Fall Changes at IMA
September 26, 2004
At the end of August, the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications at the University of Minnesota welcomed two new people to key positions. Arnd Scheel, an associate professor of mathematics at Minnesota, became the institute's deputy director, and Debra Lewis, a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Santa Cruz, began a two-year term as IMA's associate director.
Scheel, who works in dynamical systems, will be known to explorers of the DSWeb (http://www.dynamicalsystems.org/) picture gallery for his (and Bj�rn Sandstede's) images of meandering spirals and superspirals; in 2000, Scheel received a SIAM Outstanding Paper Prize for his paper "Bifurcation to Spiral Waves in Reaction-Diffusion Systems (SIAM Journal on Mathematical Analysis, 1998). Debra Lewis, whose research interests include geometric mechanics, particularly Hamiltonian and Lagrangian systems with symmetry, described some of her current research in the minisymposium Applications of Geometric Integration, which she organized for the 2004 SIAM Annual Meeting in Portland.
Scheel succeeds Fadil Santosa as IMA deputy director. Santosa's seven-year involvement in the IMA is continuing, IMA director Doug Arnold is quick to point out. Although stepping down as deputy director of IMA, a position he held from 2001 to this year, Santosa will continue as director of the Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics. (The work of one of his MCIM students, presented at this year's SIAM Conference on Imaging Science, is described on the back page of this issue of SIAM News.) Scot Adams, a professor of mathematics at Minnesota, ended a two-year term as IMA associate director this year.
New IMA deputy director, Arnd Scheel.
Debra Lewis, IMA's new associate director.
