CONFERENCE IN HONOR OF REGENTS’ PROFESSOR
EMERITUS LAWRENCE MARKUS

The Conference was held October 31 - November 1, 2002 at the School of Mathematics to celebrate Professor Markus’ 80th birthday and to recognize his achievements in mathematics and service to the University of Minnesota and to the University of Warwick, England.Professor Norrie Everitt (Birmingham, England) showed a video of Professor Christopher Zeeman, F.R.S., paying tribute to Larry Markus. He also delivered the Thursday Colloquium Lecture on “The Markus Harmonic Operator”. In his talk “Working with Larry” Professor Walter Littman (University of Minnesota) reminisced on his long association with the honoree. Other speakers were Professors: Bruce Lee (University of Minnesota), “ Stability degradation of dynamical systems by bounded disturbances”; John Mallet-Paret (Brown University), “Eigenfunctions of Max-Plus Operators, and State-Dependent Delay Equations”; Kenneth Meyer (University of Cincinnati), “Seeking Solenoids”;and George Sell (University of Minnesota), “Variations on a Lecture of Markus”. Organizing Committee consisted of Norrie Everitt, James Serrin (Co-chairs) and Walter Littman.

Dinner was at the Bistro West of the Humphrey Center. Walter Littman, who officiated as master of ceremonies, read a message from Professor Naresh Jain who was out of town. Kenneth Meyer entertained the gathering with some very funny reminiscences about Larry. However this was topped by Larry’s even funnier “rebuttal”.

Walter Littman, Professor of Mathematics

Conference on Current Trends in Mathematics and its Applications, in Honor of Regents’ Professor Avner Friedman’s 70th Birthday, November 8 - 10, 2002

The Conference was sponsored by the School of Mathematics and by the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications which Professor Friedman directed from 1986 to 1997. He subsequently founded, and directed, our highly successful Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics. Since September 2002 he has been serving as director of the Mathematical Biology Center at Ohio State University, Columbus. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has earned many other major honors. Speakers and titles of their talks: Richard Brualdi (University of Wisconsin), “Matrices in combinatorics with applications”; Mort Gurtin (Carnegie Mellon), “A nonequilibrium theory of epitaxial growth that accounts for surface stress and surface diffusion”; K.H. Hoffman (Caesar, Bonn), “Mathematical modeling of an aptamer based biosensor”; Richard James (University of Minnesota), “Reversibility of phase transformations and the search for new hybrid materials”; David Kinderlehrer (Carnegie Mellon), “Diffusion mediated transport and the brownian motor”; Nancy Kopell (Boston University), “Rhythms of the nervous system: Mathematical themes and variations”; Hiroshi Matano (University of Tokyo),“Blow-up in some supercritical nonlinear heat equations”; Gary McDonald (General Motors), “Looking backwards to the future for applied mathematical sciences”; William Newman (UCLA), “Earthquakes as a nonlinear dynamical process”; George Papanicolaou (Stanford), “Scaling limits for the random Schroedinger equation and applications to imaging”; William Pulleyblank (IBM), “Proteins, petaflops and algorithms”; and Michael Steele (University of Pennsylvania), “Minimal spanning trees and the objective method”.

At the dinner event, Professor Fernando Reitich who chaired the organizing committee read the following message from the department Head Professor Naresh Jain who was unable to attend.

Dear Avner,
On behalf of the School of Mathematics, I would like to express our deep admiration for your accomplishments as Director of the IMA and member of the School of Mathematics. Even though Hans Weinberger, as the founding director, laid a solid foundation for the Institute, you greatly expanded its focus and turned it into a world-class center for mathematics and its applications. The success of the outreach program to industry led to the establishment of the Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics, known as the MCIM, through your initiative. As part of the School of Mathematics, this center currently guides 20-25 students in our industrial mathematics program. The most important component of this program is an industrial internship for Ph.D. and Master’s students which gives them firsthand experience of real-world problems. This was accompanied by some very interesting course development at the graduate and the undergraduate levels and often you played a key role in such developments.

As IMA Director, and later as a Regents’ Professor in the School, you mentored a large number of Ph.D. students and postdocs and were instrumental in the hiring of several excellent faculty members in analysis and applied mathematics. I, together with my colleagues, have always marveled at the amount of energy that you possessed to bring so many great ideas to a successful conclusion.

You always liked new challenges and embarked on the creation of the math-biology center at Ohio State. You have our best wishes for the success of this new venture, and we know you will succeed. We also know that you will never lose interest in the IMA; it is forever a part of you. You should be very pleased that your successor, Willard Miller and Associate Director Fadil Santosa carried forward your programs, with innovations of their own, very successfully. You can also be sure that the current Director, Doug Arnold, with support from Fadil Santosa and Scot Adams, is providing the leadership to the Institute that it deserves. A great tradition of excellence was established and the new generation of leaders will not only continue that, but will also strive to achieve greater heights.

Avner, thank you for your great contributions to both the IMA and the School of Mathematics. Kusum and I wish you and Lynn a very happy 70th birthday.

Members of the Organizing Committee were Professors N. Krylov, W. Littman, F. Reitich (chair), and F. Santosa.