A new Executive Committee of ICMI was elected at the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union held in Dresden (Germany) in August 1998 and has taken charge as of January 1, 1999. It was felt appropriate to ask the members of the EC to introduce themselves to the readers of this Bulletin. The biographical information that follows, while it varies in style and details from one member to the other, provides some indications about the experiences and interests of the members of the Executive Committee. (Addresses of the EC members can be found on pages 1-2 of this Bulletin.)
Bernard R. Hodgson
Hyman Bass is the Adrain Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University, where he has taught since his 1959 Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. His research interests have been in algebra - algebraic K-theory, commutative algebra and algebraic geometry, algebraic groups, and geometric methods in group theory. He has held visiting appointments at the IAS (Princeton), IHES and ENS (Paris), TIFR (Bombay), Cambridge University, UC Berkeley, Univ. di Roma, IMPA (Rio), UNAM (Mexico), Mittag-Leffler Institute (Stockholm), University of Utah (Salt Lake City). Since 1990, Professor Bass has become actively involved in educational issues, first as part of policy advisory groups, now also as a research scholar. In the fall of 1999 he shall occupy a chair at the University of Michigan, jointly supported by the Mathematics Department and the School of Education. This will facilitate the creation at the University of Michigan of an interdisciplinary institute in mathematics and mathematics education. Professor Bass is chair of the Mathematical Sciences Education Board at the US National Academy of Sciences, and of the American Mathematical Society Committee on Education, as well as President of ICMI.
I was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in October 16, 1949. I married in 1972 to Eleonor, and have 3 boys, 2 of whom have graduated and the third is in the University. Although I met Eleonor when we both were university students of mathematics, and we both got a Ph.D. degree as mathematicians (at the University of Minnesota, 1978) and we are still doing research in mathematics, none of our children followed our paths, turning to more social/humanistic studies. I am currently a Full Professor at the Universidad Nacional del Litoral (UNL) and have a position as researcher in the Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas (CONICET), both, of course, in Argentina.
As a mathematician, my initial training was on harmonic analysis, following the school of Alberto Calderón, but my thesis was on free boundary (Stefan) problems, under the direction of Luis Caffarelli. Later, Luis convinced me to turn to numerical analysis, and so I tried to solve free boundary problems related to cavitational flow. This in turn, led me to problems in discrete optimization, a field where I stayed, and which I have used to solve problems in chemical engineering, since I am working in a mathematics group hosted by an institute of chemical engineers - the Instituto de Desarrollo Tecnológico para la Industria Química (INTEC). My work (with other collaborators) has been published in journals like AICHe Jrl., Annali Scuola Sup. Pisa., Calcolo, Computers Chem. Engng., Indiana Univ. Math. Journal., Numerische Mathematik, Pacific Journal of Mathematics, Proc. Amer. Math. Soc., Revista de la Unión Mat. Arg., SIAM Journal Cont. Opt. and Studia Math.
Through mathematical olympiads in Argentina, I became involved in the training of high school students and afterwards in trying to disseminate newer - and not so new - aspects of mathematics to high school teachers. Thus, I taught geometry using the software Cabri-Géomètre in many courses. In turn, this led a group of ex olympiad participants to create "Cabri Clubs" in Argentina. These "clubs" are formed by groups of students in high school, and they participate - as groups - in local and national competitions, using of course, Cabri. I also gave several courses based on the software Mathematica to high school students, high school teachers and university teachers, and published books on Calculus, Introduction to Computers and Mathematics, and Fractals, based on this software.
Lately, I have been working with a group of university teachers, who in turn teach prospective high school teachers, in math education subjects. Also, I have been giving courses to future high school teachers on problem solving and mathematical modeling. I am currently teaching computer programming to first year students of mathematics in the UNL.
I was born in the south of France, near the Pyrénées and went to Paris in 1965. I learnt mathematics at the École Normale Supérieure de Jeunes Filles and at the Faculty of Sciences of Paris, and completed a Ph.D. in mathematical logic at the Université de Paris 7 in 1972. I went on doing research in that area, more precisely in model theory until the late seventies. At the same time, I began to be involved in educational issues, thanks to the professor André Revuz who was my professor at the École Normale Supérieure and then became the first director of the Paris Institute of Research in Mathematics Education (IREM). The IREMs, created in the wave of interest for mathematics education induced by the new math reform, were structures attached to mathematics departments in universities, involving secondary and university teachers. They were devoted to in-service teacher training, research in mathematics education, development and diffusion of didactic resources for teachers. Three were created at a first stage, in Paris, Bordeaux and Strasbourg. One such structure exists now in each academic region (25). With two IREM colleagues, I was soon in charge of development and research in the elementary experimental school attached to the IREM. Thus I became involved in didactic research and in the development of what is often called now the French school of didactic research: a fascinating experience.
