The mathematics department hosted several visitors and postdocs for the academic year. Steve Clark, on sabbatical from the University of Missouri-Rolla was at MU for 2000-2001. A frequent visitor to the department, Clark works in differential equations and spectral theory and has collaborated with professors Ahlbrandt, Chicone, Gesztesy, Latushkin and Montgomery-Smith.
Joe Diestel, visiting for the year from Kent State University, works in functional analysis; his son, Geoffrey, is a first-year graduate student in mathematics. Doug Kurtz of New Mexico State University spent the winter term visiting the harmonic analysis group, and Jong-Youll Park of Chonnam National University in Korea is visiting the algebra group during calendar year 2001.
In fall 2000, the department welcomed six new postdoctoral fellows. Fernando Alblac, who received his PhD at Universidad Publica de Navarra, Spain, and Henrico Witvliet from Delft University of Technology, Netherlands, work in functional analysis. Laura De Carli of UCLA and Dmitry Ryabogin of Hebrew University of Jerusalem work in harmonic analysis. Milan Pokorny from Charles University, Czech Republic, works in partial differential equations and fluid mechanics, and Michael Rudnev of Caltech works in dynamical systems.
Functional analysts Manuel Leon of Maryland and Robert Judd of Texas are finishing their second years at Mizzou. Also continuing are Friedmann Brock of Leipzig University, who works on geometric questions in PDE, and Radu Cascaval of Memphis who works in nonlinear PDEs.
The department's recent postdocs made productive use of their degrees and have moved on to excellent positions and fellowships. Subhajit Ghosechowdhury took a fellowship at the Weizmann Institute in Israel. Olivier Piltant and Dorin Bucur returned to permanent positions with the French research council CNRS. Mathematical physicist Thierry Chatelain also returned to France, where he accepted a position in secondary education. Algebraist Alex Tchernev accepted a tenure-track position at SUNY Albany. Jan Lang returned to a permanent position at Charles University in Prague but has accepted a job at Ohio State University starting in fall 2001.