RETIREMENTS

Monika Stumpf joined the School in 1987 as Executive Secretary to the department head. She gave the School fifteen years of outstanding service and was recently promoted to Executive Assistant. The faculty, staff and a very large number of visitors over the years held her in very high regard. The faculty honored her at the annual department retreat last fall on the occasion of her retirement. Her contributions to the department will be cherished by all of us for a very long time and we wish her well in her future pursuits.

OBITUARY

Associate Professor Emeritus Laurence R. Harper passed away July 9, 2002 at the age of 73. He lived in Minneapolis. Professor Harper earned his Ph.D. in algebra from the University of Chicago in 1959 and joined our faculty as an Assistant Professor that same year. He was promoted to Associate Professor in 1984. He was a distinguished teacher and a gracious and supportive colleague. He retired in 2000. Larry had a quiet, friendly personality, always greeting colleagues and students with a smile. We will miss him. He is survived by his wife Kathryn, four children and eleven grandchildren. The Laurence R. Harper, Jr. Scholarship Fund has been established at Paine College in Augusta, GA.

RIVIÈRE-FABES SYMPOSIUM

The Rivière-Fabes Symposium on Analysis and Partial Differential Equations is held annually at the School of Mathematics to honor the memory of two distinguished former colleagues Nestor M. Rivière and Eugene B. Fabes.

The Fifth Rivière-Fabes Symposium on Analysis and PDE was held from April 5th to the 7th, 2002. Professors David Jerison (MIT), Wilhelm Schlag (Caltech), and Michael Lacey (Georgia Institute of Technology) each gave two lectures:“Carleman inequalities and the absence of embedded eigenvalues”, and “Global energy minimizers for free boundary problems and full regularity in three dimensions” (Jerison); “Energy growth for Schroedinger equations with Markovian forcing”, and “Dispersive estimates for solutions of Schroedinger equations with slowly decaying and time-dependent potentials” (Schlag); and “Carleson’s theorem with quadratic phase”, and “Product BMO and second order commutators” (Lacey). The other main speakers were: Professors Tatiana Toro (University of Washington), “Free boundary regularity below the continuous threshold”; and Nets Katz (Washington University, St. Louis), “Stickiness in the 3-dimensional Kakeya problem”.

The conference dinner was held on Saturday, April 6th at the Bistro West of the Humphrey Center. The evening gave the participants a chance to discuss some of the mathematics presented during the program, as well as recall the unique qualities that made Eugene Fabes and Nestor Rivière such an important part of our department. It was especially nice to have members of both the Rivière and Fabes families at the dinner that evening.

The Sixth Rivière-Fabes Symposium on Analysis and PDE will take place April 25th - 27th, 2003. Speakers will be Professors M. Christ (University of California, Berkeley), R. Coifman (Yale University), A. Iosevich (University of Missouri-Columbia), I. Laba (University of British Columbia), G. Mockenhaupt (Georgia Institute of Technology), and C. Muscalu (University of California, Los Angeles).

Organizers: Fernando Reitich (Chair), Carme Calderer, Markus Keel, and Walter Littman of the University of Minnesota and Carlos Kenig (University of Chicago)

For further information see the Symposium’s web page at http://www.math.umn.edu/arb/rf/

YAMABE MEMORIAL SYMPOSIUM

The First Yamabe Memorial Symposium was held at the School of Mathematics,
University of Minnesota, Friday-Sunday, September 20-22, 2002.

The Symposium was an enormous success. There were 72 participants, including 51 out-of-town participants and 21 from the University of Minnesota. The speakers were Professors: Hubert Bray (MIT), “Inverse Mean Curvature Flow and the Yamabe Invariant of RP^3”; Ben Chow (UC at San Diego), “A result on Hamilton’s Ricci Flow”; Richard Hamilton (Columbia University), “Perturbing Precise Harnack Estimates”; Peter Li (UC at Irvine), “Minimal hypersurfaces in a nonnegatively curved manifold”; Fang Hua Lin (Courant Institute, NYU), “Faddeev knots as stable solitons: Existence theorems”; Richard Schoen (Stanford University),“An update on the Yamabe variational approach to the construction and characterization of three dimensional constant curvature metrics”; Gang Tian (MIT), “Lefschetz fibrations and symplectic isotopy”; and Brian White (Stanford University), “Singularities in mean curvature flow”.

Yamabe Memorial Symposium, in honor of the distinguished mathematician Hidehiko Yamabe (1923-1960), replaces, and continues in expanded form, the Yamabe Memorial Lecture which has been held annually since 1989, in alternating years, at the University of Minnesota and at Northwestern University. Lectures in this series have been given by Professors Neil Trudinger, Eugenio Calabi, Rick Schoen, Shizuo Kakutani, Craig Evans, Walter Rudin, Robert Hardt, Katsumi Nomizu, Fred Gehring, Richard Hamilton, Peter Sarnak, Jeff Cheeger and S.-T. Yau. The Yamabe Memorial Symposium is an enhancement of this tradition. Mathematicians will gather every two years at the University of Minnesota for a long weekend to hear talks in an area related to geometry, to discuss the latest research and to interact with younger mathematicians. Professor Hidehiko Yamabe (1923-1960) was an active and highly collaborative mathematician in the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota from 1954 until 1960, the year of his untimely death. His work on topological groups, geometry and analysis were outstanding contributions to modern mathematics. The 2002 symposium organizers were Conan Leung, Jiaping Wang and Robert Gulliver. For additional information, including audio recordings of the lectures, lecture notes and the participant list with email addresses, see http://www.math.umn.edu/~gulliver/confs/yamabe.htm

Robert Gulliver, Professor and Chair of the Yamabe Symposium Committee