2011 Personal News

• William B. Johnson
  Overseas Visiting Scholar, St John's College, Cambridge, Spring 2011.
  Visiting Fellow, Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences, Cambridge, Spring 2011.

• Professor Emeritus Carl Maxson has been selected to receive an honorary doctorate from the College of Natural Sciences at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria.

• Joe Pasciak is the recipient of the 2011 Association of Former Students university-level Distinguished Achievement Award for Research.

• Gilles Pisier has been elected as a Foreign Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy to honor is fundamental work in functional analysis, harmonic analysis, and probability.

• The following promotions were approved by the Chancellor and Board of Regents. Effective September 1:

  Distinguished Professor, Peter Kuchment
  Professor, Guergana Petrova
  Associate Professor, Lewis Bowen
  Associate Professor, Matthew Young
  Senior Lecturer, Benjamin Aurispa
  Senior Lecturer, Jill Zarestky
  

• Retired faculty are as followed:

  Robert Blakley
  Itshak Borosh
  Douglas Hensley
  Daniel Lewis
  Carl Pearcy
  Maurice Rahe
  

Grants/Contracts Awarded

• Andrew Comech (Co-PI), NSF DMS-1101551: "Waves and Spectra: Analysis/PDE Conference," $29K,
  January 2011.
  Institute for Mathematics and its Applications: "Waves and Spectra: Analysis/PDE Conference," supported via the program "Participating Institutions Conferences," $2K, January 2011.

• William Rundell (PI), NSF DMS-1100848: "Graduate Student and Postdoctoral support for workshop and AIP conference" April 2011 to July 2011, $34,500.

• Thomas Schlumprecht Visiting Fellowship, Peterhouse College, University of Cambridge, Spring Semester, 2011.
  Research Incentivisation Grant, London Mathematical Society, 640 Pounds (with Niels-Jacob Laustsen), Spring 2011.

Workshops and Conferences

• Waves and Spectra, TAMU, January 11-14, 2011 (Organizers: Andrew Comech, Conni Liaw and Alexei Poltoratski). The conference will bring together researches from complex analysis, harmonic analysis, spectral theory, and partial differential equations, and will address questions related to integrable systems, the Riemann-Hilbert problem, spectral and scattering problems for partial differential equations and related aspects of Ccmplex/harmonic analysis.

• Finite Element Rodeo, TAMU, February 25-26, 2011 (Organizer: Andrew Bonito). The finite element rodeo is an annual, informal conference on finite element methods that rotates between several universities in Texas and Louisiana.

• Applied Inverse Problems Conference May 23-27, 2011 (Organizer: William Rundell). The AIP Conferences aim to provide a primary international forum for researchers working on applied inverse problems - ranging through mathematical modeling, analytic theories and methods, as well as computational algorithms and data inversion techniques. They are held every two years and are meant to be the comprehensive meeting for those interested in mathematical aspects of the subject from an applications viewpoint. This meeting is also serving as the second Inverse Problems International Association (IPIA) conference.
  
  An estimate of the scientific scope and range of the conference can be infered from the IPIA web site and the scope of the journal Inverse Problems.
  
  Each conference presents invited talks by international experts as well as a sequence of minisymposia on topics of current interest and contributed papers. The venues are chosen to encourage strong interaction between the participants.

• Group Actions on Measure Spaces, TAMU, March 24-27, 2011 (Organizers: Lewis Bowen and David Kerr). The aim of this workshop is to promote interaction between researchers working from a variety of different viewpoints within the broad subject of group actions on measure spaces. Topics will include von Neumann algebras, measured equivalence relations, recurrence and nonconventional ergodic averages, ergodic theorems for actions of nonamenable groups, connections between ergodic theory and descriptive set theory, and entropy for actions of sofic groups.

• Workshop in Analysis and Probability Summer 2011
  
  The Summer 2011 Workshop in Analysis and Probability at Texas A&M University will be in session from July 5 until August 5.
  
  SUMIRFAS
  
  The Informal Regional Functional Analysis Seminar (SUMIRFAS) will be held July 29-July 31. All talks will be held in Blocker 165.
  
  Concentration Week on "Greedy Algorithms in Banach spaces and Compressed Sensing"
  
  Thomas Schlumprecht (co-chair), Edward Odell (co-chair), Steve Dilworth, Daniel Freeman and Denka Kutzarova are organizing a Concentration Week on "Greedy Algorithms in Banach spaces and Compressed Sensing" for the week of July 18-22.
  
  When encoding or reconstructing a vector using an iterative algorithm, a natural approach is to take the best or biggest approximation at each iteration. Such techniques are referred to as greedy algorithms. The theory of compressed sensing is concerned with encoding and reconstructing vectors which are sparsely represented with respect to a given basis. Kevin Ford will present a series of talks on deterministic construction of matrices with the restrictive isometry property. There will be a second series of talks devoted to greedy algorithms and bases. Click here to see the home page for this Concentration Week: Greedy Algorithms in Banach spaces and Compressed Sensing.
  
  Concentration Week on "Non-Linear Geometry of Banach Spaces, Geometric Group Theory, and Differentiability"
  
  Florent Baudier (chair), Bill Johnson , Piotr Nowak and Bunyamin Sari are organizing a Concentration Week on "Non-Linear Geometry of Banach Spaces, Geometric Group Theory, and Differentiability" for the week of August 1-5.
  
  The program will include an introductory course by Mark Sapir on coarse embeddings and their applications to geometric group theory, and a series of lectures by Gilles Godefroy on the recent work of the late Nigel Kalton on the coarse classification of Banach spaces. Click here to see the home page for this Concentration Week: Non-Linear Geometry of Banach Spaces, Geometric Group Theory, and Differentiability

Fall 2011 Recipients, Department of Mathematics Awards

• Outstanding Staff

  Steve Johnson

  Kelly Minnis

• Outstanding Service

  Gregory Berkolaiko

  Stephen Fulling

• Outstanding Teaching

  Michael Anshelevich

  Kathryn Bollinger