Kudos

Congratulations are due to several faculty members for promotions and awards:

Distinguished Research Professor

Daniel Nakano was selected as one of four university wide Distinguished Research Professors (DRP) in 2010. The DRP is an appointed honorific professorship which is awarded on the basis of "international recognition for original contributions to knowledge and whose work promises to foster continued creativity in their discipline". Nakano is the sixth member in the history of the Mathematics Department to receive this prestigious honor.

Nakano is a world leader in algebraic representation theory and his research program has contributed to making UGA a center of mathematics research in this area. Throughout Nakano's academic career, he has been known for his original results stemming from the creation of new approaches to problems that have stymied many mathematicians. Nakano also currently serves as the VIGRE director and his leadership has been critically important to the success of the UGA VIGRE program.

Sandy Beaver Teaching Professor

Ed Azoff, who's completing his 38th year in the Mathematics Department at UGA, was awarded the Sandy Beaver Teaching Professorship this year. This will not surprise those of you who were lucky enough to take a course from Ed while at UGA. Indeed, he was a recipient of the Josiah Meigs Award, the University's highest teaching award, in 2001.

Ed continues to teach a variety of courses at all levels. In his quest to teach every undergraduate course at least once, he is taking on the challenge this spring of teaching the new course on transforms that was introduced by Andrew Sornborger last year. He is also teaching the calculus with theory sequence this year for the fifth time and has, as always, a devoted following.

Ed has been an inspiration to many students over the years. Student comments taken from the award nomination include:

"He is by far the best teacher I’ve had in any subject area. He was always willing to spend time with students to make sure they understood the subject."

"Looking back at my undergraduate studies at UGA, it is easy for me to see that Dr. Azoff was one of the greatest parts of my educational experience. He was not only a great teacher but also a caring friend. I am now a math teacher as well, and I hope that I too can have as profound an impact on my students as Dr. Azoff has had on me."

"Anything a student needed, he provided. His interaction with students was remarkable." Of course, most of the students made reference to the salmon joke that continues to make its way perennially into every one of Ed's classes (or math club lectures). If you do not know it, send him an email, he will be glad to share it with you!

Alexander Petukhov was promoted to associate professor in the summer of 2010. Dr. Pethukov is a leader in the applied fields of approximation theory, data compression and encoding, and video denoising. In addition to his solid record of publication and grant support, Dr. Petukhov is a co-author of the US Patent US7769244B2 on automatic digital film and video restoration approved in 2010. His numerical algorithms and software won an international competition for the right to restore the movie Metropolis (produced in 1927 by F. Lang), one of the most influential films in cinema history. The premiere of the restored Metropolis occurred on February 12, 2010, on the big screen mounted on Brandenburg Gate during the International Berlin Film festival, Berlinale. The restored film is included in the World Memory Register by UNESCO.

Sa’ar Hersonsky was promoted to the rank of professor in the summer of 2010. Dr. Hersonsky was hired as an associate professor in 2005 after holding positions at Cornell, Cal Tech, Ben Gurion University, and Princeton. He works on problems at one of the central fronts of contemporary mathematics: negatively curved manifolds. His work has drawn the attention and praise of many top international leaders in geometry and topology. His most recent work combines analytic and combinatorial methods to study solutions of Dirichlet boundary value problems on a topological surface. This work is considered a promising inroad to the celebrated Cannon Conjecture.

Professor Hersonsky has shown great commitment to excellence in the classroom and has used his previous experiences at various institutions to provide a wonderful and effective learning environment for his students. Hersonsky's students have deemed him "one of the most student oriented teachers" at UGA.