Lax to Deliver Gibbs Lecture

Peter D. Lax, New York University-Courant Institute, will deliver the AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture on Friday January 5, 2007 from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. He will speak on Mathematics and Physics. The lecture will be held in Grand Ballroom A, B, C, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Peter D. Lax is Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. He was born in Budapest, Hungary on May 1, 1926. He emigrated to New York with his parents in 1941, and subsequently received his B.A. (Mathematics) in 1947 and his Ph.D. (Mathematics) in 1949 from New York University. In 1950, Lax went to Los Alamos for a year and later worked there as a consultant, but by 1951 he made his academic home at New York University, where he has undertaken his life's work at the Courant Institute (and where he served as director from 1972-1980). He became professor in 1958.

Professor Lax's interests focus on fluid dynamics, partial differential equations, and computation.. He laid the foundations for the modern theory of nonlinear hyperbolic conservation laws and has made fundamental contributions to numerical methods for partial differential equations. His name is connected with many major mathematical results and numerical methods.

Professor Lax is a member of many learned organizations. He has received honors too numerous to mention. He was the SIAM von Neumann Lecturer in 1969, the Hermann Weyl Lecturer in 1972, and the MAA Hedrick Lecturer in 1973.

He served as President of the AMS from 1979 - 1980.

Bona to Speak on Big Waves in Deep Water

Jerry L. Bona, University of Illinois at Chicago, will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Monday January 8, 2007 from 10:05 a.m. to 10:55 a.m. He will speak on Big waves in deep water. The lecture will be held in Grand Ballroom A, B, C, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Jerry Bona received a B.S. in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science from Washington University, Saint Louis in 1966 and a Ph.D. in Mathematics directed by Garret Birkhoff, from Harvard University, Cambridge in 1971. He was a post-doctoral fellow under the direction of T. Brooke Benjamin and J.J. Mahony at the the Fluid Mechanics Research Institue in the University of Essex from 1970 to 1972, before joining the faculty of mathematics at the University of Chicago. His research interests include fluid mechanics, partial differential equations, computational mathematics and the associated numerical analysis, oceanography, coastal engineering, economic theory and lately, the analysis of gene expression and its use as a tool in designing cancer treatment.

Bona is currently Chair of the Mathematics, Statistics and Computer Science department at UIC, having formerly held a Professorship at the University of Chicago and Chaired positions at Penn State and the University of Texas at Austin. He has served on a wide range of committees of the AAAS, AMS, MAA and SIAM, on NSF, NSERC, NATO, ONR, and U.S. Army Research Office advisory committees as well as on many ad hoc advisory and evaluative committees. Dr. Bona has recently taken over as the Convenor of the International Center for Mathematical Sciences which is headquartered in Edinburgh in Maxwell's former home. He has mentored about 50 graduate students and post-doctoral fellows and is on the editorial board of 30 or so scientific journals.

In addition to Garrett Birkhoff, Brooke Benjamin and John Mahony, Professor Bona was mentored by Felix Browder and Jim Douglas, Jr. when he was a young faculty member at the University of Chicago. Bill Pritchard showed him the importance of careful laboratory experiments in understanding fluid mechanics. Ridgway Scott patiently taught him the role of numerical simulation in science and as an aid to formulating and understanding mathematical theory. Haim Brezis, Jean-Claude Saut, and Roger Temam helped him into the modern theory of partial differential equations. Michael Longuet-Higgins and Barbara Boczar-Karakiewicz introduced him to problems in oceanography and coastal engineering. He learned about mathematical issues in economic theory from Sandy Grossman, Jose Scheinkman, Manuel Santos and Karl Shell. Paul Sally, Naomi Fisher, Phil Wagreich and Harvey Keynes brought him into mathematics education.

Okounkov to Deliver Colloquium Lectures

The AMS Colloquium Lectures will be delivered by Andrei Okounkov, Princeton University, on Friday, January 5, 2007 - Sunday, January 7, 2007 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. He will speak on Limit shapes, real and imagined. The lectures will be held in Grand Ballroom A, B, C, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Andrei Okounkov is a Professor of Mathematics at Princeton University. He received his bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1993 and his doctorate in mathematics in 1995 from Moscow State University. He taught at the University of Chicago from 1996 to 1999 and at the University of California at Berkeley from 1998 to 2002.

Professor Okounkov has been a Research Fellow in the Dobrushin Mathematical Laboratory at the Institute for Problems of Information Transmission at the Russian Academy of Sciences and a member of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton and of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. He was awarded a Sloan Research Fellowship in 2000, a Packard Fellowship in 2001, and the European Mathematical Society Prize in 2004. He was also awarded the Fields Medal in August, 2006 in recognition of his work linking different fields of mathematics that had seemed unrelated.

