1997 Personal News

• Bill Johnson's paper ``Banach spaces determined by their uniform structures'' (joint with J. Lindenstrauss and G. Schechtman) received a Featured Review in Mathematical Reviews 97b:46016.

• David R. Larson has been appointed to the editorial board of the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.

• David C. Dobson has been awarded a 1997 Sloan Foundation Research Fellowship.

• Elton Lacey's son Michael has been awarded the 1996 Salem Prize, jointly with Christoph Thiele, for work on Calderón's bilinear Hilbert transform and the development of a new method of phase space analysis. The prize, established in 1968, is given each year to a young mathematician who is judged to have done outstanding work in the area in which Raphaël Salem worked, primarily Fourier series and related topics.

• Gilles Pisier's paper ``A polynomially bounded operator on Hilbert space which is not similar to a contraction'' received a Featured Review in Mathematical Reviews 97f:47002.

• Grants awarded by the National Science Foundation:

• Junping Wang, Richard E. Ewing, and William Rundell, ``New mathematics and innovative numerical methods for the valuation of options,'' NSF grant number DMS-9706985, $75,000, August 1, 1997 to July 31, 2000.

• Thomas Schlumprecht, ``Structure theory of infinite dimensional Banach spaces and a Gaussian correlation problem,'' NSF grant number DMS-9706828, $64,057, August 1, 1997 to July 31, 2000.

• Goong Chen and Jianxin Zhou, ``Analysis, control, dynamics and visualization of distributed parameter systems containing nonlinearities,'' NSF grant number 9610076, $91,000, August 1, 1997 to July 31, 1999.

• David R. Larson, ``Operator algebras, operator theory and applications,'' NSF grant number DMS-9706810, $153,000, July 1, 1997 to June 30, 2000.

• N. Sivakumar, ``On some problems in radial-basis functions,'' NSF grant number DMS-9706583, $59,414, July 15, 1997 to June 30, 2000.

• Jon T. Pitts, ``Texas Geometry and Topology Conference,'' NSF grant number DMS-9704755, $30,000, July 1, 1997 to June 30, 2000.

• Gilles Pisier is the 1997 winner (joint with Yuri Nesterenko) of the Ostrowski Prize. Previous recipients are Louis de Branges (1989), Jean Bourgain (1991), Miklós Laczkovich and Marina Ratner (1993), and Andrew Wiles (1995).

  An announcement of the award from the AMS Notices is available.

• Joining the department in fall 1997 are tenure-track Assistant Professor Laura Anderson and visitors Brian DeFacio, Jon McCammond, Anthony Giaquinto, Corran Webster, Marshall Whittlesey, Quan Zheng, and Jian Zhou.

• Tamás Erdélyi was promoted to Associate Professor with tenure effective September 1, 1997.

• N. Sivakumar, whose promotion to Associate Professor with tenure became effective September 1, 1997, received the Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching at the College of Science faculty and staff meeting on September 19, 1997.

• Fall 1997 recipients of Department of Mathematics awards for

• outstanding service
  • Art Belmonte
  • William B. Johnson
  • Emil J. Straube
• outstanding teaching
  • Amy Austin
  • David L. Barrow
  • Jon T. Pitts

• The award citations are available.

• Grants awarded by the Texas Higher Education Coordinating Board ARP/ATP program:

• Prabir Daripa, ``Advanced Scientific Computation of Non-Linear Problems with Applications,'' $107,087.

• William B. Johnson and Gilles Pisier, ``New Directions in Geometry of Banach Spaces,'' $81,700.

• Richard E. Ewing and Joseph Pasciak, ``Numerical Modeling of Subsurface Flows in Porous Media,'' $169,933.