Cornell Mathematics Doctorates, 1980-1989


Following the record 117 mathematics doctorates awarded at Cornell during the previous decade, only sixty one were awarded from 1980 to 1989. Thirteen went to women.

Thirty three faculty supervised at least one Ph.D.s during this decade. Anil Nerode (6) and John Hubbard (5) were the most active, followed by Louis Billera, Kenneth Brown, Marshall Cohen, Leonard Gross, Stephen Lichtenbaum, Lawrence Payne, Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg and Richard Shore (3).

In 1986, the Mathematical Science Institute was created under the leadership of Geoffrey Ludford, Professor of Theoretical and Applied Mathematics, and with the help of Charlie Van Loan (Computer Science), Lars Wahlbin (Mathematics), and Narahari Prabhu (OR-IE). It was supported for ten years by a grant from Army Research Office.

Left, Dragon day in1988 on the Arts Quad in front of White Hall and Sibley Hall.


1980 (9 doctorates)


William Henry Beckmann

Title: Completely Aspherical 2-Complexes. Advisor: Marshall Cohen. Career: Owner and President of Network Computing Associates, Ltd.

Brian Evan Blank

Title: Boundary Behaviour of Limits of Discrete Series Representations. Advisor: Anthony Knapp. Career: Washington University in St. Louis.

Matthew James Donald

Title: The Classical Limits of P([phi]) Quantum Field Theories. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: The Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge, UK.

Constantine Achilleos Gatsonis

Title: Estimation of the Posterior Density of a Location Parameter. Advisor: Lawrence Brown. Career: Brown University, School of Public Health.

Neil Immerman

Title: First Order Expressibility as a Complexity Measure. Advisors: Anil Nerode and Juris Hartmanis. Career: University of Massachusetts Amherst.

James Elliot Meister

Title: On Supercuspidal Representations of the Metaplectic Group. Advisor: Stephen Gelbart. Career: Institute of Advanced Study; Karus-Alterman Corporation.

Subhashis Nag

Title: On some geometrical problems in Teichmuller and Torelli spaces. Advisor: Clifford Earle. Career: The Institute of Mathematical Sciences, Chennai. 1998 Shanti Swarup Bhatnagar Prize for Science and Technology.

Alicia Norma Sevilla

Title: On Continuous Galois Cohomology. Advisor: Shankar Sen. Career: Moravian College.

Darko Veljan

Title: Euler Manifolds and Stiefel-Whitney Homology Classes. Advisor: Peter Kahn. Career: University of Zagreb.


1981 (4 doctorates)


Isabel Marie Beichl

Title: Computations in Group Cohomology for Finite Groups. Advisor: Kenneth Brown. Career: National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Stephen Brady

Title: Recursive Aspects of Real Closed Fields. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Senior Software Engineer, IBM.

Gudrun Birgitta Brattstrom

Title:L-functions of Jacobi-sum Hecke characters. Advisor: Stephen Lichtenbaum. Career: Stockholm University.

Martin W. Lo

Title:Isometric Embeddings of Manifolds with Boundary. Advisor: Richard Hamilton and Roger Livesay. Career: Navigation and Mission Design Section, Jet Propulsion Laboratory.


1982 (6 doctorates)


Melville Lester Bienenfeld

Title: Advisor: Stephen Lichtenbaum. Career: Westchester Community College.

Jaime Bohorquez

Title: On the Effective Content of the Theory of Modules. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Escuela Colombiana de Ingeniería.

Nilotpal Ghosh

Title: On the Convergence of the Boundary Element Method. Advisor: Lars Wahlbin. Career: Community College of Baltimore County.

Bruce Masao Ikenaga

Title: Homological Dimension and Farrell Cohomology. Advisor: Kenneth Brown. Career: Millersville University of Pennsylvania.

William Kazez

Title: On Equivalences of Branched Coverings and Their Action on Homology. Advisor: Israel Berstein. Career: University of Georgia.

Leonard Robert Schreiber

Title: Non-Recursiveness in Euclidean and Integral Domains. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Computer Consultant, NYC.


1983 (9 doctorates)


Margaret M. Bayer

Title: Facial Enumeration in Polytopes, Spheres and Other Complexes. Advisor: Louis Billera. Career: University of Kansas.

Ethan David Bloch

Title: Pulling Apart Simplexwise Linear Near-Embeddings of a 2-Disk in R^2, Advisor: David Henderson. Career: Bard College.

Steven Patrick Boyer

Title:Shake-Slice Knots. Advisor: Peter Kahn. Career: Université du Québec à Montréal.

Maryse Camilla Desrochers

Title: Self - Duality of Integer Rings as Galois Modules. Advisor: Stephen Chase. Career: Marianopolis College.

Eric Stephen Key

Title: Recurrence and Transience Criteria and a Limit Law for Generalized Random Walk in a Random Environment. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

Jiann-Hua Lou

Title: Some Properties of a Special Class of Self Similar Processes. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: National University of Singapore Singapore.

David Alan Odell

Title: Trace Constructions in alpha-Recursion Theory. Advisor: Richard Shore. Career: University of Melbourne; Insureware.

Philip Henry Scowcroft

Title: The Real-Algebraic Structure of Scott's Model of Intuitionistic Analysis. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Wesleyan University.

David Lea Webb

Title: Grothendieck Groups of Dihedral and Quaternion Group Rings. Advisor: Kenneth Brown. Career: Dartmouth College.


1984 (3 doctorates)


Sheryl Silibovsky Brady

Title: Recursive Topology in Euclidean Space. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: State University of New York, Purchase.