He works in representation theory, probability theory, and algebraic geometry.

Efron to Speak on Baseball, Shakespeare, and Modern Statistical Theory

Bradley Efron, Stanford University, will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Friday January 5, 2007 from 3:40 p.m. to 4:30 p.m. He will speak on Baseball, Shakespeare, and modern statistical theory. The lecture will be held in Grand Ballroom A, B, C, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Bradley Efron is Professor of Statistics and Biostatistics at Stanford University. He works on a combination of theoretical and applied topics, including empirical Bayes, survival analysis, exponential families, bootstrap and jackknife methods and confidence intervals. Most of his applied work has originated in biomedical consulting projects at the Stanford Medical School, mixed in with a few papers concerning astronomy and physics. Even his theoretical papers usually begin with specific applied problems.

Professor Efron was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, May 1938, to Esther and Miles Efron, Jewish-Russian immigrants. A Merit Scholarship, in the program's inaugural year, brought him to Caltech, graduating in Mathematics in 1960. He arrived at Stanford that Fall, eventually gaining his Ph.D., under the direction of Rupert Miller and Herb Solomon, in the Statistics Department, whose faculty also included Charles Stein, Herman Chernoff, Manny Parzen, Lincoln Moses and Ingram Olkin. Brad has lived at Stanford since 1960, with sabbaticals at Harvard, Imperial College and Berkeley. He has held several administrative positions at the university: Chair of Statistics, Associate Dean of Science, Chairman of the University Advisory Board and Chair of the Faculty Senate. He is currently Chair of the Undergraduate Program in Applied Mathematics.

He has received numerous honors including doctorates from Chicago, Madrid, and Oslo, a MacArthur Prize Fellowship, membership in the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, fellowship in the IMS and ASA, the Wilks medal, Parzen Prize, the newly inaugurated Rao Prize and the outstanding statistician award from the Chicago ASA chapter. He has been the Rietz, Wald and Fisher lecturers and holds the Max H. Stein endowed chair as Professor of Humanities and Sciences at Stanford. Professional service includes Theory and Methods editor of JASA, and President of both the IMS and the ASA.

Wright to Speak on A Tale of Three Complexities:
The Worst of Times, the Best of Times, the Spring of Hope

Margaret H. Wright, New York University-Courant Institute, will deliver an AMS Invited Address on Saturday January 6, 2007 from 3:20 p.m. to 4:10 p.m. She will speak on A tale of three complexities: The Worst of Times, the Best of Times, the Spring of Hope. The lecture will be held in Grand Ballroom A, B, C, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Margaret H. Wright is Silver Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics and chair of the Computer Science Department in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University. She received her B.S. (Mathematics) and M.S. and Ph.D. (Computer Science) from Stanford University. Prior to joining NYU, she was a Distinguished Member of Technical Staff and Bell Labs Fellow at Bell Laboratories, Lucent Technologies, and before that she held a research position in the Department of Operations Research at Stanford. Her research interests include continuous optimization, linear algebra, scientific computing, and application of optimization to real-world applications.

Professor Wright was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1997, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2001, and the National Academy of Sciences in 2005. During 1995-1996 she served as president of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM).

She has chaired advisory committees for the Directorate of Mathematical and Physical Sciences at the National Science Foundation and for the Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research at the Department of Energy. She is currently a member of the scientific advisory committees for the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study and for ``Matheon'' (the German Research Center on Mathematics for Key Technologies). She serves on the Board of Governors for the Institute of Mathematics and Its Applications at the University of Minnesota, and previously served on the Scientific Advisory Committee and Board of Trustees of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, Berkeley. In 2003, she was a member of the International Review of Mathematics in the United Kingdom. She is an associate editor of the SIAM Journal on Optimization, the SIAM Journal on Scientific Computing, and Mathematical Programming.

Haxell to speak on Forming Committees

Penny Haxell, University of Waterloo, will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Friday January 5, 2007 from 2:15 p.m. to 3:05 p.m. She will speak on Forming Committees. The lecture will be held in Grand Ballroom A, B, C, Sheraton New Orleans Hotel.

Penny Haxell received her Ph.D. in pure mathematics from the University of Cambridge in 1993. In the same year, she joined the Department of Combinatorics and Optimization at the University of Waterloo, becoming a full professor in 2004. She spent one year as a visiting professor at Bell Laboratories in Murray Hill, NJ in 2002. Her research interests focus on extremal combinatorics and graph theory. From 1998 to 2005 she was a managing editor of the Journal of Combinatorial Theory, Series B, and now serves on the editorial board. In 2006 she received the Krieger-Nelson prize of the Canadian Mathematical Society.