In 1980, my research work took a new orientation when an experimental section was created for first year students at the university Paris 7. This was a section where both researchers in mathematics and physics didactics were involved. Our aim was to coordinate the teaching of the two disciplines through joint lectures, assessments, group work and project work. The experience was challenging and turned out to be successful, but we had real difficulties with the coordination of teaching on differentials. This difficulty was the source of a research project on the teaching and learning of differential and integral processes involving three research teams in mathematics or physics didactics supported by the National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS); I piloted it with the physicist L. Viennot from 1984 to 1987. I then worked on differential equations, trying to find the means of renewing teaching contents and practices which were not sensitive to the evolution of the field nor to the potential offered by the technological evolution. Jointly with M. Rogalski in Lille, we developed for first-year students at the University of Lille an experimental course open to qualitative and numerical approaches and relying on computer use; we analyzed the cognitive functioning of students faced with such new topics as well as the conditions of viability of such an experiment.
In 1991, after 22 years spent at the university Paris 7, first as an assistant and then as a "maître de conférences", I got a position of full professor in Reims, in the new university structure (IUFM) created for the training of primary and secondary teachers. I have worked there until now, preparing mathematics graduate students to the difficult national competition they have to pass in order to become secondary teachers and introducing those having succeeded to didactic and pedagogical concerns during their year of professional training. This was also a challenging experience as, when they were created, IUFMs were strongly criticized by those, numerous, who thought that teaching was mainly an art and that nothing could be learnt about it except from personal experience in classrooms. We had to find the ways of efficiently connecting theory and practice, of making our didactical tools and results accessible and useful for young teachers and it was not at all an easy task. As regards research, I remained attached to the mathematics didactic research team I had contributed to create at Paris 7 and, while tutoring doctorate students on very different themes, I orientated my personal research on issues related to the integration of computer technologies at secondary level, especially to the integration of CAS such as Derive or calculators such as the TI92, in the framework of different projects supported by the Ministry of Education.
From next September, I will be back at the university Paris 7, as a professor in the mathematics department and will take in charge the direction of the IREM. May I mention also that this is only one part of my professional life. As anyone else, I have been involved in international cooperation (through my participation to the international group on Psychology of Mathematics Education and its specific working group on advanced mathematical thinking, through joint projects with foreign universities, through participation to different doctorate programs). I have also assumed various scientific and editorial responsibilities but I think that it would be rather cumbersome to list them here.
After graduating in mathematics from Université Laval, I went to the Université de Montréal for a Ph.D. in mathematical logic. I came back at Laval in 1975 as a member of the Département de mathématiques et de statistique, where I am now Professeur titulaire. I spent two years away under visiting appointments, one as a Visiting Associate Professor in computer science at the University of Toronto (1981-82) and one a Visiting Researcher at the Centre de recherches mathématiques de l'Université de Montréal and at the Université de Nice - Sophia Antipolis, France (1988-89).
As the position I got at Laval was partially concerned with the mathematical education of primary school teachers, I was naturally led over the years to develop a professional interest for the general issue of mathematics teaching and learning. Thus both my teaching tasks and my research work have been devoted to mathematical logic and theoretical computer science on the one hand and mathematics education on the other, with a stronger emphasis on the latter recently. I am the author or co-author of more than 50 papers in these fields. My mathematical work includes the solution of decision problems in logic using an automaton-theoretic framework, an arithmetical characterization of the complexity class NP and the study of axiomatic contexts for termination of rewriting systems (the last two being results obtained jointly with Clement F. Kent). I am the proud discoverer (or inventor, depending on your philosophical standpoint) of sequence M2252 appearing in Sloane & Plouffe’s Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences (Academic Press, 1995); this sequence arose from work I did on Pascal triangle modulo 2.
An important part of my work in mathematics education is related to the preparation of teachers, both in a pre-service and in an in-service context. Mathematicians have in my opinion a specific and essential contribution to bring to the education of schoolteachers, including those of the primary level. I am interested by various aspects of teacher education, in particular in connection with the influence of computers and informatics on the teaching of mathematics. I have been involved in various programs related to teacher education, including an in-service program for primary school teachers that existed for more than 20 years at Université Laval. I have recently taught two courses in a distance education framework through videoconferencing. I have also recently immersed myself seriously in the history of mathematics (I was until then an amateur), as I am regularly teaching a history course for secondary school teachers.
