Math Times Department of Mathematics Fall 2003 Distinguished Mathematical State Farm Foundation Research award recipients Professorship established Professors Derek Robinson and Zhong-Jin Ruan grant of $500,000 from the State Farm have been awarded 2003-2005 Distinguished A Companies Foundation has resulted in the Mathematical Research Awards. These awards, given by establishment of the State Farm Companies the department for the first time in Fall 2001, have a dual Professorship in Actuarial Science at the University purpose. The first purpose is to recognize senior members of Illinois. The grant is an endowment: the principal of the faculty for their outstanding achievements and to will remain intact, with income used to enhance the provide them more time to focus on their research salary and provide other benefits to a person named activities. The second purpose is to honor distinguished State Farm Scholar or State Farm Professor. Such department faculty members of the past for their endowed positions are among the best ways for a contributions to mathematics as a whole and to the university to attract and retain talented faculty, and Department of Mathematics at the University of Illinois honor both the recipient and the institution whose name in particular. Each year the awards are presented by the they carry. The State Farm Companies Foundation’s Executive Committee to at most two senior members of gift is a wonderful example of corporate citizenship, the department. and we at Illinois are deeply grateful for it. erek Robinson’s Distinguished Mathematical At a ceremony in the Illini Union on September D Research Award is given in memory of William W. 24, Esther Portnoy was formally named the first State Boone. Professor Robinson received his Ph.D. from Farm Scholar at UIUC. Attendants included Mindy Cambridge University in 1963. He was an Instructor at Laub for State Farm, Dean Jesse Delia of the College UIUC from 1963-65 and a Lecturer at the University of of Liberal Arts and Science, campus Provost Richard London from 1965-68. He has been a member of the Herman, and members of the Mathematics UIUC Department of Mathematics faculty since 1968. Department, as well as some of Professor Portnoy’s His research area is the theory of groups, especially family. infinite soluble group theory and its connection with ring Professor Portnoy received her Ph.D. in theory and homological algebra. He has also worked on mathematics from Stanford University in 1969. She algorithmic problems in group theory and received much joined the UIUC faculty in 1974 and has served as encouragement from Professor William Boone. Professor Director of the UIUC Actuarial Science Program since Robinson is the author of four books and about 100 1991. Her area of specialization is application of articles. He has been thesis advisor to nine Ph.D. students. statistical methods to problems in actuarial science, He was a recipient of a Sir Edmund Whittaker Prize, an especially graduation of mortality data and race/gender differences in mortality patterns. continued on page 3 University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The Math Times is published From the Department Chair: twice a year by the Department he fall term is here again. This year the season change was marked most of Mathematics at the University Tnotably by large numbers of wooly worms crossing the roads—some of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. one way, some the other way. I have been told that this proves that there are The Math Times is available via at least two kinds of wooly worms. But does it mean that the winter will be a the web in pdf format at long and cold one? www.math.uiuc.edu/mathtimes. This last year was a hard one in terms of budgets for our state and for our university. But you can see that despite this we have moved forward into this year with all the energy that we expect at Illinois. This fall we have three new Editor Tori Corkery Asst. Editor Cherri Davison regular faculty members and a number of new postdoctoral faculty members. Distribution Lori Dick We have several faculty visitors who are adding to our teaching and research activities. We have begun another fund raising drive in hopes of matching the one from last year that was very successful considering it was a first-time Address corrections and changes effort. should be sent to: Let me highlight here just a few of the large number of departmental activities that have gone on this last summer or are going on this fall. We have Lori Dick begun the fourth year of NSF VIGRE grant funding with many people again [email protected] involved in the mentoring groups that it sponsors. This past summer, two 257 Altgeld Hall (MC-382) Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REUs) groups were organized: 1409 W. Green Street Urbana, IL 61801 one led by Kim Whittlesey on geometric group theory and the other led by Robert Muncaster on evolutionary game theory. Also, this summer for the first time, a new aspect of the VIGRE program was started: REGS (Research Joseph Rosenblatt, Chair Experiences for Graduate Students). REGS came out of discussions in the Department of Mathematics Graduate Affairs Committee last year, with Professor John D’Angelo chairing Main Office the committee and leading the development of REGS. In this component of 273 Altgeld Hall (MC-382) the VIGRE program, first or second year graduate students work with faculty 1409 W. Green Street members on research projects that can lead to publishable results. This Urbana, IL 61801 summer’s REGS were exciting and successful. A forum will occur later in the fall that highlights the REGS. Telephone: 217-333-3350 Fax: 217-333-9576 Another new event, also emerging from discussions in last year’s Graduate Affairs Committee on the graduate program, is the Alumni Visiting Committee [email protected] that comes to town in October. This year the committee consists of four past www.math.uiuc.edu graduate students who are now faculty members at various universities. They will return to the department to meet with current graduate students and faculty members and to evaluate the department’s graduate program. These people are Professors Jim Colliander (University of Toronto), Richard Hain (Duke University), Stuart Kurtz (University of Chicago), and Judy Walker (University of Nebraska). Professors Walker and Colliander will give talks in October, and Professors Hain and Kurtz will be returning to give talks later in the year. We expect to be able to make significant improvements in our graduate program with the input from these distinguished alumni. Thus, it is with excitement and anticipation that we start this new academic year. We do not know yet if this year will be as hard financially as the last two. We do not know if all our plans will come to fruition as quickly as we hope. But we do know that the faculty and students in our department are actively engaged in the business of learning and creating mathematics. What greater joy can there be?! Department of Mathematics 2 Distinguished Mathematical Research award receipients, continued Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award and a Beckman Award. Professor Robinson was an Associate at the Center for Advanced Study in Urbana in 1981-82 and 1992, and has held visiting positions at the University of Freiburg, the University of Padua, Notre Dame University, the National University of Singapore, the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, Zurich, and Warwick University. William Boone received his doctorate in mathematics from Princeton University in 1952. He taught at Princeton, Rutgers and the Catholic University of America before joining the UIUC Department of Mathematics faculty in 1958, where he served until his death in 1983. He held an Alexander von Humboldt Senior U.S. Scientist Award at the University of Bonn in 1978 and was a visiting professor at Oxford in 1972-73 and 1978-79. Professor Boone, who made many contributions to the field of mathematical logic, provided the first correct proof of the unsolvability of the word Derek Robinson problem for finitely presented groups—one of the outstanding mathematical achievements of the 20th century. hong-Jin Ruan’s Distinguished Mathematical Research Award is given in Z memory of Mahlon M. Day. Professor Ruan received his Ph.D. in mathematics from UCLA in 1987 and joined the UIUC Department of Mathematics in 1988. Professor Ruan is a founder of operator space theory. His research, in particular his joint book with Edward G. Effros on Operator Spaces has made fundamentally important contributions to this newly developed active research area in modern analysis. Professor Ruan has also made very important contributions to non-commutative harmonic analysis and locally compact quantum groups. Recently, he is more interested in the local theory of operator spaces and its applications to C*- algebras, von Neumann algebras and non-commutative Lp-spaces. Professor Ruan has published about 40 research papers and has supervised four Ph.D. theses in operator spaces and Kac algebras at Illinois. Zhong-Jin Ruan Mahlon M. Day received his Ph.D. in mathematics from Brown University in 1939. He was a member of the UIUC Department of Mathematics faculty from 1940 to 1983. He served as department head from 1958-1965 and was editor of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics from 1980-1986. Professor Day, widely known for his 1957 book Normed Linear Spaces, did pioneering work on geometrical properties of these spaces. He was a leading expert on the “roundness” of a normed space and its influence on other properties of the space. This work was fundamental to the rapid growth of the field.