Manuel Lerman received the 1999 Research Excellence Award from the UConn Chapter of the American Association of University Professors. This university-wide award recognizes outstanding research contributions by UConn faculty members.

Manny received his PhD degree from Cornell University in 1968. After appointments at MIT and Yale, he joined our department as an associate professor in 1973. He was promoted to Professor in 1976.

The award cites Manny's outstanding work in mathematical logic. His specialty is computability theory (also known as recursion theory), an area in which one tries to understand the information content of sets that computers use as oracles. Those are potentially infinite collections of information that can be supplied to a program. Two sets are compared through an analysis of whether the information supplied by the first is sufficient to compute the second, and their degree of complexity is determined by studying an algebraic structure. Manny's work has been important in understanding the properties of these structures, and has appeared in leading mathematics journals. The significance of his contributions has been recognized through many speaking invitations at universities and major professional society meetings. The National Science Foundation has supported Manny's research with nearly continuous grants since 1969.

Manny's book Degrees of Unsolvability appeared in 1983, and at present he is for the second time the coordinating editor of a conference proceedings volume. He has been active in the Association for Symbolic Logic, serving as a member of its governing council for many years and for the past 13 years as coordinating editor of its book series, Perspectives in Mathematical Logic (published by Springer-Verlag). He has also chaired several ASL committees, currently the Committee on Prizes and Awards.

In addition to being one of the editors of Math CONNections, Manny chaired the Department's Graduate Program Committee for many years, and has served on numerous other departmental committees. He also enjoys teaching especially Math 223, Euclidean and Non-Euclidean Geometry. Besides teaching the mathematics, he relates its content to the historical search for knowledge and highlights its role as an example of a purely intellectual pursuit that has spawned very important applications. His goal is to instill in his students a feeling for how and why mathematics is studied while they learn the mathematics itself.