Distinguished Alumni Honored

Dean Harry Morrison presented nine School of Science Distinguished Alumni Awards at a banquet held on April 28 at University Inn and Conference Center in West Lafayette. In addition to honoring an individual from each SoS Department, Dean Morrison presented an annual Distinguished Alumni Award for Excellence in K-12 Teaching. We are very pleased that this year's award went to a Lafayette high school math teacher, Donna Osborn.

Distinguished Mathematics Alumnus
Joel Smoller, Ph.D. 1963

Joel Smoller is Professor of Mathematics and holds the Lamberto Cesari Chair in Mathematics at the University of Michigan. Following completion of his Ph.D., he spent one year as an instructor at Michigan and another year at Courant Institute at New York University. He returned to Michigan as an assistant professor of mathematics in 1965.

Smoller¹s research has focused on shock-wave theory, systems of reaction-diffusion equations, dynamical systems, and bifurcation theory. Recently, he and his collaborators have been working in General Relativity‹specifically, shock-waves in general relativity, Einstein-Yang/Mills equations, and both Einstein-Dirac-Maxwell equations and Einstein-Dirac-Yang/Mills equations. His work proposes a new cosmological model, different from the standard "big-bang" model, which is based on their exact fluid-dynamical shock-wave solution of the Einstein equations. With F. Finster and S.-T. Yau, Smoller wrote a series of papers where they obtain particle-like solutions for the Einstein-Dirac-Yang/Mills equations and show the non-existence of black-hole solutions for these equations.

Joel Smoller has been an invited speaker at many national and international mathematics conferences. In 1998 a conference was held in his honor at the University of California, Davis.

Excellence in K-12 Teaching Award
Donna M. Osborn, M.S. 1977

Donna M. Osborn is a mathematics teacher at Jefferson High School in Lafayette, Indiana, where she has taught for most of the past 15 years. Her work experience also includes teaching at the middle school and college levels, and she has held two one-year teaching posts abroad. As the recipient of a Department of Energy Albert Einstein Distinguished Teaching Fellowship, Ms. Osborn spent the 1999-2000 academic year in Washington, D.C., working in Congress with Rep. Peter Visclosky on K-12 education programs in science and mathematics.

Osborn was the recipient of the Christa McAuliff Award for Indiana in 1988 and the Golden Apple Award from the Greater Lafayette Chamber of Commerce in 1990. In 1998 she won a Tandy Technology Prize, and she received the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science and Mathematics Teaching for Indiana in 1996.

Donna Osborn is a member of the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Indiana Council of Teachers of Mathematics, the Mathematics Association of America, and Phi Delta Kappa. She has served as a mathematics consultant for the Indiana Department of Education and for Encyclopedia Brittannica. She was also a member of the Core 40 writing team and served on the committee to review items for the Indiana Gateway Exam.

Alum Accolades

Lawrence Stone (Ph.D. 1967) was inducted into the National Academy of Engineering on October 3, 1999 in Washington, D.C. He was elected to the academy for his work in search theory and applications. Larry is the Chief Operating Officer of Metron Inc., a scientific consulting company in Reston, Virginia.

Shirley Buccieri (B.S. 1973) returned to the West Lafayette campus in early November to participate in Purdue¹s Old Masters program. Shirley is Senior Vice President, General Counsel, and Secretary of Transamerica Corporation in San Francisco, California.

Kathy Welch-Martin (B.S. 1979) was named by President Clinton as one of 208 teachers to receive the Presidential Award for Excellence in Mathematics and Science Teaching (PAEMST), the nation¹s highest honor for mathematics and science teaching in elementary and secondary schools. Ms. Welch-Martin will receive a $7,500 NSF education grant to be used at her school (Wainwright Middle School in Lafayette, Indiana), a Presidential citation, and a trip to Washington in June to attend a series of recognition events.

Richard McGrath (B.S. 1950) of Kittanning, Pennsylvania returned to campus during Gala Weekend in April to participate in the 50th anniversary celebration of the class of 1950. Mr. McGrath took time out from the festivities to pay a personal visit to the Math Department. He presented department head Carl Cowen with a gift to the department in honor of Paul Erdös.