Notables

Honoring efforts to increase the numbers of minorities and women in science and mathematics, the University of Wisconsin at Stevens Point has named Cornell mathematician Carlos Castillo-Chavez one of three Distinguished Alumni for 1999. Castillo-Chavez is a professor of biomathematics and director of the Cornell Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute. He was cited by the University of Wisconsin, where he earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1976, for fostering minority student involvement in research at Cornell and in Mexico, where he was a visiting professor at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico in 1998-99. Previous honors to Castillo-Chavez include the Presidential Faculty Fellowship Award (1992-97) from President Bush and the Presidential Mentoring Award from President Clinton for his work with minorities and women in the sciences.

Richard V.E. Lovelace, professor of applied physics and of astronomy, has been appointed by the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics of the Earth and Environmental Sciences Division at Los Alamos National Laboratory as the next Orson Anderson Distinguished Visiting Scholar for the fall term of 1999. The focus of this appointment will be on magnetohydrodynamic flows in space and astrophysical environments and their associated energy dissipation processes. He will be working with Los Alamos astrophysicists on accretion disks and jets and with plasma physicists on energy dissipations processes in those systems.

Juris Hartmanis, the Walter R. Read Professor of Engineering and professor of computer science, was awarded an honorary doctorate of humane letters during the spring commencement ceremony at the University of Missouri-Kansas City May 7. Hartmanis has been at Cornell since 1965 and was a founding member of thecomputer science department and served as its first chair. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, and in 1993 hereceived the Turing Award, the highest award in computer science.