Math Newsletter - Vol. 3, No. 1

CONTENTS

Math Department Newsletter
Vol. 3 No. 1
November 2001

New faculty

Welcome to Elizabeth Wood

Record Student Enrollments

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This is a periodic newsletter of doings in the Caltech Math Department. Feedback of any kind is welcome and encouraged. Feel free to pass this on to any friends who don't have the good sense to be Math majors.

Barry Simon
Your friendly Executive Officer

NEW FACULTY

Wilhelm Schlag joined the faculty this quarter as an Associate Professor but because of a previous commitment, he is spending this quarter at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He will be in residence starting January 1. Schlag is an analyst with broad interests in harmonic analysis and its applications.

Danny Calegari will start an appointment as an Assistant Professor this summer. He is currently a postdoc at Harvard. He works in 3-dimensional topology.

For this year, we have a Visiting Professor, Sa'ar Hersonsky, who is a hyperbolic geometer from Ben Gurion University in Beer'sheva, Israel. In the Spring, Laurent Clozel an expert in Automorphic Forms will be a visiting professor.

This year, we appointed our first Scott Russell Johnson Senior Research Fellow, a position made possible by a gift from Steve and Rosemary Johnson. The fellow is Ken Bromberg, a topologist who will be here for two years and then leave to be a faculty member at the University of Utah.

We have one new Taussky-Todd fellow this year. David Pollack is an algebraic number theorist who will be here for only a year before going to a faculty position at Wesleyan. We have four new Bateman Instructors this year: John Clemens in Logic, Serguei Denissov in Mathematical Physics, Xun Dong in Combinatorics, and Anatolii Grinshpan in Analysis. Edray Goins, a number theorist, is here as an Irvine Fellow; and David Damanik, a mathematical physicist, as a Fairchild Postdoctoral Scholar.

WELCOME TO ELIZABETH WOOD

A key staff member is our departmental administrator who not only runs the Math Office but also arranges departmental functions, oversees the budget and our visitors program. After the resignation of our former administrator, we did without a captain of the ship for several months while we searched for a suitable replacement. We are fortunate in having found Elizabeth Wood. Liz likes interacting with students so drop in and say hello.

RECORD STUDENT ENROLLMENTS

Both undergraduate and graduate enrollments in mathematics are at 20+ year highs. We've tended to average 8-12 majors a year but currently have 15 sophomores, 16 juniors and 14 seniors. We have 36 graduate students, up from the 26-29 typical of the past few years.

NAMED LECTURESHIPS

The Prize and Lecture Committee has settled on the lineup of named lecturers for this year. The Wolff family set up the Wolff Lectureship in honor of Tom Wolff who was killed tragically in the summer of 2000. The first Wolff lecturer will be Charles Fefferman of Princeton. The work of both Wolff and Fefferman is described at http://math.caltech.edu/events/01wolff.html.

On January 22, 2002, Persi Diaconis of Stanford will give a talk entitled The Mathematics of Perfect Shuffles. Diaconis is not only a world-class mathematician, he is a world-class magician, and we'll no doubt see some pretty fancy shuffles. To read more about Diaconis, see http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/report/news/february28/aaasdiaconis-228.html. Sometimes in the past, the DePrima Lecture, which is intended to be accessible to undergraduates, hasn't been, but I'm sure this year it will be and it will be a lot of fun.

On March 12, Yasha Sinai of Princeton will give the Alaoglu Lecture.

PUTNAM EXAM

A review session for the Putnam Exam will be held on Friday, November 30 at 4:00 in 159 Sloan. The Putnam Exam will be on Saturday, December 1. Students should meet at the lobby of Baxter at 7:45 a.m.