As our mathematically minded readers know, the 21st century actually began Jan. 1, 2001. We take this as an opportunity to look back on the developments in the math department during the past decade. Thanks to two rounds of enhancement, the department has 43 tenure and tenure-track faculty this year, rising to 45 in academic year 2002-03 when we complete our hiring for the second round of enhancement.
The department developed a postdoctoral program and now has five postdoctoral lines that will rise to seven in 2003-04. We instituted eight graduate fellowships and renovated the offices of our graduate students at a cost of $1 million. The department received $1.2 million as donations and pledges from its alumni and friends, for which we are most grateful. Also, we added more than $3 million in rate and cost money to our budget.
Since 1990, the department has made 24 hires of the highest caliber. This can be seen in a 300 percent rise in grant support. In 1997, then Assistant Professor Daniel Lieman received a $250,000 NSF CAREER award, one of only four awards in the field of mathematics that year. In 1999, Assistant Professor Charles Li became the department's first winner of an ultra prestigious Guggenheim Fellowship. The Guggenheim Foundation receives about 3,500 applications annually and typically awards 200 fellowships at $35,000 each to senior researchers at prestigious institutions. That Li was able to acquire this award as a junior faculty member is a stunning achievement. In addition, the department has been the home of two Sloan fellows: Michael Larsen in 1997-98 and Zhenbo Qin in 1997-01. Sloan fellowships are awarded to a handful of top researchers each year, and having two in five years is a real mark of success for a department.
As a result of our successful recruitment of these outstanding faculty members, the department has rapidly become a mathematical center, particularly in the areas of commutative algebra/algebraic geometry, harmonic analysis/PDE and mathematical physics-dynamical systems. Many top researchers regularly visit here. By the end of 2001, the department will have held 15 conferences since 1992. About 1,200 people representing more than 50 different countries attended the conferences.
Within the University, the stature of the department in research and teaching has risen dramatically. Administrators routinely refer to our department as a campus star. In 1995, Nigel Kalton was named one of MUs 16 Curators' Professors at that time. In the past decade, Mark Ashbaugh, Dale Cutkosky and Stephen Montgornery-Smith received the Chancellor's Award for Outstanding Research, the highest research award given at MU.
On the teaching side, the department has acquired six consecutive $10,000 Kemper Awards for teaching excellence and a University of Missouri Presidential Award for Outstanding Teaching.
In the past 10 years, the department has become a leader on the education front. Professors John Beem and Ira Papick are co-primary investigators on a $6 million NSF grant that established a consortium to support the dissemination and implementation of a standards-based mathematics curriculum for the middle grades.
In the early 1990s the department began to phase in the use of Mathematica in teaching. We now have successfully integrated the use of Mathernatica into the three semester calculus sequence and in several higher-level courses. We also have established master's programs in applied mathematics, and in applied mathematics and economics.
It has been a great decade.
