January 7, 2005

Dear friends of Georgia mathematics,

Happy new year! The Mathematics Department had a fruitful 2004 and a busy Fall semester, with more good things to come this Spring. Here is a brief update.

The Department has hosted a number of distinguished visiting mathematicians this semester. Professor Viacheslav Nikulin from the University of Liverpool has just concluded a visit with Distinguished Research Professor Valery Alexeev. Professor Gordana Matic hosted a visit from Professor Paolo Lisca of the University of Pisa. Dr. Wu Li, Senior Research Engineer at the NASA Langley Research Center, recently concluded a visit with Professor Lai. Professor John McCuan from Georgia Tech was in residence here for the whole fall semester. In addition we have had shorter visits from colloquium speakers Donna Testerman of EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland and Peter Greiner and Hanfeng Li of the University of Toronto, and Eric Friedlander of Northwestern University.

As you may know, the Department is presently in the fourth year of a $2.5 million VIGRE grant from the National Science Foundation to promote the integration of research into the graduate and undergraduate programs, contributing to a higher than usual level of activity in the "off-season." Among these activities were very successful Research Experience for Undergraduates (REU) programs last summer, led by Professor Jason Cantarella on Mathematics and Art, and by post-doctoral associate Dr. Aaron Abrams on Configuration Spaces of Graphs, respectively. The VIGRE research group in algebra, led by Profs. Benson, Chastkofsky, Dan Nakano and Brian Boe, continued its torrid pace of investigation and discovery. PhD student Bree Ettinger, having just completed her BS and MA degrees at the Department, launched into the next phase of her work, to be conducted under Professor Ming-Jun Lai, with a highly successful internship at the Boeing Corporation in Seattle. For summer 2005 we plan to offer another pair of REUs: one on harmonic analysis led by Professor Akos Magyar, and the other on numerical analysis led by Postdoctoral Associate Tatyana Sorokina.

Still more exciting events are planned for the coming Spring. The Cantrell Lectures will be given by the world-renowned mathematical physicist Professor Roger Penrose, Rouse Ball Professor of Mathematics at the University of Oxford , creator of the famous Penrose Tiling of the plane and author not only of the provocative 1990 mathematical bestseller The Emperor's New Mind but also of the brand new tome The Road to Reality: A Complete Guide to the Laws of the Universe. Our own Professor Lai is organizing an international conference on Wavelets and Splines to be held at UGA in May. This promises to be one of the major events in world mathematics next year, with invited lectures by Ingrid Daubechies of Princeton, David Donoho from Stanford and Ronald Coifman of Yale.

Our members have won a number of awards and honors recently. Professor Lenny Chastkofsky won the Student Government Association Outstanding Professor Award, a new prize given to a professor who has had an especially meaningful influence on students. Distinguished Research Professor David Benson won a Humboldt Foundation Fellowship to do research in algebra in Germany in 2005. Graduate student Ted Ashton was awarded the Department's first Pythagoras Award last month.

Frank Lether, who retired from active service in 2003, sends us some inspiring photos from his summer vacation of the University of Utah's new Benny Rushing Mathematics Center. The late Professor Rushing earned his PhD from the Department in 1968 and went on to a distinguished career as Professor of Mathematics and Dean of the College of Science at Utah.

A banquet celebrating the career of the recently retired Professor Elliott Gootman took place in August. Present for the festivities were emeriti Kevin Clancey, Tom Brahana, John Hollingsworth and Jim Cantrell. Jim had made an earlier appearance at the Department in August to deliver a generous gift of $1,000.

I intend to send this newsletter out more frequently this year. Please send us news about yourself or others connected to UGA Mathematics. We have set up an email address for this purpose: alumnews@math.uga.edu. If you'd prefer to receive this newsletter electronically, please send an email to this effect to that address. This will save the department some postage and copying expenses, and we'll be able to include full-color photos without spending our operating budget on color copies.

Finally, I'd like to extend my personal invitation to you to visit the department whenever you're back in Athens.

Best wishes,

Joe Fu
Professor and Head