Math Notes from:
Basics, A Newsletter of the Life and Physical Sciences
Ming Gu awarded 1998 Sloan Research Fellowship
Ming Gu, an associate professor in the Department of Mathematics, was awarded a 1998 Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. Gu has received a variety of awards for his work, including the Householder IX Award for the best dissertation in numerical linear algebra filed during the three-year period from 1993 to 1996. His research interests include numerical linear algebra, adaptive filtering, system and control theory, and optimization. Established in 1955, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation's fellowship program supports and honors young scientists and economists, during the early stages of their careers, who show " outstanding promise of making fundamental contributions to new knowledge."Sun-Yung Alice Chang awarded 1998 Guggenheim Fellowship
With a roster of seven distinguished fellows for 1998, the College of Letters and Science was well represented in the Guggenheim Fellowship competition. Second only to UC Berkeley, UCLA tied with Princeton in the number of fellowships awarded to a single campus.Each year, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation recognizes scholars, artists, and writers who have " demonstrated exceptional capacity for productive scholarship or exceptional creative ability in the arts. " One of the most prestigious honors accorded to scholars in the natural sciences, social sciences, humanities, and creative arts, the Guggenheim Fellowship is intended support research and artistic creation by providing fellows with "blocks of time in which they can work with as much creative freedom as possible."
- Professor of mathematics Sun-Yung Alice Chang was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work on a fourth-order differential operator called the Paneitz operator. A "geometric analyst," Chang uses partial differential equations to study problems in geometry. She is currently working on problems in four-dimensional spaces.
Millennium Meeting
American Mathematical Society's " Millennium " Meeting: In 1992, the International Mathematical Union declared the year 2000 to be World Mathematical Year (WMY 2000), and now the American Mathematical Society has scheduled a special "Millennium" meeting as part of its WMY 2000 celebrations. UCLA has been selected to host this historic and scientifically important conference, to be held August 7-12, 2000. Titled "Mathematical Challenges of the 21st Century," the meeting will bring together thirty invited speakers who will cover a broad spectrum of mathematics and its challenges. At the second International Congress of Mathematicians held in Paris in 1900, the German mathematician David Hilbert set forth twenty-three problems that have challenged mathematicians to the present day. "One hundred years after Hilbert declared his famous problems in the last turn-of-the-century meeting in Paris, UCLA will play host to a conference which will potentially shape world mathematical research in the next century," said Tony F. C. Chan, chair of the Department of Mathematics.Displayed with permission from the Editor of the Basics.