Liz Jessup is associate professor of Computer Science at the University of Colorado at Boulder (CU). She joined the faculty in 1989 after earning her Ph.D. in computer science from Yale University. In 1990-91, she spent one year in residence at Oak Ridge National Laboratory as an Alston S. Householder Fellow in Scientific Computing. Liz's research interests are in the design, analysis, and implementation of algorithms and efficient software for matrix algebra problems. Her present work focuses on developing memory-efficient algorithms for solving sparse linear systems.Liz has also been actively involved in undergraduate education, beginning with her role as co-developer of an award-winning, NSF-funded undergraduate curriculum in high-performance scientific computing. She has since created a linear algebra course with computer science applications designed to illustrate the importance of linear algebra to math-reluctant computer science majors. Most recently, she has worked with the Institute for Women and Technology to expand its Virtual Development Center to CU. The primary activity of CU's center is a project-based course in which students provide computational solutions to problems confronting local social service organizations.
Harold P. Boas, the son of two university professors (a physicist and a mathematician), was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois. His earliest childhood memory is working out the product of 12 times 12. As a teenager, he played on Evanston Township High School's national championship chess team. After earning degrees from Harvard and MIT, he taught for four years at Columbia University before taking a position at Texas A&M University, where he is a professor of mathematics.His research publications mainly concern the theory of functions of several complex variables. In 1995, he and his collaborator Emil J. Straube were jointly awarded the Stefan Bergman prize for their work on the multi-dimensional Cauchy-Riemann equations.
He believes that a mathematician's role in teaching--construed broadly as the effective communication of mathematical knowledge--extends beyond the classroom. His activities in this direction include service on the editorial board of the Carus Monograph series of the Mathematical Association of America and editorship of the Notices of the American Mathematical Society.