I have been involved over the years in various activities pertaining to mathematics education at the international level, especially in the context of activities under the responsibility of ICMI. I was the chair of the Canadian National Committee for ICME-7, held at Université Laval in 1992, and I served on the Executive Committee, Finance Committee and Local Organizing Committee of ICME-7. I was a member of the International Program Committee of ICME-8. I have participated in seven of the eleven ICMI Studies that have taken place up to now and was invited to report on the first five of these Studies in a regular lecture at the International Congress of Mathematicians 1990 (Kyoto). I have also presented invited lectures at ICM98 (Berlin) and at ICME-7. I am currently a member of Working Group 3.1 of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) devoted to informatics and secondary education. I chaired the International Program Committee of an IFIP Working Conference on the relationship between informatics and secondary school mathematics (Villard de Lans, France, 1997) organized in a sequel to two others on the same theme held in Bulgaria in 1977 and 1987.
I am involved in the program "Innovators in the Schools" which brings scientists in primary and secondary schools of Québec to present aspects of their professional field to classes of children. I have been active in various mathematics education groups in Canada, being the past president of the Canadian Mathematics Education Study Group and a former member of the Education Committee of the Canadian Mathematical Society. I am particularly pleased of have been invited as a plenary speaker by each of the three francophone mathematics teachers associations in Québec - primary, secondary and tertiary level. The Association mathématique du Québec presented me the Roland-Brossard Award (1987) - best paper, for a text on the kaleidoscope - and Abel-Gauthier Award (1991) - personality of the year. In 1998, I was the recipient of the Adrien-Pouliot Award of the Canadian Mathematical Society for contribution to mathematics education.
Gilah Leder took up her position of Professor in the Graduate School of Education at La Trobe University at the beginning of 1994. At the beginning of 1999 she was appointed as well Director of the newly created Institute for Advanced Study at the same institution. She has previously worked at Monash University, the Secondary Teachers College (now The University of Melbourne) and at secondary schools in South Australia and Victoria. Her teaching and research interests embrace the interaction between teaching, learning and assessment of mathematics, affect, gender issues, and exceptionality. She has published widely in each of these areas.
Gilah serves on various editorial boards and educational and scientific committees and is a frequent presenter at scientific and professional meetings. She is Past President of the Mathematics Research Group of Australasia and current President of the International Group for the Psychology of Mathematics Education.
Gilah enjoys teaching, particularly at the graduate level. Trout Also Multiply, a video she produced some years ago, received a National Merit Award from the Australian Society for Educational Technology. She was named "supervisor of the year" (at Monash University) and was the supervisor of "an exemplary doctoral thesis" at La Trobe University. Gilah takes particular pleasure in her inclusion in the recently published Notable women in mathematics. A biographical dictionary (edited by Charlene Morrow and Teri Perl).
I have studied algebraic geometry at Tokyo University under Professor Kunihiko Kodaira's guidance. After my master degree, I got a position at Nagoya University as an assistant researcher and have been since then at the same university, though I have changed my positions several times. I am currently Professor at the School of Mathematics of Nagoya University. I have visited Bonn several times as a guest researcher at SFB and the Max-Planck-Institute, Mathematics Section. Hence I feel Bonn as my second home research place.
My specialty is algebraic geometry, in particular the moduli theory, in which one studies geometric properties of the so-called moduli space which parametrizes a certain geometric structure. Classically well-known examples are moduli spaces of complete curves of a fixed genus and that of polarized abelian varieties, both of which are natural generalizations of the moduli space of elliptic curves. I have studied the problem of compactifications of the moduli spaces, which has close connection to the study of degeneration in families of varieties with the given structure. I obtained a meaningful compactification of the moduli space of polarized abelian varieties, called Voronoi compactification. After that I have studied the moduli space of K3 surfaces and then the 2-dimensional quantum field theory which has a close relation to the moduli of curves.
I have been a member of the Education Subcommittee of the Mathematics Section of the Academic Council of Japan since 1993. I have been a trustee of the Mathematical Society of Japan since 1994 and always been in charge of education, except for the period April 1997 - April 1999 at which time I was the president of MSJ. I took an initiative for the MSJ to publish our opinion on mathematics education in elementary and high schools.
As a trustee of education I established a working group on college mathematics in 1994, because I found that all serious problems of mathematics education in Japan are concentrated there. From 1995 we began a systematic study on college mathematics after getting a grant from the Ministry of Education. A close investigation showed that both the environment of college math education and the math ability of college students are getting worse and that the situation is very serious. We are now studying methods to overcome this situation and to improve the college math education.
I have the project of extending our study to the whole undergraduate mathematics, including all departments where one uses mathematics heavily, e.g. physics, economics, teacher education, etc. We also want to start an international cooperation for such a study since I believe there are some common factors or tendency, although education differs very much between countries for historical reasons. I hope ICME-9 would give a good chance for such an international study.
This study is of course closely related to the math education in elementary and high schools. In Japan we shall make a study on the change of the national curriculum and on the problem of teacher education, the most important factor in keeping the level of math teachers in Japan. Here one needs a new movement of math education similar to what Perry did in England or Felix Klein in Germany in the new century.
I participated in several international meetings on math education, such as ICME-8 and EARCOME98.
