FACULTY NEWS

Bill Abikoff was a speaker at the convocation ceremony for the recently formed Honors College at the Polytechnic University (Brooklyn, NY) in January 2004. (See http://honors2.poly.edu/Alumni.htm)

Yung-Sze Choi received the Chancellor's Excellence in Research award for 2003-2004 and was recognized for this achievement at the Graduate Commencement in May 2004.

Evarist Giné will give a Medallion Lecture at the joint 67th Annual Meeting of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics and 6th World Congress of the Bernoulli Society, in Barcelona, Catalonia, on July 26-31, 2004. The IMS selects eight Medallion Lecturers every year, and the one-hour lectures are delivered at the IMS meetings held during that year. Another researcher with ties to our Department, Vladimir Koltchinskii of the University of New Mexico, will give a Medallion Lecture at the same meeting. Evarist was also the President of the Program Committee for the IX Congreso Latinoamericano de Probabilidad y Estadistica Matematica, held in Punta del Este, Uruguay, in March 2004. In addition, Evarist was awarded a 2-year grant from the National Security Agency to work on his project, "Limit Theorems in Probability Theory and Applications," through February 2006.

Sarah Glaz received the 2004 UConn AAUP Excellence Award for Teaching Innovation.

(See the article by Jim Hurley elsewhere in this issue.) The award was presented at a ceremony at the Legislative Office Building in Hartford on April 14.

Joe McKenna received the Distinguished College or University Teaching Award of the Northeastern Section of the Mathematical Association of America for 2004.

Reed Solomon was awarded a 3-year NSF grant for his proposal "Computability Theory, Reverse Mathematics and Countable Algebraic Structures".

Ed Tomastik (emeritus) has revised and greatly expanded his highly successful book Calculus: Applications and Technology. The third edition (with a 2005 copyright) has recently been published by Thomson Learning (Brooks/Cole).

A First Graduate Course in Abstract Algebra by Bill Wickless (emeritus) has recently been published by Marcel Dekker, Inc., as number 266 in their series Pure and Applied Mathematics.

VISITORS

Lev Sakhnovich, an author of three monographs and over 170 papers, spent the academic year 2003-2004 at UConn as a guest of Vadim Olshevsky. Vadim and Lev obtained new results on matrix and operator Bezoutians, robust control, and filtering. They also worked with graduate student Tom Bella and obtained a new result in coding theory.

Kevin C. O'Meara, of the University of Canterbury (New Zealand) visited us again for the fall semester of 2003. Kevin gave two talks at the Algebra seminar on "Diagonalization Complexity," and on December 4, he also gave an expository lecture entitled "Gromov Translation Algebras" in the colloquium series. (One can read Kevin's recent publication on translation algebras in the year 2002 issue of Advances in Mathematics.)

Prof. Huaiyu Jian of Tsinghua University (P. R. China), a specialist in Partial Differential Equations with interests in variational calculus and geometric analysis, visited Changfeng Gui for the spring semester.

Yuli Eidelman (Tel Aviv) spent September/October 2003 here as a guest of Vadim Olshevsky. They (together with I. Gohberg) obtained new results on semiseparable matrices, with applications to the semiseparable QR algorithm for solving general eigenvalue problems.

Profs. S-G Lee and Kwak (Sung Kyun University, Seoul, Korea) visited to learn about our actuarial program.