Charles Helou

Title: An Explicit 2^n-th Reciprocity Law. Advisor: Shankar Sen. Career: Penn State University, Brandywine Campus.

Wei-Shih Yang

Title:Simon-Lieb Inequality for Phi-4 Theory in Two Dimensions. Advisor: Eugene Dynkin and Leonard Gross. Career: Temple University.


1985 (7 doctorates)


Christine Ann Haught

Title: Turing and Truth-table Degrees of 1-Generic and Recursively Enumerable Sets. Advisor: Richard Shore. Career: Loyola University, Chicago.

Katherine E. Magurn

Title: Subdivision and Enumeration in Balanced Complexes. Advisor: Louis Billera. Career: Miami University, Ohio.

Colm K. Mulcahy

Title: Spaces of Signatures. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Spelman College.

Victoria A. Powers

Title:Finite Constructable Spaces of Signatures. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Emory University.

Patrick Russel Sheppard

Title: The Dirichlet Principle and Finite Energy Solutions of the Discrete Dirichlet Problem. Advisor: Eugene Dynkin. Career: Project Engineer, MDA.

Mark Frazer Simpson

Title: Arithmetic Degrees: Initial Segments, omega-REA Operators and the omega-Jump. Advisor: Richard Shore. Career: Xerox Corporation; Founding President of LG Electronics Research Center of America (LGERCA), now Trivet Digital.

Andrew J. Sterge

Title: Game Theoretic Models of Coalition Formation and Power in Legislatures. Advisor: William Franklin Lucas. Career: Head of the Reinsurance Group, AQR Capital Management, LLC.


1986 (4 doctorates)


Allan David Bennett

Title: Continuous Dependence on Modeling in the Cauchy Problem for Second-Order Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations. Advisor: Lawrence Payne. Career: Vice President and Portfolio Manager at Farmington Asset Management Ltd.

Bruce Driver

Title:Convergence of the Four-Dimensional U(1) Lattice Gauge Theory to Its Continuum Limit. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: University of California, San Diego.

Jan Persens

Title: On Stabilizing Ill-Posed Problems for Partial Differential Equations under Perturbations of the Geometry of the Domain. Advisor: Lawrence Payne. Career: University of the Western Cape; Director of International Relations; President of the African Mathematical Union 1999-2004.

Rakesh

Title: A Coefficient Determination Problem for the Wave Equation. Advisor: Lawrence Payne. Career: University of Delaware.


1987 (6 doctorates)


Kevin Hutchinson

Title: On the Homology of GL_2 of a Field. Advisor: Stephen Lichtenbaum. Career: University College, Dublin.

Eric Paul Klassen

Title: Representations of knot groups in SU(2). Advisor: Marshall Cohen. Career: Florida State University.

Ralph Werner Oberste-Vorth

Title: Complex Horseshoes and the Dynamics
of Mappings of Two Complex Variables. Advisor: John Hubbard. Career: Indiana State University; Marshall University.

Leena-Maija Reissell

Title: Gaps in Scott Ranks. Advisor: Michael Morley. Career: XOX Corporation.

Jacques Rioux

Title: On the Equivariant Homotopy Type of Compact G-ANR's. Advisor: James West. Career: Senior Actuarial Scientist at SAS Institute.

Ben Scott Wittner

Title: On the Bifurcation Loci of Rational Maps of Degree Two. Advisor: John Hubbard. Career: Staff Scientist, Massachusetts General Hospital Center for Cancer Research.


1988 (7 doctorates)


Susan Maureen Barton

Title: The Real Spectrum of Higher Level of a Commutative Ring. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: West Virginia University.

Thomas Gerald Brady

Title:The Integral Cohomology of Out_+(F_3). Advisor: Marshall Cohen and Karen Vogtmann. Career: Dublin City University.

Allen Lee Fogelsanger

Title: The Generic Rigidity of Minimal Cycles. Advisor: Robert Connelly. Career: Musician, Marymount Manhattan College.

Janet Elizabeth Head

Title: The Combinatorics of Newton's Method for Cubic Polynomials. Advisor: John Hubbard. Career: unknown.

Geoffrey Kiralis

Title: Pseudo-Isotopies of Irreducible Three-Manifolds. Advisor: Allen Hatcher. Career: unknown (associated with Dartmouth College).

Gabriele Elizabeth Meyer

Title: Attracting and Repelling Point Pairs for Vectorfields on Manifolds. Advisor: David Henderson. Career: Lecturer, University of Wisconsin.

Lauren Lynn Rose

Title: The Structure of Modules of Splines over Polynomial Rings. Advisor: Louis Billera. Career: Bard College.


1989 (6 doctorates)


Steven Anthony Bianco

Title: Stochastic Epidemic in a Large Population. Advisor: Richard Durrett. Career: Senior Principal Engineer at Autodesk.

Benjamin Martin Bielefeld

Title: Changing the Order of Critical Points of Polynomials Using Quasiconformal Surgery. Advisor: John Hubbard. Career: unknown.

Yuval Fisher

Title:The Classification of Critically Preperiodic Polynomials. Advisor: John Hubbard. Career: National Security Agency.

Mark Gordon Low

Title: A Unified Asymptotic Minimax Theory for Nonparametric Density Estimation and Nonparametric Regression. Advisor: Lawrence Brown. Career: Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Christopher Francis Noble

Title: Equilibrium Behavior of the Sexual Reproduction Process. Advisor: Richard Durrett. Career: Lawrence University; Senior Consulting Actuary at Towers Watson, Seattle, Washington.

Jinchao Xu

Title: Theory of Multilevel Methods. Advisor: James Bramble. Career: Pennsylvania State University.