Expanding Your Horizons Conference for Girls
The next EYH conference will take place on November 7, 2009 at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. See Announcement. Early registration is recommended to obtain the best choice of workshops.
Professor Mohammed Named as David Blackwell Lecturer
Dr. Salah E.A. Mohammed, Professor and Distinguished Scholar, Department of Mathematics, has been named as the David Blackwell Lecturer at the Mathematical Association of America (M.A.A.) MathFest to be held in Madison, Wisconsin, July 30 – August 2, 2008. MathFest is the largest annual summer meeting of mathematicians in the United States. Last August, MathFest drew more than 1,400 attendees to San Jose, California. See the full scientific program for this year’s MathFest (which includes a complete list of M.A.A. invited addresses and their abstracts).
Dr. Mohammed is an internationally recognized expert and world leader in the field of stochastic analysis. He earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the University of Warwick, England, in 1976, and joined the faculty of SIUC in 1984. He attained the rank of Professor in the Department of Mathematics in 1989. Dr. Mohammed was awarded a Visiting Professorship at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, California, for the 1997-1998 academic year, and he was a Scientist in Residence at the prestigious Mittag-Leffler Institute in Stockholm, Sweden, at the invitation of the Royal Swedish Academy of Science from September 1 to December 15, 2007. Dr. Mohammed’s research has also been supported by a Visiting Research Fellowship at the Institute for Mathematics and Its Applications in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and by an Alexander von Humboldt Research Fellowship, under which he has conducted research in German institutes during several periods of his career, most recently in the summer of 2007. His research work has received continuous grant support from the National Science Foundation since 1989. Dr. Mohammed was recognized as the SIUC Excellence Through Commitment Outstanding Scholar in 2006. Further details regarding Dr. Mohammed’s research can be found at his website http://sfde.math.siu.edu.
The first Blackwell Lecture was given in 1994, and it has been given annually at the summer meeting of the M.A.A. since then. The lecture is sponsored by the National Association of Mathematicians, a non-profit professional organization formed in 1969 to, among other things, increase the numbers of the then very few African-American mathematicians. According to the organization’s website www.nam-math.org, this organization “has always had as its main objectives, the promotion of excellence in the mathematical sciences and the promotion of the mathematical development of underrepresented American minorities”.
This lecture is named in honor of David Harold Blackwell, who is generally recognized as one of the greatest African American mathematicians. He earned a Ph.D. at the University of Illinois in 1941 at the age of 22, becoming only the seventh African American to receive a Ph.D. in Mathematics. In 1954, he was appointed Professor of Statistics at the University of California at Berkeley, where he served as chair of the Department of Statistics for many years. He is the first and only African American to be any one of: a member of the National Academy of Sciences (to which he was named in 1965), a President of the American Statistical Society, and a Vice President of the American Mathematical Society. He is also an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Statistical Society.
Professor Mohammed will deliver his lecture, titled “Random Dynamics and Memory: Structure Within Chaos”, at 1:00 p.m. on Friday, August 1. An abstract of the talk is available at http://sfde.math.siu.edu/Blackwellabstract1.pdf.