Chemerda Lectures in Science Scheduled for 5 to 8 February

31 January 2007—Robert V. Kohn, professor of mathematics at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, will present the 2007 John M. Chemerda Lectures in Science from 5 to 8 February 2007 on the Penn State University Park campus. The first lecture, titled "Energy-Driven Pattern Formation," is intended for a general audience and will take place at 8:00 p.m. on Monday, 5 February, in 114 McAllister Building. These free public lectures are sponsored by the Penn State Eberly College of Science.

Kohn also will give three more specialized lectures as part of this series. The remaining lectures will take place in 114 McAllister Building, and include:

• "Bounds on Coarsening Rates, with Examples from Materials", at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 6 February,
• "The Evolution of a Crystalline Surface Below the Roughening Temperature," at 4:00 p.m. on Wednesday, 7 February, and
• "The Internal Structure of a Cross-Tie Wall: An Example of Magnetic Pattern Formation" at 2:30 p.m. on Thursday, 8 February.

Kohn is a world-renowned expert on nonlinear partial differential equations and on non-convex variational problems. His research focuses mainly on the analysis of mathematical models in materials science. He studies coarsening due to energy-driven motion, micromagnetics, pattern formation due to energy minimization, shape-memory materials, and surface energy as a selection mechanism. He also is interested in quantitative finance, and is among the leaders of the Mathematics in Finance Masters Program at the Courant Institute.

Kohn's work was recognized with the Ralph E. Kleinman Award from the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) in 1999. He was selected as a Plenary Speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians (ICM) in 2006 and at the International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) in 2007. He is active on the editorial boards of Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, Interfaces and Free Boundaries, Mathematical Modeling and Numerical Analysis, Multiscale Modeling and Simulation, Progress in Nonlinear Differential Equations and Their Applications, Structural Optimization, the Springer Series on Interdisciplinary and Applied Mathematics, and the Proceedings A of the Royal Society of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom.

Kohn received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Harvard University in 1974, a master's degree in mathematics from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom in 1975, and a doctoral degree in mathematics from Princeton University in 1979. He was a postdoctoral fellow at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 1979 to 1981, when he joined the faculty there. He was promoted to professor of mathematics in 1988.

The John M. Chemerda Lectures in Science are named in honor of John M. Chemerda, a member of the Penn State Class of 1935. For more information or access assistance, contact Florence Dunlop in the Department of Mathematics at (814) 865-8462.

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