Rice University | News & Media

4/27/2000 12:12:00 AM

Richard Tapia Honored Through Cornell Lecture Series

Cornell University is establishing a lecture series to honor Richard Tapia, the Noah Harding Professor of Computational and Applied Mathematics, and David Blackwell, professor emeritus of mathematics at the University of California-Berkeley, two of the nation's most eminent mathematicians.

The lecture series will provide a forum for the research of African-American, Latino and American Indian scientists working in the fields of mathematical and statistical sciences.

On May 7 and 8, a conference will be held on the Cornell campus to inaugurate the David Blackwell and Richard Tapia Distinguished Lecture Series in the Mathematical and Statistical Sciences.

Tapia and Blackwell will attend the event, which will conclude with a banquet in their honor.

"I am happy that Cornell is making this bold move to have a lecture series highlighting underrepresented minorities," Tapia said. "I also am honored to be in the company of such an incredibly respected individual as David Blackwell."

The inaugural events will begin on May 7 with an evening reception and a lecture by Persi Diaconis, professor of mathematics at Stanford University.

The May 8 program includes six talks by prominent researchers in the fields of statistics and applied mathematics and 12 short lectures by graduate students and postdoctoral researchers, with strong minority representation. The speakers will include two recent Rice graduates, Leticia Valasquez and John Rodriguez.

James Donaldson, dean of arts and sciences at Howard University, and Margaret Wright, head of the scientific computing research department at Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies, were selected to speak at the banquet about Tapia and Blackwell's contributions to mathematics, including the education of blacks and Latinos.

The program is the initiative of Don Randel, provost of Cornell; Robert Harris Jr., vice provost for diversity and faculty development at Cornell and professor of Africana studies; and Carlos Castillo-Chavez, director, Mathematical and Theoretical Biology Institute at Cornell and professor of biomathematics.

The lecture series, which will provide an honorarium of $1,000 for the guest lecturer, is being established with the encouragement of Cornell President Hunter Rawlings.

Tapia, who received his doctorate from the University of California-Los Angeles, in 1992 became the first native-born Hispanic to be inducted into the National Academy of Engineering. He has contributed to mathematical optimization theory and iterative methods for nonlinear problems. His current research is in the area of algorithms for constrained optimization problems and interior-point methods for linear and nonlinear programming.

With Tapia's help, Rice's computational and applied mathematics department has become a national leader in promoting women and underrepresented minority Ph.D. recipients in the mathematical sciences. His recent honors and awards include: Lifetime Mentor Award, American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1998; appointment to the National Science Board by President Clinton, 1996; and the Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics and Engineering Mentoring Program, 1996.

Blackwell completed his graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1941. He has contributed to several areas of mathematics: set theory, measure theory, probability theory, statistics, game theory and dynamic programming. His name is attached to a theorem in statistics, the Rao-Blackwell theorem, which is important in estimation theory and tests of hypotheses. He is an author of the classic book "Theory of Games and Statistical Decisions." He is the recipient of numerous honors and awards.