Dr. John E. McCarthy, Spencer T. Olin Professor of Mathematics and Statistics at Washington University in St. Louis, will visit the Texas A&M University campus this week to present three public lectures in conjunction with the R.G. Douglas Lectures, sponsored by the Department of Mathematics.
McCarthy, a champion of pure mathematics who served as chair of the Department of Mathematics and Statistics from 2016 to 2021, will present “What is non-commutative function and what is it good for?” on Monday (Nov. 13), followed by “Random commuting matrices” on Tuesday (Nov. 14) and finally “The Hardy-Weyl algebra and monomial operators” on Wednesday (Nov. 15). All three lectures are scheduled for 4 p.m. in Room 117 of the John R. Blocker Building. (See abstracts for all three presentations.)
McCarthy received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1989. He spent two years as a visiting assistant professor at Indiana University prior to joining the faculty at Washington University, where his primary research interests include operator theory, one and several complex variables, and their interaction. He is also an affiliated faculty member for neuroscience within the Division of Biology and Biomedical Sciences, where his research explores the use of mathematical techniques to improve our understanding of the development of Alzheimer’s Disease.
A fellow of the American Mathematical Society, McCarthy has served since 2018 as a member of the International Workshop on Operator Theory and Applications Steering Committee and since 2011 as cooperating editor of the Journal of Operator Theory. His research has been continuously funded by the National Science Foundation for more than three decades, along with grants from the National Institutes of Health and Department of Education. To date, he has authored hundreds of publications on both pure and applied mathematics that have appeared in various peer-reviewed academic journals and also co-authored four books. In addition to the AMS, McCarthy is a member of the Irish Mathematical Society, the Association for Women in Mathematics and the American Association of the Advancement of Science.
The Douglas Lecture Series honors longtime Texas A&M mathematician and Distinguished Professor Dr. Ronald G. Douglas, who served as a professor in the department from 1996 until his death in 2018 and as former executive vice president and provost of Texas A&M from 1996 until 2002. The annual event was established in December 2014 to bring distinguished mathematicians who work in areas similar to those pioneered by Douglas to campus each year. Fellow Texas A&M mathematicians and lifelong friends Dr. Carl Pearcy and Dr. Ciprian Foias (1933 - 2020) made the lead gifts to create the lectureship, perhaps inspired by Douglas’s and Pearcy’s contributions that were instrumental in establishing the Foias Lectures earlier that same year within the department.
For more information on any of the three events, contact the Department of Mathematics at (979) 845-7554.