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Program

Eisenbud to Deliver Retiring Presidential Address

The AMS Retiring Presidential Address will be delivered by David Eisenbud, Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, on Friday, January 13, 2006 from 3:20 p.m. to 4:10 p.m. He will speak on Threads from My Life: Linear (good) Resolutions and Small (seductive) Varieties. The lecture will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

David Eisenbud received his PhD in 1970 at the University of Chicago under Saunders Mac Lane and Chris Robson. He was on the faculty at Brandeis University unitl he took his current position at Berkeley in 1997. He has been a visiting professor at Harvard, in Bonn and in Paris. Eisenbud's mathematical interests have ranged over commutative and non-commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, topology, and computer methods.

Eisenbud has been Director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute since 1997. He served as President of the AMS in 2003 and 2004. He is a Director of Math for America, a foundation devoted to improving mathematics teaching. He has been a member of the Board of Mathematical Sciences and their Applications of the National Research Council, and a member of the US National Committee of the International Mathematical Union.

Eisenbud currently serves on the editorial boards of the Annals of Mathematics, the Bulletin du Societe Mathematique de France, and Springer-Verlag's book series Algorithms and Computation in Mathematics.

Eisenbud's interests outside of mathematics include juggling (he is co-author of a paper on the mathematics thereof), photography and, above all, music. He currently spends most of his musical time singing Bach, Schubert, Schumann and Brahms.

Devlin to Speak on The Mathematics of Everyday Language

Keith J. Devlin, Center for the Study of Language and Information, Stanford University, will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Friday, January 13, 2006 from 10:05 a.m. to 10:55 a.m.. He will speak on The mathematics of everyday language. The lecture will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

Dr. Keith Devlin is Executive Director of Stanford University's Center for the Study of Language and Information, a co-founder of Stanford's Media X program, and a Consulting Professor of Mathematics at Stanford. He is the author of twenty-five books, one interactive book on CD-ROM and over seventy published research articles. He is Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, a World Economic Forum Fellow, and a former member of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board. He is a regular contributor to NPR's popular magazine program Weekend Edition (where he is known as "the Math Guy") and a frequent contributor to various other local and national radio programs, commenting on advances in mathematics and computing. He writes a monthly column, "Devlin's Angle," on the web journal MAA Online.

His most recent books are The Math Instinct: Why You're a Mathematical Genius (along with Lobsters, Birds, Cats, and Dogs), Thunder's Mouth Press (2005) and The Millennium Problems: The Seven Greatest Unsolved Mathematical Puzzles of Our Time, Basic Books (2002).

Lenstra to Deliver Colloquium Lectures

The AMS Colloquium Lectures will be delivered by Hendrik W. Lenstra Jr., Universiteit Leiden, on Thursday, January 12, 2006 – Saturday, January 14, 2006 from 1:00 p.m. to 2:00 p.m. He will speak on Entangled radicals. The lectures will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

Hendrik W. Lenstra Jr received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the Universiteit van Amsterdam in 1977. He was a full professor at Amsterdam from 1978 until 1986, at Berkeley from 1987 until 2003, and since 1998 at the Universiteit Leiden in the Netherlands.

Lenstra is active in number theory and algebra. He is best known for introducing advanced techniques in the area of number-theoretic algorithms. These have important applications in the areas of cryptography and computer security. Lenstra has been a member of the Royal Dutch Academy of Science since 1984, and a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences since 1996. He is a recipient of the Fulkerson Prize of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming Society (1985). During the academic year 1990/1991, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and in 2000/2001 he held the Hewlett-Packard Visiting Research Professorship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley. In 1998 he won the Spinoza Award, which constitutes the highest scientific honor in the Netherlands.

Fisher to Speak on Mathematicians and Education Reform: A Cautionary Tale

Naomi Fisher, University of Illinois at Chicago, will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Sunday, January 15, 2006 from 9:00 a.m. to 9:50 a.m. She will speak on Mathematicians and education reform: A cautionary tale. The lecture will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

Naomi Fisher earned her B.A. in Mathematics from Connecticut College for Women (now Connecticut College), her M.A. in Mathematics from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and her Ph.D. in Mathematics Education from Northwestern University. She is the Director of the Mathematicians and Education Reform (MER) Forum, the Coordinator of the Chicago Symposium Series on Excellence in Teaching Mathematics and Science: Research and Practice, and Adjunct Professor of Mathematics at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

Fisher's work in the mathematics community has focused on how mathematicians may effectively contribute to the educational enterprise at all levels, K-12, undergraduate, and graduate, and how mathematics departments may strengthen their undergraduate programs. Her work in helping to build inter-disciplinary forums include programs for mathematicians and mathematics educators, and programs for scientists, mathematicians, and educators. Fisher's teaching has focused on teaching K-12 teachers, especially in helping teachers to increase the role of geometry in the school curriculum. As a founding member of the Park City Mathematics Institute (formerly the Regional Geometry Institute), she was the Director of the High School Teaching Program. She teaches in the SESAME program for middle grade teachers at the University of Chicago. As part of the Chicago Public Schools Algebra Initiative, she teaches K-8 teachers to prepare to teach a rigorous Algebra course for 8th grade students in Chicago. Fisher is the Co-Editor of the MER Newsletter and has edited several volumes of the CBMS Series on Issues in Mathematics Education. She was the 1993 recipient of AWM's Louise Hay Award for Contributions to Mathematics Education.

