2003-2004 News Archive

2004 Commencement Photos

Leonard Gross Named Fellow of American Academy of Arts & Sciences

On April 30, 2004, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences announced the election of 178 new Fellows, including our own Prof. Leonard Gross. The Academy will welcome this year's new Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members at its annual Induction Ceremony in October at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Election to the Academy has always been one of the highest honors in the United States. The Academy has elected as Fellows and Foreign Honorary Members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the eighteenth century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the nineteenth, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the twentieth. The current membership of over 4,500 includes more than 150 Nobel laureates and 50 Pulitzer Prize winners. Three other Cornell mathematics professors have been elected to the Academy. They are Richard Durrett (2002), Harry Kesten (1999), and Eugene Dynkin (1978).
—posted May 4, 2004

Mathematics Awareness Month Public Lecture

Professor Steven Strogatz, Department of Theoretical and Applied Mechanics, will give a public lecture Wednesday, April 14th, 4:00-5:00 PM in Bache Auditorium (room 228) Malott Hall for Mathematics Awareness Month. His talk, entitled Sync, will convey the excitement of a new field in a lecture aimed at a general audience. [Abstract | Poster]
—posted April 1, 2004

Christopher Francisco Wins Teaching Award

Christopher Francisco, a fifth-year graduate student in the Mathematics Department, has been selected to receive a John M. and Emily B. Clark Distinguished Teaching Award from the College of Arts and Sciences. The award will be presented at a college faculty meeting on May 11th. Recipients of the Clark Award demonstrate their devotion to teaching, student counseling and development of new courses and new methods of instruction. Christopher is among the very best teaching assistants in the College of Arts and Sciences. Past Mathematics Department recipients of the Clark Award have included Kathryn Nyman (2001), David Brown (2000), David Reed Solomon (1998), Hal Schenck (1997), Jeffrey Mitchell (1996), Lisa Orlandi (1995) and Vee Ming Lew (1993).
—posted March 25, 2004

Math Major Wins Writing Prize

Senior mathematics major Mushfeq Khan has been awarded second place in the Knight Competition for Writing in the Majors for work done in David Henderson's MATH 451 (Euclidean and Spherical Geometry). His paper, Can the Bug Tell Which Manifold?, discusses how from an intrinsic point of view someone (the bug), who can't walk far, could tell which of 10 possible geometric 2-manifolds it was on — the lower dimensional analog of the problem of determining the shape of our physical universe. The committee praised Mushfeq's paper for "the elegance and clarity of [his] responses to these complex questions."

This is the second year that a mathematics major has won a Knight Prize for Writing in the Majors. Last year, Matthew Wachs, a junior mathematics major, won for his research paper on Charles Babbage in David Henderson's History of Mathematics course (MATH 403). The paper, entitled Charles Babbage and Mechanical Equipment Capable of Performing Mathematical Operations, was described by the awards committee as "a terrific paper—one of the few I really wanted to keep reading, even though it's so long."
—posted February 9, 2004

Department Says Goodbye to José Escobar

It is with great sadness that we report that Professor José F. Escobar passed away on January 3, 2004 while on sabbatical leave in Colombia. Prof. Escobar joined the faculty at Cornell on July 1, 1994, after teaching at Indiana University, the University of Chicago, and the Courant Institute at New York University. During his career he received numerous academic awards and honors, most notably an Alfred P. Sloan Dissertation Fellowship (1985-86) and a Presidential Faculty Fellowship in pure mathematics (1992-97). He was a vital part of our community, and he will be sorely missed.

A memorial service will be held on Monday, February 16, 2004, at 4:00 PM at Annabel Taylor Hall on the Cornell campus. A reception will immediately follow the memorial service in the One World Room, downstairs in Anabel Taylor Hall. [Press Release]
—posted February 2, 2004

Awards Presented at Department Holiday Party

Standing in for Department Chair Ken Brown, Prof. Robert Connelly presented the department teaching awards for 2003 at the department's annual holiday party on Friday, December 5th. Senior faculty, junior faculty and teaching assistant awards were given to Maria Terrell, Dan Zaffran and Dan Ciubotaru, respectively. The winners were chosen from among 87 nominees.

Director of Graduate Studies Michael Stillman then awarded the Battig Prize jointly to James Belk and Harrison Zhou, the York Award to Farkhod Eshmatov, and the Hutchinson Award to Jason Martin and Melanie Pivarski.

Winners were also announced for the first annual Gingerbread House Contest. Three teams of graduate students built gingerbread houses and guests at the party voted to select a winner. [Photos]
—posted December 10, 2003

Welcome New Faculty and Graduate Students!

Department faculty, staff and graduate students gathered on Wednesday, September 3rd in the Mathematics Department lounge to welcome new faculty and graduate students and to celebrate the beginning of the new academic year.
— posted September 12, 2003 

Last modified:August 17, 2009