Duke mathematician wins the first Blackwell-Tapia Prize

Arlie O. Petters, a mathematician at Duke University, is the first recipient of the Blackwell-Tapia Prize, an award that specifically honors a mathematical scientist from underrepresented minority groups, including African-Americans and Hispanics. The award is supported by funding from Cornell and the the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI), Berkeley, Calif.

The $3,000 award was presented at a conference held Nov. 1-2, at MSRI. The conference, which builds on a lecture series established at Cornell in May 2000, is sponsored by Cornell, MSRI and the Institute for Pure and Applied Mathematics, University of California at Los Angeles.

The award and the lecture series are named for mathematicians David Blackwell of the University of California at Berkeley and Richard Tapia of Rice University. The award will be given every other year to a leading mathematical scientist who has served as a role model and inspiration for colleagues and students from underrepresented minority groups.

The MSRI conference featured lectures by Petters and other leading mathematicians and poster sessions. The establishing of the conference and the award have been spearheaded by Carlos Castillo-Chavez, professor of biomathematics in the departments of Biological Statistics and Computational Biology and Theoretical and Applied Mechanics at Cornell.