Andrews Named President of American Mathematical Society
George E. Andrews, Evan Pugh professor of mathematics, has been elected president of the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He was elected by his peers in the 30,000-member group and will take office in 2009 after serving one year as president-elect.
Andrews’s research centers on number theory and on the theory of partitions and their applications to statistical mechanics and computer science. He is an authority on the work of Srinivasa Ramanujan, the Indian mathematician of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, who is considered to be one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of all time. Andrews is collaborating on a multi-volume study of Ramanujan’s lost notebook, which Andrews discovered in the Trinity College Library at Cambridge in 1976. The first volume of this study was published in June 2005.
A member of the Penn State faculty since 1964, Andrews was named Evan Pugh professor of mathematics in 1981. He served as chair of the department from 1980 to 1982 and from 1995 to 1997, and he is currently the department’s associate chair for faculty development. During his tenure at Penn State, Andrews has served as thesis advisor for 18 doctoral and 13 masters degree recipients and he currently advises 4 doctoral students.
Andrews earned his doctorate in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, and his bachelors and masters degrees at Oregon State University in 1960.
Among his many honors and awards are the Allegheny Region Distinguished Teaching Award from the Mathematical Association of America and the Centennial Award from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania, which he received "in recognition of contributions to pure mathematics and ... mathematical education.” He recently was named as one of three finalists for Baylor University's 2008 Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, the single largest award given to an individual for exceptional teaching. Andrews has been awarded honorary degrees by the University of Waterloo in Canada, the University of Florida, and the University of Parma in Italy. He was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 2003 and to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1997. He also has been awarded a Guggenheim fellowship and a Fulbright scholarship.