Faculty news

Lisa Fauci

In June 2004, Postdoc Nick Cogan and Lisa went to Washington, D.C., where they represented the American Mathematical Society at the Coalition for National Science Funding Exhibit on Capitol Hill. Since 1995, the Coalition for National Science Funding (CNSF) has sponsored an exhibition and reception each spring, showcasing research made possible by the National Science Foundation. Over 30 booths display a wide range of scientific research and education projects and university researchers and educators are on hand to describe their work to interested members of Congress and their staffs. This  event draws quite a number of Congressional staff, members of Congress, and White House leaders each year. Lisa and Nick’s exhibit described their research on mathematical models of swimming microorganims.

Lisa is a member of the Organizing Committee of the 2005 SIAM Annual Meeting, to be held in New Orleans, July 11-15.

Laszlo Fuchs

Laszlo (Evelyn and John G. Phillips Distinguished Chair in Mathematics) retires as of Fall 2004. Laszlo Fuchs has been a leading member of the department for almost 40 years, having emigrated from Hungary in the mid-sixties. He is probably known to everyone reading this. Laszlo has been a leading researcher in algebra, particularly in abelian groups where he literally wrote the book on the subject, a dedicated teacher at all levels and a wonderful colleague to all of us. He has been a remarkable role model to generations of young mathematicians at Tulane and elsewhere, maintaining his research program and activity over a career that started in the late forties (Ph.D. 1947, the last doctoral student of F. Riesz). We wish him and his family well. Laszlo has assured us that he will continue to be a presence in the department; he will just no longer teach.

On April 29, 2004, Laszlo’s longtime collaborator Luigi Salce gave a beautiful lecture on the contributions of Laszlo to many areas of Algebra via his 200 papers and five successful books. Some significant steps of his scientific activity were recalled from the personal point of view of a co-author.

Congratulations also are due to Laszlo and Shula on the birth of their first grandchild Ayla to Terry Fuchs Cohen & Zev Cohen, Monday, November 8, 2004, in New York City.

Luigi Salce Old friends (Laszlo Fuchs & Peter Lax)

Arnie Levine and Pat Brockett

Arnie retired several years ago, remains active in research and consulting. and lives in Columbia, S.C., where his wife Nina is a member of the English faculty at the University.

Pat Brockett (who taught at Tulane long ago) is Professor of Finance and Mathematics at the University of Texas.

Their joint paper Fraud Classifications Using Principal Component Analysis RIDITS, Journal of Risk & Insurance, September 2002, won an important prize. Every year the Casualty Actuarial Society selects one paper which they determine (using a screening by a distinguished panel of top research-oriented casualty actuaries) to be the best paper of the year on a topic of importance to actuaries. Last year the paper was selected for the prize among all publications in 2002! The paper was distributed to all members with a recommendation to read it and comment on it. There was a cash award.

Mike Mislove

In summer 2003 Mike taught a two week short course on Domain Theory at the University of Udine, Italy. He and Karl Hofmann were an invited participants in the Conference Honoring John Pym on his retirement from the University of Sheffield.

Mike helped organize

· the Workshop on Applications of Lattice Theory and Ordered Sets to Computer Science at DIMACS.

· and the Session on Computer Science and Topology at the 2003 Summer Topology Conference at Howard University in Washington, DC.

· The electronic series Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science (ENTCS) was founded by Mike in 1995. The series provides a venue for the rapid and wide dissemination of proceedings of conferences and workshops in theoretical computer science, as well as high quality PhD theses and lecture material. It is published by Elsevier Science as an electronic companion to its journals in the area: Information and Computation, Information Processing Letters, the Journal for Computing and Systems Sciences, and Theoretical Computer Science. ENTCS published its 100th volume in 2004, the same year it moved from it own, stand alone platform to ScienceDirect, Elsevier's main platform for electronic publications.

· The Mathematical Foundations of Programming Semantics conference series (MFPS) held its twentieth annual meeting in May 2004 on the campus of Carnegie- Mellon University. MFPS annually attracts upwards of 100 mathematicians and theoretical computer scientists. The kickoff to the 20th meeting featured a conversation among four leaders of the community: Cliff Jones (Newcastle), John McCarthy (Stanford), John Reynolds (CMU) and Dana Scott (CMU), moderated by Mike Mislove. MFPS also honored Mike for his service to the series; he has been one of the chief organizers of the annual meeting since 1987, when it first met on the Tulane campus. The series is identified with Tulane because of the many times the meetings have been held in New Orleans on the Tulane campus

Alex Wentzell

Alex participated in the international conference Kolmogorov and Contemporary Mathematics (Moscow, June 16 -- 21, 2003) in commemoration of the centennial of Andrei Nikolaevich Kolmogorov (25.IV.1903 -- 20.X.1987), giving the talk Asymptotic expansions in limit theorems for stochastic processes.

Jerry Goldstein

Jerry, now in the math department at the University of Memphis, was named Dunavant Professor in August 2004. His wife Gisele (see the Alumni news page) is also Professor there.

Jim Rogers

In June of 2004, Jim Rogers attended the AMS-IMS-SIAM Summer Research Conference, Complex Dynamics: 25 Years after the Appearance of the Mandelbrot Set, in Snowbird, Utah, where he presented the paper  "Julia Sets, Sierpinski Curves, and Indecomposable Continua."  He is very pleased that his beloved creatures, Indecomposable Continua, have found a place in Dynamical Systems.

Adjunct Professor Karl H. Hofmann (Professor of Mathematics Emeritus at Darmstadt University of Technology, visiting the Department each year in the spring and the fall for a month) was appointed Visiting Professor at the School of Information Technology and Mathematical Sciences of the University of Ballarat, Victoria, Australia, from September through December 2004. He collaborates with our old friend Professor Sidney A. Morris, Head of the School ITMS, on the project "Lie Theory and the Structure of Pro-Lie Groups and Locally Compact Groups" which is presented in a book manuscript of 600 pages that should be submitted for publication in the near future. Karl Hofmann has lectured various times on this project at Tulane in the Algebra and Topology Seminars. Sid has visited Tulane University several times since 1980.

Iliano Cervesato just arrived (January 2005). In his words: “I have recently arrived in the Department as a visiting faculty until November. I have been working on logical models of security protocols for the past few years, most recently at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, and before that at Stanford. This interest emerged from and continues prior work on linear logic and type theory. During my time at Tulane, I will be collaborating with Mike Mislove, his postdocs and his numerous visitors on a number of open issues in cryptographic protocol analysis. I am looking forward to meeting you all.”