Jonathan D.H. Smith, professor of mathematics, was recognized at the American Mathematical Society’s fall central sectional meeting with two special sessions in honor of his 70th birthday. The meeting was held September 14 and 15 in Madison, Wisconsin.
The special session on quasigroups and loops was organized by two of Smith’s 21 former doctoral students, J.D. Phillips (Ph.D. ’92) and Petr Vojtechovsky (Ph.D. ’01).
Sung Yell Song, associate professor of mathematics, and Kenneth Johnson, professor of mathematics at Penn State University and Smith’s long-time collaborator, planned the special session on association schemes and related topics.
Along with his work in the two areas of the special sessions, Smith’s expertise includes the development of mathematical models for complex and biological systems. The models are simplified by using appropriate space and time parameters intrinsic to each level of the system, and by taking the most random models possible, subject to constraints imposed from the user’s knowledge and required level of detail.