Department

Department News, Spring 2006

Faculty and Student Awards

David Lutzer won the Virginia Outstanding Faculty Award

Professsor David Lutzer is one of the recipients of the 2006 Virginia Outstanding Faculty Awards.
The awards are administered by the State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV).
The Virginia General Assembly and governor created the awards in 1986. Since the first
presentation in 1987, 232 faculty members in Virginia’s colleges and universities have been
honored. This year, 15 faculty members from across the state were selected from a competitive
pool of nearly 90 candidates who were nominated by their peers at Virginia’s colleges.
Statewide, there are roughly 11,000 full-time faculty members. Winners of the award must
demonstrate a record of “superior accomplishments in teaching, research and public service.”
The recipients were honored Thursday evening during a ceremony with Gov. Timothy M Kaine.

Professor Lutzer is the 3rd winner of this award from the Department of Mathematics. In 2001,
Professor Charles Johnson was one of eleven statewide winners, and in 2004, Professor
Chi-Kwong Li was one of eleven statewide winners. The Virginia Outstanding Faculty
Award is the highest honor that the Commomwealth can bestow on a faculty member. Since
the beginning of the program in 1987, only nine mathematicians statewide have been chosen
for VOFA, and twenty nine faculty members from William and Mary have won the Outstanding
Faculty Award.

Pictures from the award ceremony: (left) Professor Lutzer with Chair Chi-Kwong Li and Associate Chair George Rublein of the Department of Mathematics;
(middle) Governor Timothy M. Kaine presents the award to Professor Lutzer, to the right is Dr. Mimi M. Elroda, SCHEV council member;
(right) Three recipients from William and Mary: Melvin Patrick Ely, Newton Family Professor of History;
David Lutzer, Chancellor Professor of Mathematics; and Margaret Saha, Class of 2008 Professor of Biology

Virginia Outstanding Faculty Awards State Council of Higher Education for Virginia (SCHEV)

Feb 24, 2006 William and Mary News article News article in student newspaper Flat Hat

Senior mathematics major Smith gets the Thomas Jefferson Prize in Natural Philosophy

Paul A. Smith, a senior mathematics major from Blacksburg, Va., is the recipient of the
College’s 2006 Thomas Jefferson Prize in Natural Philosophy.

Paul A. Smith also reiceived a Goldwater Fellowship in 2004 for the years 2004-2006;
he was awarded a Chappell Fellowship in 2003 to support research with Charles R. Johnson

W&M News article

Faculty News

Professor Vladimir Bolotnikov, one of recipients of a 2005 Alumni Association Fellowship (see Newsletter 2005 Fall), was featured in the William and Mary Alumni Magazine, Winter 2005/2006 issue. (A Good Cuppa Joe-----The 2005 Alumni Association Fellowship Honorees, By Sylvia Corneliussen)
Professors Michael Lewis and Junping Shi have been promoted to associate professor, effective Septmber, 1, 2006.
Several excellent lectures were given by some prominent visitors during the Fall 2005 semester:

Eminent Lecture Series by Professor Dimitri Gurevich (Nov. 2-9, 2005)

Freeman Visiting Fellow Lecture by Professor Jinchuan Hou (Sept. 28, 2005)
Distinguished Lecture Series by Professor Alexander A. Kirillov (Sept. 6-10, 2005)

Faculty Research Highlight

Professor Sebastian Schreiber is one of the co-authors of a paper published in Nature magazine in November 17, 2005. (Superspreading and the impact of individual variation on disease emergence, J. Lloyd-Smith, S. J. Schreiber, P. E. Kopp, and W. M. Getz, Nature 438 (2005) 355-359) This paper has been featured in Nature News Online, Nature's News and Views , Richmond Times Dispatch, Der Spiegel , UC Berkeley News, and W&M News. Nature is one of academic journals with most impact on the scientific sommunity.

Professor Leiba Rodman is one of the co-authors of a book published by Birkhauser in December, 2005. (Indefinite Linear Algebra and Applications, by Israel Gohberg, Peter Lancaster, Leiba Rodman.) This is the ninth book which is co-authored or co-edited by Professor Rodman, and he has also published more than 260 papers since 1978.

Professor Larry Leemis is one of the co-authors of a textbook published by Printice Hall in December, 2005. (Discrete-Event Simulation : A First Course (Hardcover), by Lawrence M. Leemis, Stephen K. Park) Professor Leemis published his first textbook Reliability: Probabilistic Models and Statistical Methods in 1994.

Professor Ilya Spitkovsky was one of the two plenary speakers at the Fifth International conference on Matrix Analysis Methods in Stochastic Models in Pisa, Italy, June 2005.
Several faculty members of the department presented their work at the Joint Mathematics Meetings 2006, San Antonio, TX

Nick Loehr The $q,t$-Catalan theorem and the $q,t$-Square theoremAMS Special Session on Algebraic and Enumerative Combinatorics
Sebastian Schreiber On persistence of coupled sink populationsAMS Special Session on Nonautonomous Discrete Dynamics
George Rublein is the organizer of MAA Session on Mathematics of Chemistry

Alumni News

Travis Slocumb, who earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from William and Mary in 1988, has been selected as Senior Vice President for Business Development of the Research, Development, Test and Evaluation (RDT&E) Group of Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC). For the past year Slocumb has served as chief technology officer for the RDT&E Group. SAIC is the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the United States, with more than 43,000 employees in over 150 cities worldwide. (report from Yahoo Business News)
Katherine Masyn, who earned a Bachelor of Science in mathematics from William and Mary in 1995, has become an assistant professor in the Department of Human and Community Development, University of California, Davis. She also obtained a masters degree in biostatistics at UC Berkeley (1999), and a Ph.D from the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, UCLA (2003); she was the winner of the William and Mary Prize in Mathematics and the Benjamin Stoddard Ewell Award in 1995 when she was an undergraduate student at William and Mary.

Created by Junping Shi, Feb. 28, 2006