Two UI mathematicians named AAAS Fellows

January 27, 2011 - 12:00am

Jan. 27, 2011 - Two University of Iowa faculty members from the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) Department of Mathematics have been awarded the distinction of 2010 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the world's largest general scientific society and publisher of the journal Science.

The two new AAAS Fellows are:

  • Raúl E. Curto, Ph.D., UI professor of mathematics from 1987 to present, CLAS Collegiate Fellow and CLAS executive associate dean.
  • Philip C. Kutzko, Ph.D., UI professor of mathematics from 1979 to present, and CLAS Collegiate Fellow.

The two UI recipients are among 503 members awarded the honor by the AAAS because of their scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications. The new Fellows will be honored in February at the 2011 AAAS Annual Meeting in Washington, D.C.

Curto was recognized for distinguished contributions to the field of multivariable operator theory, particularly in spectral theory, model theory, joint hyponormality and subnormality, and truncated moment problems. Curto, who received his doctorate in mathematics from SUNY at Stony Brook, N.Y., in 1978, joined the UI in 1981. His research focuses on branches of mathematics that seek to explain various concepts arising in quantum mechanics, geophysics, statistics, image recognition, spectral analysis, and economics. Curto places special emphasis on inverse problems, where the values of some model parameters are obtained from observed data.

Kutzko was recognized for outstanding contributions to representation theory and for leadership in establishing a national network of faculty and institutions promoting a simple premise: mathematics is for all. Kutzko, who received his doctorate in mathematics from the University of Wisconsin at Madison in 1972, joined the UI in 1974. He is the recipient of a prestigious 2009 Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring. Kutzko’s research focuses the representation theory of p-adic groups with applications to number theory.

The nonprofit AAAS (www.aaas.org) was founded in 1848 and includes 262 affiliated societies and academies of science, serving 10 million individuals. Its journal, Science (www.sciencemag.org), has the largest paid circulation of any peer-reviewed general science journal in the world, with an estimated total readership of one million. AAAS hosts a website, EurekAlert!, at http://www.eurekalert.org.