UD conference honors noted math professor
More than 50 mathematicians from around the world attend a special conference honoring George C. Hsiao, Carl Rees Professor of Mathematics at UD.
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10:38 a.m., Aug. 10, 2009----Some 50 mathematicians from across the country and around the world gathered at the University of Delaware from Aug. 7-9 for a conference held in honor of the 75th birthday of George C. Hsiao, the Carl Rees Professor of Mathematics at UD. Hsiao is internationally recognized for his pioneering contributions to the analysis of boundary integral equations (BIEs).

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The conference, Advances in Boundary Integral Equations and Related Topics, was an international event, with speakers and organizing committee members representing at least 10 countries. Talks focused on recent developments in the analysis, computation and application of BIEs.

“It was an honor for me to be co-organizer of this meeting,” said Pam Cook, professor of math and associate dean in the College of Engineering at UD. “The meeting celebrated and highlighted Dr. Hsiao's career, the breadth of his research, his students and his internationally recognized research program. George has been a valuable resource for the University, the department and especially for our graduate students whom he has actively mentored and supervised.”

“George Hsiao has a distinguished career as a pioneer in the analysis of BIEs and their discretization strategies,” said Provost Tom Apple, who welcomed attendees to the conference. “Over the course of nearly 50 years, he has published a prolific body of work and collected an incredible array of awards, ranging from the University of Delaware's prestigious Alison Award to the world-renowned Humboldt Fellowships.”

But Hsiao is noted for more than just an impressive list of publications and awards. “He has also been an outstanding teacher and mentor,” said Nilima Nigam, who is now a faculty member in the Department of Mathematics at Simon Fraser University in Canada. “He energetically and enthusiastically encourages his students to become scholars in the fullest sense of the word.”

Nigam recalls being concerned when a group of graduate students was missing from the main area at a conference being held at the Banff Centre in Alberta, Canada. “We were in the middle of the Canadian Rockies in the dead of winter,” she says. “Where could they possibly have vanished to? Of course, to a small meeting room, where George was patiently explaining the foundations of acoustic scattering. None of these students had ever met George before the conference, but in typical style, he reached out and made the effort to engage them. I recently met one of these young students, who said George's off-the-cuff exposition was the highlight of his trip.”

Born in Shanghai, Hsiao is an engineering graduate of National Taiwan University. He received his master's degree in civil engineering from the Carnegie Institute of Technology and his doctorate in mathematics from Carnegie-Mellon University. He joined the UD faculty in 1969.

The author of more than 150 papers on mathematics, applied mechanics, oceanic environment, rheology and biomedical engineering, Hsiao has given invited lectures worldwide and is the coauthor of Maple Projects for Differential Equations; Water Waves and Ship Hydrodynamics: An Introduction; Boundary-field Equation Methods for a Class of Nonlinear Problems; and Boundary Integral Equations.

Support for the Hsiao conference was provided by the UD Department of Mathematical Sciences and the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.

Article by Diane Kukich
Photo by Doug Baker

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