1999 Personal News

• Richard E. Ewing has been named to the editorial board of Optimization and Engineering.

• Paulo Lima-Filho is on leave at Stanford University during the spring 1999 semester.

• James H. Bramble has been named a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents.

• Marshall A. Whittlesey will be a Warschawski Assistant Professor at the University of California at San Diego starting fall 1999.

• At its meeting on March 26, 1999, the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents approved promotions to Professor for Huai-Dong Cao, Thomas B. Schlumprecht, and Jianxin Zhou, effective September 1, 1999.

• Ronald G. Douglas is 1999-2000 chair of the Mathematics Section of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

• Ronald G. Douglas has been named a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Texas A&M University effective September 1, 1999.

• Professor Norman Naugle, who taught in the Department of Mathematics from 1955 until his retirement in 1997, died Thursday, July 1, 1999, aged 68. A career Aggie, he received his B.S., M.S. (1959), and Ph.D. (1965) in physics from Texas A&M University. From 1965-1968, he consulted for NASA and played a key role in the selection of lunar landing sites for Apollo space missions. Dr. Naugle had a significant impact on the spread of Donald Knuth's program TeX, the international standard package for mathematical typesetting, both through implementing TeX widely on the Texas A&M University campus and through his protégé Tomas Rokicki, author of dvips. Dr. Naugle consulted for numerous departments across campus and helped develop many of the applied and computational mathematics courses within the Department of Mathematics.

• William Perry was named a distinguished alumnus of Park College in Parkville, Missouri in summer 1999.

• Grants awarded by the National Science Foundation:

• Goong Chen and Jianxin Zhou, "A Conference on Advances in Control of Nonlinear Distributed Parameter Systems", NSF grant number DMS-9815632, $9,000, August 15, 1999 to January 31, 2000.

• Jon McCammond, "Geometric Group Theory", NSF grant number DMS-9971682, $60,981, July 15, 1999 to June 30, 2002.

• George Androulakis, "Isomorphic Theory of Banach Spaces", NSF grant number DMS-9970547, $56,709, June 15, 1999 to May 31, 2002.

• Edward S. Letzter, "Noncommutative Algebras", NSF grant number DMS-9970413, $74,812, June 1, 1999 to May 31, 2002.

• William B. Johnson and Gilles Pisier, "Geometry of Banach Spaces and Operator Spaces", NSF grant number DMS-9970350, $247,000, June 15, 1999 to May 31, 2002.

• Alexei G. Poltoratski, "Asymptotic Behavior of Cauchy-Stieltjes Type Integrals of Singular Measures", NSF grant number DMS-9970151, $78,480, August 1, 1999 to July 31, 2002.

• James H. Bramble, Joseph E. Pasciak, and Raytcho Lazarov, "Construction of Accurate, Robust and Efficient Numerical Techniques for Partial Differential Equations", NSF grant number DMS-9973328, $289,842, August 1, 1999 to July 31, 2002.

• William Rundell, "Various Inverse Problems in Partial Differential Equations and Methods for their Solutions", NSF grant number DMS-9971674, $77,100, August 1, 1999 to July 31, 2002.

• Joseph D. Ward, "Approximations of Functions from Scattered Data: Theory and Applications", NSF grant number DMS-9971276, $87,179, July 1, 1999 to June 30, 2002.

• Huai-Dong Cao is a Visiting Professor at MIT during the fall 1999 semester.

• Stephen A. Fulling has a Faculty Development Leave for the fall 1999 semester.

• Richard E. Ewing was honored on Thursday, September 2, 1999 at a reception in the Memorial Student Center Forsyth Center Galleries recognizing his appointment as the inaugural holder of the Richard H. Harrison, III / External Advisory & Development Council Endowed Dean's Chair in Science and the Mobil Technology Company Endowed Chair in Computational Science.

• At the College of Science faculty meeting on September 23, 1999, Bruce D. Lowe received the Association of Former Students Distinguished Achievement Award in Teaching, and G. Donald Allen and Arthur Hobbs were recognized as College of Science Mentors.

• Tamás Erdélyi has been appointed an editor of the two journals Journal of Approximation Theory and Mathematical Inequalities and Applications.

• Jon T. Pitts was elected the representative at-large for the College of Science Faculty Advisory Council, October 1999.

• Rita Stout, a lecturer in the department for over ten years until her retirement in 1994, died suddenly of a brain aneurysm on October 12, 1999, while traveling in Germany with her husband Bill. She taught business mathematics and mathematics for elementary education majors, and for two and one-half years she taught at the branch campus in Koriyama, Japan.

Fall 1999 Recipients, Department of Mathematics Awards

• Outstanding Service

  Marcia Drost

  Jane Schielack

  Ellen Toby

• Outstanding Teaching

  Lynnette Cardenas

  Rekha R. Thomas

  Philip B. Yasskin

• The award citations are available.