Mathematics Department from 1977 to 1980
Nick Rose stepped down as department head in 1977 and the headship was turned over to Dr. James M. Ortega. Hubert Park, Associate Head of the Department, delayed his retirement for one year to assist Ortega in the administration of the department.
James M. Ortega (Photo from Archives
#UA 13.5)James M. Ortega was born in Madison, Wisconsin. He graduated from High School in Albuquerque, New Mexico and received a B.S. degree in Mathematics from the University of New Mexico in 1954. He received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1962. Dr. Ortega worked as a mathematician for the Sandia Laboratories in Albuquerque and for Belcomm in Washington, D.C. In 1961 he took a leave and served as visiting professor at the University of California in San Diego. In 1964 he joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Maryland and became professor of Computer Science, Mathematics, and Applied Mathematics in 1969.
In 1972 he was appointed director of ICASE (Institute for Computer Applications in Science and Engineering) at the NASA research center at Langley, Virginia, and in 1973 he became an adjunct professor at the College of William and Mary and at the University of Virginia. Ortega has written two books and published extensively in numerical analysis. He also directed a number of Ph.D. dissertations at Maryland and Virginia.
Because of his academic and industrial background, the department had great expectations for Ortega's tenure as department head. Ortega and the department shared the aspiration to become a nationally recognized department, particularly in applied mathematics. Somehow, in the view of some faculty, Ortega pushed too hard to have some pure mathematicians change to applied fields. There was also some disagreement between Ortega and the administration over promotions and appointments. To make a long story short, Ortega felt he did not receive sufficient backing from either the faculty or administration, and he resigned in 1979. He went on to a successful career at the University of Virginia.
Though Ortega's stay at State was brief, there were several accomplishments during his tenure. He started a Distinguished Lecturer Series, which formalized the long-standing tradition of bringing outstanding mathematicians to the campus. In the period 1977-1979, the lecturers were Felix Browder, Peter Lax, Saunders MacLane, Roger Penrose, John Milnor, Raoul Bott and Garrett Birkhoff (a very distinguished group indeed!).
Some revisions were made in the graduate programs. In the M.S. program four "core" courses (real analysis, complex analysis, linear algebra and modern algebra) were required with an additional four elective courses in mathematics and three courses in a minor field. Each student was also required to complete a written project. The Ph.D. program was made more flexible by having the written portion of a student's preliminary examination prepared and administered by the student's advisory committee (instead of a departmental committee).
When Ortega resigned in 1979, Walter Harrington was appointed Acting Head. Harrington was well respected and kept the department on an even keel while a search committee looked for a new department head.
Walter Harrington was born in 1916 in Salamanda, New York (population about 10,000) near Buffalo. He did his undergraduate and graduate work at Cornell University, getting his his Ph.D. in number theory in 1941. From Cornell he went to Penn State and got involved in Ordinance Work for the War effort. Harrington met Cell while they were both doing work at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds. In 1957 John Cell lured him away from Penn State with an offer of a full Professorship.
Walter Harrington Harrington played a significant role in getting the Ph.D. program approved. He participated actively in research and supervision of Ph.D. students. Besides serving as acting head in 1979-80, Harrington served as Assistant Head of the Department from 1976 to 1982 in overall charge of the undergraduate program and student advising.
In April of 1980, Harrington organized a ceremony to honor the winners of the Maltbie Awards. These awards are given to the six top graduate teaching assistants, based on their teaching performance. The awards were funded by a generous gift from Professor and Mrs. Maltbie. Professor Maltbie had supervised the graduate teaching assistants from 1957 until his retirement in 1979.
The Honors Program was started about 1965. Bob Winton was the first Honors Advisor, followed by John Bishir and then Lavon Page, each of them serving 5 years. Harrington appointed Sandy Paur to take over the task in 1980. In her own words, Paur said:
"Soon after I was appointed to the job, I started seeing things that needed changing, particularly in the ways students were identified and recruited for the program, and there wasn't anybody I needed to clear things with so I just did it. Then I found other things to change. At the end of 5 years, there were still a lot of things that I thought needed to be done. I was having a good time so I just didn't tell anybody that usually the Honors Advisor stepped down after 5 years. I kept finding things to fix and/or add to the program so here [I am] after 29 years."When Paur took over the program in 1980 there were about 6-7 students with one or two graduating each year. Under Paur's leadership the program prospered. By the mid 1990's membership in the program was 20-25 students and is now between 35 and 40 students with 10-12 students graduating each year. 145 students have graduated from the Honors Program since 1992. Of these 110 students went on to graduate school. 38 studied abroad, including 29 at the Budapest Semesters in Mathematics. 27 students received prestigious scholarships and fellowships including Gates, Fulbright, Ford, Goldwater and NSF awards. It is clear that, because of Sandy Paur's hard work and dedication, the Honors Program is a big success and an asset to the department. In fact, in 2008, the External Review Committee specifically cited the department "for the size and quality of the undergraduate honors program".
During the 1977-1980 period there were four additions to the facutly. Two appointments were made while Ortega was head:
Jack Silverstein got his Ph.D. from Brown University in 1975 and began his stay at State in 1978. His specialty is probability and mathematical statistics with a special interest in random matrices. He has published 45 papers and has had two Ph.D. students. Silverstein's research has been supported by the NSF. In 2007 Silverstein was elected Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics "for seminal contributions to the theory and application of random matrices."
Elmor Peterson has a Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University in 1964. He works in convex analysis and optimization. He has supervised 12 Ph.D. students at other institutions before joining NC Sate in 1979. Since then he has been advisor or co-advisor of three more Ph.D.s. Peterson has written 1 book and over 50 research publications and has served on the editorial board of SIAM 's {\it Journal on Discrete Methods}. Peterson retired in 2005.
During his caretaker year, Harrington also made two additions to the faculty:
Charles Siewert was awarded a Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 1965 and joined the faculty of the Nuclear Engineering Department at State the same year. In 1980 he was given a joint appointment with the Mathematics Department, and, in 1983, he became a full time member of the department. Siewert's research is in analytical and computational methods in particle transport theory. He has written over 250 papers and has supervised 11 students in Nuclear Engineering. His research has been supported by the NSF since 1980. He serves on the editorial board of Transport Theory and Statistical Mechanics and the Journal of Qualitative Spectroscopy and Radiative Transfer. He received the Sigma Xi Research Award in 1970, the Alumni Association Research Award in 1985 and the Outstanding Alumnus Award from the University of Michigan in 1990. Siewert retired in 2008.Jesus Rodriguez obtained a faculty appointment at NCSU after getting his Ph.D. from the University of Maryland in 1980. His research is in existence and qualitative properties of solutions to boundary value problems in differential and difference equations. Rodriquez has published over 20 papers and has supervised and two Ph.D. students. He has had research support from NSF.