New SIAM Leaders Take Office on First of Year
January 12, 2007
As in every odd year, SIAM enters 2007 with a new president. Cleve Moler (The MathWorks, Inc.) began a two-year term on January 1, succeeding Martin Golubitsky (University of Houston), who spends 2007 as past-president.
Also taking up new positions this month are Irene Fonseca (Carnegie Mellon University) and Alison Ramage (University of Strathclyde), both elected in the fall of 2006 to the SIAM Council. The two other Council contests decided in the fall election were both won by incumbents: Douglas Arnold (Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications, University of Minnesota) and Michael Heath (University of Illinois at Urbana�Champaign). Council members serve three-year terms; an individual can serve up to three consecutive terms.
The SIAM membership also voted to fill three positions on the SIAM Board of Trustees. Apparently happy with current operations, voters re-elected three incumbents: Marsha Berger (Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University), Suzanne Lenhart (University of Tennessee), and Lloyd (Nick) Trefethen (Oxford University). Each began a three-year term on January 1.
The fall 2006 elections, the third in which voters had the option of voting electronically, maintained the healthy increase in percentages of voting members set in motion with the new system. Voters have been encouraged to suggest ways in which the system could be improved, and SIAM staff are now looking into ideas submitted this fall.
SIAM has five vice presidents, all but one appointed by the SIAM president. (The exception is the VP at large, currently David Keyes of Columbia University, who was elected in 2005 to a two-year term ending December 31, 2007.) One new vice president, appointed by Golubitsky, took office this month: Jeffrey Saltzman (Merck & Co., Inc.) succeeds Kirk Jordan of IBM as SIAM's vice president for industry and, as such, an ex officio member of the Council.
The full Council membership is now as follows: Douglas Arnold; Andrea Bertozzi (UCLA); William Briggs (University of Colorado at Denver; SIAM vice president for education); Carlos Castillo-Chavez (Arizona State University); L. Pamela Cook (University of Delaware; SIAM secretary); Lori Freitag Diachin (Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory); Iain Duff (Rutherford Appleton Laboratory; chair, SIAM Board of Trustees); Lisa Fauci (Tulane University); Irene Fonseca; Martin Golubitsky; Samuel Gubins (Annual Reviews; SIAM treasurer); Michael Heath; Ilse Ipsen (North Carolina State University; SIAM vice president for programs); C.T. Kelley (NCSU; vice president for publications); David Keyes (vice president at large); Randall LeVeque (University of Washington); Cleve Moler; Mary Pugh (University of Toronto); Alison Ramage; Jeffrey Saltzman; Andrew Wathen (Oxford); and Henry Wolkowicz (University of Waterloo).
The members of the Board of Trustees are Marsha Berger; Tony Chan (National Science Foundation); Iain Duff, chair; Samuel Gubins; Nicholas Higham (University of Manchester); Suzanne Lenhart; John Lewis (Cray Inc.); Jerrold Marsden (California Institute of Technology); Juan Meza (Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory); Cleve Moler; Nick Trefethen; Anna Tsao (AlgoTek, Inc.); and Stephen Wright (University of Wisconsin).
As always, thanks are due to all the officials, whether elected or appointed, who have worked to make SIAM what it is. Special thanks this year to Kirk Jordan, whose six years as SIAM vice president for industry drew to a close at the end of 2006, and to Henk van der Vorst (Utrecht University) and Anne Greenbaum (Washington), whose terms on the Council ended in 2006.
As mentioned many times by SIAM executive director James Crowley (see Toward a More Open SIAM), SIAM thrives on the diversity of its members' interests. Elected officials are chosen by the membership from a slate of candidates put together by the Nominating Committee. Hoping to draw a larger fraction of the membership into the candidate-selection process, the Board asked at its December meeting that the "Suggestions for Nominations" link on the SIAM Web site be made more accessible. Readers are encouraged to visit the site (www.siam.org/) and avail themselves of the opportunity to volunteer or suggest colleagues who would be good candidates for leadership positions in SIAM.
Image Archive for Numerical Analysis. In Philadelphia for the winter meeting of the SIAM Board of Trustees (December 8�9, 2006), Nick Higham gave SIAM News a preview of a project then about to go live on the Web. He and Sven Hammarling, having been entrusted with two sets of photos by Heather Wilkinson, widow of the pioneering numerical analyst James Wilkinson, wanted to make them available to the community. Realizing that a small, and diminishing, group had ever actually laid eyes on some of the people pictured, they quickly set about scanning and in some cases photographing the photos, identifying as many of the individuals pictured as possible. Asked about alerting the community of their posting, Higham offered to let SIAM News do the announcing.
If a few early viewers are any indication, readers will enjoy looking at the photos. They can also be of assistance: Hammarling and Higham hope to hear from anyone who can identify the few pictured people unknown to them and their colleagues. For a start, the photo above, from an album of photos Walter Gander took at Gatlinburg VII (Asilomar, California, 1977), shows several prominent members of the SIAM community. Who are the stylish picnickers?
Gander's album, which makes up the largest of the repositories (www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/photos/gatlinburg7/), turns out to contain photos of several currently newsworthy members of the SIAM community: Cleve Moler, third from the left in the photo at right, began a two-year term as SIAM president on January 1. Iain Duff, pictured below, was elected to a second one-year term as chair of the SIAM Board of Trustees at its December meeting. Tony Chan, shown below with Eric Grosse, is a member of the Board and current head of the Directorate for Mathematical and Physical Sciences at NSF; Grosse, a former member of the Board (2002�04), is a member of SIAM's System Oversight Committee.
The remaining two repositories
(www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/photos/wilkinson and www.maths.manchester.ac.uk/~higham/photos/lanczos/) consist of previously unpublished photos of Wilkinson (1919�1986) in various settings and of Cornelius Lanczos (1893�1974), the latter from the University of Manchester archives; samples from both appear below.
Asilomar, 1977: From left, Dianne O'Leary, Charlie Van Loan, Cleve Moler, Maurice Cox, John Reid (?), Olof Widlund, Alan Jennings, Bob Ward, �ke Bjorck, Ivo Marek.
Eric Grosse and Tony Chan, longtime active members of the SIAM community, as captured thirty years ago by photographer Walter Gander at the Gatlinburg VII Conference on Numerical Linear Algebra.
Also from the Manchester archives: Leslie Fox, V.N. Kublanovskaja (?), Heather Wilkinson, and James Wilkinson. Photo taken during the Gatlinburg VIII meeting, Oxford, July 1981, by Walter Gander.
Cornelius Lanczos. Copyright University of Manchester.
