Cornell is establishing a lecture series to honor two of the nation's most eminent mathematicians, David Blackwell of the University of California at Berkeley and Richard Tapia of Rice University. The lectures will provide a forum for the research of African-American, Latino and American Indian scientists working in the fields of mathematical and statistical sciences.
On May 7 and 8 a conference will be held on the Cornell campus to inaugurate the series, to be called the David Blackwell and Richard Tapia Distinguished Lecture Series in the Mathematical and Statistical Sciences. Many lectures will be open to the public, with times and places to be announced at a later date.
Both Blackwell, who is professor emeritus of mathematics at U.C. Berkeley, and Tapia, who is the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics at Rice, will attend the event, which will conclude with a banquet in their honor.
The new lecture series is being established at the initiative of Don Randel, Cornell provost; Robert Harris Jr., Cornell vice provost for diversity and faculty development and professor of Africana studies; and Carlos Castillo-Chavez, director, Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute and professor of biomathematics at Cornell. The series, which will provide an honorarium of $1,000 for the guest lecturer, also is being established with the encouragement of President Hunter Rawlings.
Speaking for the organizers, Castillo-Chavez said that objectives of the lecture series are multiple. "First of all, we, the minority communities at Cornell University, would like to honor the mathematical and personal achievements of David Blackwell and Richard Tapia," he said. "We feel that it is critically important that current and future generations of African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans, as well as current and future generations of non-minorities, learn and remember the achievements of these two extraordinarily talented and productive mathematicians. The establishment of this lecture series also recognizes their continuous efforts in creating, supporting and maintaining opportunities for minority scientists, statisticians and mathematicians across the nation."
Events at Cornell to celebrate the inauguration of the program will begin May 7 with an evening reception, followed by a lecture by Persi Diaconis, the Mary V. Sunseri Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Stanford University. The daylong events May 8 will feature lectures by Tapia; Michael Todd, the L.C. Welch Professor of Operations Research and Industrial Engineering at Cornell; Susan Holmes, visiting associate professor in statistics at Stanford; and by 12 minority graduate students and postdoctoral researchers.
At a luncheon May 8, to be hosted by Cornell minority graduate students who are Sloan Foundation fellows, Albert Bridgewater, senior science adviser at the National Science Foundation, and Denise Stephenson-Hawk, provost of Spelman College, will speak about underrepresented minorities in academia. At the luncheon, several people will be recognized for their contributions to the education, training and mentoring of underrepresented minorities in the mathematical and statistical sciences. They are Herbert Hethcote, representing the mathematics department at the University of Iowa; James Schatz and Barbara S. Deuink, division of mathematical sciences at the National Security Agency; Ted Greenwood of the Sloan Foundation; and Stephen Wirkus, visiting assistant professor of mathematics at Cornell.
At the banquet May 8, James Donaldson, dean of arts and sciences at Howard University, and Margaret Wright, head of the scientific computing research department at Bell Labs -- the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies -- will talk about the contributions of Blackwell and Tapia to the education of African Americans and Latinos.
Blackwell completed his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1941. He taught on the faculties of Southern University, Clark College and Howard University, where he was chairman of the mathematics department before joining the faculty of U.C. Berkeley in 1954. He has contributed to several areas of mathematics: set theory, measure theory, probability theory, statistics, game theory and dynamic programming. His name is attached to a theorem in statistics, the Rao-Blackwell theorem, which is important in estimation theory and tests of hypotheses. He is an author of the classic book Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions.
Blackwell was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1965. He also is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the R.A. Fisher Award and the John Von Neumann Theory Prize.
Tapia, born in Los Angeles to parents who emigrated from Mexico as teen-agers, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Los Angeles. In 1994, he was the first native-born Hispanic to be inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. He has contributed to mathematical optimization theory and iterative methods for nonlinear problems. His current research is in the area of algorithms for constrained optimization problems and interior-point methods for linear and nonlinear programming.
Under Tapia, the computational and applied mathematics department at Rice has become a national leader in promoting women and underrepresented minority Ph.D. recipients in the mathematical sciences. His recent honors and awards include: Lifetime Mentor Award, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1998; appointment to the National Science Board by President Clinton, 1996; and Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring Program, 1996.
The lecture series is supported by Cornell's Center for Applied Mathematics and the departments of mathematics, statistics, biometrics and theoretical and applied mechanics. It also has the support at Cornell of Walter Cohen, dean of the Graduate School; John Hopcroft, dean of the College of Engineering; Philip Lewis, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences; and Daryl Lund, dean of the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences. Members of the organizing-committee are Joe Buhler, U.C. Berkeley; Abdul-Aziz Yakubu, Howard University; Harris; and Castillo-Chavez.
| Cornell Chronicle Front Page | | Table of Contents | | Cornell News Service Home Page |