To all members of ISIMM
1. STAMM XIV near Frankfurt 2004 (8/22 - 8/28)
The next STAMM meeting will be organized by Professor Kolumban
Hutter (Darmstadt). The dates are chosen so as to cover the
week immediately after the IUTAM Congress in Warsaw. That congress is
sure to be visited by many scientists from all over the world. Thus
ISIMM members, who visit the Warsaw event from overseas, may decide
to add a week to their stay in Europe and attend the STAMM
meeting.
The venue will be the Lufthansa training centre in
Seeheim-Jugenheim which is in the close neighbourhood of the
Frankfurt airport and connected to it by a regular direct bus ride of
approximately ½ hour.
Because of these favourable
conditions as to time and place we hope that STAMM 2004 will become a
popular event among ISIMM members.
2. New Elections
Despite electronic mail and the world-wide web it has proved to be
difficult for the nomination committeee to decide on the names of the
candidates for the executive committee and of the candidates for
president and secretary.
Now, however, the names on the
ballots are nearly complete and you will be asked to vote within the
next few weeks. We apologize for the delay.
3. New members
Professor Tomas Roubicec from the Mathematical Institute of the
Charles University in Prague has been nominated for membership by
Prof. A. Mielke in Stuttgart.
The nomination has been
seconded by Professors K. Rajagopal (College Station) and I. Müller
(Berlin) and has been approved by those members – a majority – of
the executive committee who deigned to answer the request.
Therefore
we welcome Professor Roubicec into ISIMM.
We remind you that
the list
of members of ISIMM is part of the ISIMM homepage.
4. Honorary members
As you may recall the constitution of ISIMM permits members to be
promoted to honorary membership upon their 70th birthday. It has been
our pleasure to convey this new status to three of our illustrious
members. They are
Prof. R.N. Knops
(Edinburgh)
Prof. S. Rionero
(Napoli)
Prof. P. Villaggio
(Pisa).
We wish all three of the new honorary
members many years of continued success in their scientific
endeavours.
5. Book series
Due to the initiative of our publication committee the
long-standing plans of the Society for the publication of a series of
books has come to fruition.
The series will be
called
“Interaction of Mechanics and Mathematics Series”
(IMM)
and will be published by Springer Heidelberg.
In
the publication agreement it says that the series will “cover
advanced textbooks and introductory scientific monographs in English
language. The authors should be distinguished specialists with
international reputation in their field of expertise”.
Professor
Lev Truskinovsky has signed the agreement on behalf of the Society.
He is also the editor of the series and he should be approached by
members who wish to contribute.
We hope and trust that the
series will be successful and that in due time it should reflect the
progress of our subject which is the promotion of the mutual
interaction of mathematics and mechanics.
We shall keep you
informed about the development of the series in this newsletter when
the first contracts are signed.
6. Obituary
Jindřich Nečas, 1929 – 2002.
On
Dec.5, 2002, Professor Jindřich Nečas, the honorary ISIMM member,
passed away in DeKalb, Illinois, USA, losing his long-lasting battle
with cancer.
In his rich academic carrier, he
educated a great number of students and had dozens of dedicated
collaborators and followers in Europe and America. He is the founder
of the Czech school of partial differential equations built in a
close link with the schools in France, Germany, Italy, and
Russia.
Born in Prague on Dec.12, 1929, he grew
up at Mělník, a small town in Bohemia where his family ran a
pub. He studied mathematics at the Charles University in Prague,
graduating in 1952, and started his research activities as the first
PhD student of Professor Ivo Babuška in the Mathematical Institute
of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in Prague, receiving a
PhD-degree in 1957. In 1967, he was appointed external head of the
Department of Mathematical Analysis at the Faculty of Mathematics and
Physics of the Charles University in Prague. Later on, in 1971, he
joined this Faculty on a regular basis. Since 1993, he shared a
professor position at the Northern Illinois University in DeKalb, and
worked and gave lectures at both Prague and DeKalb as long as the
state of his health allowed him to commute between the Czech Republic
and the USA. All the time he sought (and found) collaborators also
among physicists and mechanical engineers. In 1987, he founded a
vital MS/PhD-programme "Mathematical and computational modelling
in physics and engineering" at the Charles University.
He is the (co)author of 8 monographs and about two hundred papers.
His main interests ranged over modern methods in linear and later
especially nonlinear partial differential equations, regularity
theory (related with Hilbert's 19th problem), calculus of variations,
nonlinear spectral theory, and nonlinear functional analysis. In the
context of ISIMM, one should mention his permanent interest in
applications of mathematics in continuum mechanics and thermodynamics
of solids and fluids, namely in problems of elasto-plasticity,
hardening, contact problems, Coulomb friction, transsonic potential
flows and flows of non-Newtonian incompressible fluids. During his
last years, he conceptually dreamt about what he called "living
fluids" that might have universal applications in biology with
possible ambitions to explain the origin of life. The central theme
of his activity during the last decade was an attempt to answer
(affirmatively or not) the "hot" question about regularity
and uniqueness or blow-up of solutions of the Navier-Stokes
equations.
As a person, Professor Nečas loved
people and loved mathematics. This is a simple and condensed truth
about him. These deep involvements ultimately led him to constant
dedication to organize Czech mathematics, which, however, was not
possible without being engaged politically during the period 1948-89
in Czechoslovakia. After the Soviet-led invasion of Czechoslovakia in
1968, his left-wing orientation and engagement got him into a
conflict with the new pro-Soviet regime. As a consequence, during
1969-1989 he was denied a full professorship and free travelling to
Western countries, and his contacts abroad were restricted. This, of
course, immediately changed after 1989, and he become soon a full
professor at the Charles University, received a honoris-causa
doctorate from the Technical University Dresden, Germany (1991), the
"Presidential research professor" award at the Northern
Illinois University (1996), and the state prize of the Czech Republic
from President Václav Havel (1998). He succeeded to be active
up to his very end: even during the last 2 days before his final
transport to a hospital in DeKalb, he nearly did not sleep because of
writing his last notes concerning the blow-up mentioned above. He
died a week before his 73 birthday. The mathematical community lost a
charismatic person and an outstanding mathematician, many of us lost
a friendly colleague and an excellent teacher. A commemorative
web-page has been established at
http://www.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/memories/necas.
Jan
Kratochvíl and Tomáš Roubíček
May 2003.
7. Web-page
Apart from this Newsletter we try to keep our members informed
about topics of interest in our
web-page
http://www.thermodynamik.tu-berlin.de/isimm/index.html
Please
check this page from time to time for information.
Ingo Müller and Krzysztof Wilmanski
created July 30, 2003, by A.Musolff
last July 30, 2003.
URL
http://www.thermodynamik.tu-berlin.de/isimm