I believe that my first most important duty is to contribute to the success of the coming ICME-9 as a member of the Japanese National Organizing Committee.
I was born in the Gutian County, Fujian Province of China, on January 2, 1949. My research areas in mathematics concern the representation and cohomology theory of algebraic groups and related finite groups, and the algebraic theory of quantum groups and related topics. I have received my education in mathematics at the East China Normal University (Ph.M. 1981, Ph.D. 1982). I am currently the President of East China Normal University, after having been Vice President from 1994 to 1997. I was Vice Chairman and Chairman of the Department of mathematics from 1990 to 1994. My academic title is Professor of mathematics (1991). I was a Visiting Associate Professor at the University of Virginia from January 1989 to June 1990. I am currently a member of the Executive Council of the Chinese Mathematical Society and the Deputy Director-General of the Shanghai Mathematical Society.
President of ICMI (1991-1998)
Catedrático de Análisis Matemático, Universidad Complutense de Madrid
Member of the Real Academia de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y Naturales (Madrid).
I was strongly attracted to mathematics when I started to have a flavor of the beauty of Euclidean geometry when I was 12 years old. The many happy hours I then spent with the beautiful ideas and problems in the books by F.G.M. and Rouché-Comberousse have influenced my way through mathematics to such a point that, in spite of having devoted myself later on mainly to harmonic analysis and its relatives, I have always tried to explore the intuitive and geometrical aspects of whatever I was doing. In this respect I learnt later many useful lessons from my friend and thesis advisor Alberto P. Calderón, with whom I was working at the University of Chicago (United States) for three years.
Since before I started my professional studies in mathematics I had studied philosophy both in Loyola (Basque Country, Spain) and in Munich (Germany), the many deep links of mathematics with philosophy have also attracted my attention and I think that the exploration of these connections has given my dedication to mathematics a more humanistic approach.
I have always liked to teach and to work together with students and teachers at all levels. This pleasant collaboration has been the source of many of the books, both at university and secondary level that I have written together with others.
Main works:
Jacob Palis was born in Brazil, 1940. He graduated 1962 at the Engineering School of the University of Brazil (now Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). He got the Master Degree in 1965 and the Ph.D. Degree in 1967, both at the University of California - Berkeley. He has since been a professor at the Instituto de Matemática Pura e Aplicada (IMPA), being its Director since 1993. He got a Guggenheim Post-Doctoral Fellowship in 1973, visiting Princeton, MIT and Berkeley. He has been a visitor to several others institutions around the world, like Collège de France, IHES, Univ. Paris-Sud at Orsay, ETH-Zurich, KTH-Stockholm, Univ. Warwick and Cambridge. He published about 75 papers in main mathematical journals. In the sixties, he worked on questions related to the global stability of dynamical systems. The results he has obtained with Smale led them to the formulation of a basic conjecture in the modern theory of dynamical systems, correlating the concepts of hyperbolicity and stability. The last part of the proof of this conjecture is due to one of his outstanding Ph.D. students, R. Mañé. So far, he was the adviser to 35 Ph.D. thesis of students from 10 different countries, mostly Latin-America. In this way, he contributed to the creation of a highly qualified school on dynamical systems in the region. More recently, he is dedicating himself to the study of chaotic systems, adopting a more probabilistic point of view and again providing results and global conjectures.
He has been awarded the Prizes University of Brazil (1962), Moinho Santista (1976), Third World Academy of Sciences (1989), National Brazilian Prize for Science and Technology (1990), Brazilian National Order of Scientific Merit (1994) and the Interamerican Prize for Science (1994). He is a member of the Brazilian, Indian, Chilean and the Third World Academies of Sciences and he has been awarded an honorary doctoral degree from the University of Rio de Janeiro and the University of Chile. He has been the Secretary of the International Mathematical Union, 1991-1998, and Vice-President of ICSU, from 1996 until middle 1999. He is now President of IMU until the end of 2002.
Selected Publications:
Books:
Phillip A. Griffiths, Ph.D., became the seventh Director of the Institute for Advanced Study in 1991. Prior to joining the Institute for Advanced Study, he was Provost and James B. Duke Professor of Mathematics at Duke University for eight years. From 1972-83 he was a Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University. He has also taught at Princeton University and the University of California, Berkeley. He was a Member in the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study from 1968-70.
A native of Raleigh, North Carolina, Dr. Griffiths received his Ph.D. from Princeton University. Among his professional associations, he is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, and he was a member of the National Science Board from 1991-1996. A former member of the Board of Directors of Bankers Trust New York Corporation, he currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Oppenheimer Funds. Dr. Griffiths is Secretary of the International Mathematical Union and Founding Chair of the Science Institutes Group.
Dr. Griffiths has three daughters and one son. His wife Marian is a neurologist.