Savageau to Deliver Gibbs Lecture

Michael Savageau, University of California Davis, will deliver the AMS Josiah Willard Gibbs Lecture on Thursday, January 12, 2006 from 8:30 p.m. to 9:30 p.m. He will speak on Function, Design and Evolution of Gene Circuitry. The lecture will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

Michael Savageau received a B.S. degree from the University of Minnesota in 1962, a Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1967 working in the interdisciplinary area of cell physiology and systems science, and, after postdoctoral work at UCLA and Stanford, joined the University of Michigan faculty in 1970. He was Chair of the Department of Microbiology and Immunology from 1992-2002. He initiated the interdisciplinary training program in Cellular Biotechnology in 1989 and Michigan's interdisciplinary Bioinformatics Program in 1998. He was named the Nicolas Rashevsky Distinguished University Professor in 2002. In 2003 he moved to the University of California, Davis, in the Department of Biomedical Engineering and in the Microbiology Graduate Group. He is currently Distinguished Professor and Chair of Biomedical Engineering. He has been a visiting professor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Biophysikalische Chemie, Göttingen, Germany (1976-77), The John Curtin School of Medical Research, The Australian National University, Canberra, Australia (1983-84), the University of Arizona (1993-94), and the Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques, Bures-sur-Yvette, France (2002-03). His honors include Guggenheim Fellow, Fulbright Senior Research Fellow, Michigan Society of Fellows, Foundation for Microbiology Lecturer, American Association for the Advancement of Science Fellow, the University of Michigan Harold R. Johnson Diversity Service Award, Moore Distinguished Scholar at the California Institute of Technology, and Institute of Medicine of the National Academies of Science. He served as Editor-in-Chief of Mathematical Biosciences from 1995 to 2005. He also has served on several editorial boards, on the board of directors of the Society for Mathematical Biology and the International Federation of Nonlinear Analysts, and on National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, Howard Hughes Medical Institute, and the National Academies of Science advisory panels. His research is focused on mathematical methods for the comparative analysis of function, design and evolution of gene circuitry. He has published two books and more than 140 scientific articles and has lectured extensively in the US and abroad.

Su to Speak on Preference Sets, Graphs, and Voting in Agreeable Societies

Francis Edward Su, Harvey Mudd College, will deliver an MAA Invited Address on Thursday, January 12, 2006 from 2:15 p.m. to 3:05 p.m. He will speak on Preference sets, graphs, and voting in agreeable societies. The lecture will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

Francis Edward Su earned his B.S. in Mathematics from the University of Texas at Austin and his Ph.D. from Harvard. He is an associate professor at Harvey Mudd College, and has held visiting positions at Cornell and MSRI. His recent research focuses on problems in topological and geometric combinatorics, especially those that have applications to the social sciences, and he has co-authored many papers with undergraduates. He has a passion for teaching and popularizing mathematics. In 2001 he received the Merten M. Hasse Prize from the MAA for expository writing, and in 2004 he received the MAA's Henry L. Alder Award for distinguished teaching. Su serves on the Editorial Board of Math Horizons, and in his spare time he enjoys working on his "Math Fun Facts" website. His other hobbies include songwriting, theology, and outdoor activities.

Jitomirskaya to Speak on Spectral Properties of Quasiperiodic Operators

Svetlana Jitomirskaya, University of California Irvine, will deliver an AMS-MAA Joint Invited Address on Saturday, January 14, 2006 from 11:10 a.m. to 12:00 p.m. She will speak on Spectral properties of quasiperiodic operators: the competition between order and chaos. The lecture will be held in Ballroom C (third level), Convention Center.

Svetlana Jitomirskaya received her BS/MS (1987) and PhD (1991) from the Moscow State University. She is now a full professor at UC Irvine, where she has worked since 1991, starting as a part-time lecturer. While already a permanent faculty at UCI she had held a nine month visiting position at Caltech and a three month position at MSRI. Her research
interests focus on mathematical problems arising in solid state physics, particularly the spectral theory of Schrodinger operators.

She received the Sloan fellowship in 1996, UCI Distinguished mid-career award for research in 2004 and AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter prize in 2005. She was a speaker at ICM 2002 and will deliver a plenary address at ICMP 2006.

112th Annual Meeting of the
American Mathematical Society (AMS)

We are pleased to acknowledge the following sponsors of this meeting:

Addison-Wesley
Hawkes Learning Systems
MacKichan Software
W. H. Freeman & Company

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