- a gift of approximately $1 million to the AMS. The funds ator and matrix theory, convex will be used to establish the Ky and Yu-Fen Fan Endowment. analysis and inequalities, lin- Income from the endowment will support mathematics in ear and nonlinear program- China and mathematically talented high school students ming, topology and fixed point in the U.S. theory, and topological groups. “The gift from Ky and Yu-Fen Fan reflects their com- His work in fixed point theory, mitment to supporting mathematics, particularly in their in addition to influencing non- home country of China, where there is much talent but few linear functional analysis, has found wide application in resources,” said AMS president Felix E. Browder. “Their mathematical economics and generosity is remarkable.” game theory, potential theory, Funds from the Ky and Yu-Fen Fan Endowment will pri- calculus of variations, and dif- marily be devoted to a program for fostering collaborations ferential equations. between Chinese mathematicians and mathematicians in “The Ky and Yu-Fen Fan En- Ky and Yu-Fen Fan other parts of the world, especially North America. The dowment addresses groups program will provide grants to Chinese mathematics that have deep reservoirs of talent in need of cultivation departments to bring in visitors from the rest of the world and resources,” Browder said. “The AMS is profoundly as well as grants to North American departments to bring grateful to Ky and Yu-Fen Fan. The impact of their gen- in visitors from China. There will also be support for erosity will be felt for years to come.” occasional conferences in China and for improving mathematics library holdings in Chinese institutions. In —Allyn Jackson addition, the endowment will provide small grants to assist programs in the U.S. that nurture mathematically talented high school students. Half of the Fans’ gift will go Straley Named MAA Executive into the endowment, and the other half into a gift annu- ity (whereby the donor receives an annuity and the unused Director portion becomes a donation). The Mathematical Association of America (MAA) has named Ky Fan is an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Tina Straley as its new executive director. Straley, associ- University of California, Santa Barbara. Born on September ate vice president for scholarship and graduate studies at 19, 1914, in Hangchow, China, he received his B.S. degree Kennesaw State University in Georgia, has served in the from Peking University (1936) and his D.Sc. degree from Southeastern Section of the MAA, has been an editor of the the University of Paris (1941). He was a member of the In- MAA Notes, and has served as a program officer at the Na- stitute for Advanced Study in Princeton from 1945 to 1947 tional Science Foundation. Straley succeeds Marcia P. Sward, and held positions at the University of Notre Dame, Wayne who took a position at the National Environmental State University, and Northwestern University before going Education and Training Foundation. to U.C., Santa Barbara, in 1965. Elected a member of the Academia Sinica in 1964, Fan served as the director of the —Elaine Kehoe Institute of Mathematics there from 1978 to 1984. MARCH 2000 NOTICES OF THE AMS 379.