March - European Mathematical Society Publishing House

Introducing Introducing
the Committee
(part 1)
Sir John Kingman (President) is the Director of the Isaac Newton Institute for
Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge, a post he has held since 2001. Cambridge was his
first university, which he left in 1965 for professorships at the Universities of Sussex and
Oxford. He was Chair of the UK Science and Engineering Research Council from 1981-
85, and then served for 16 years as Vice-Chancellor (equivalent to Rector) of the
University of Bristol.
Sir John works on probability theory and its applications to random processes in a variety
of applications, including population genetics and operational research. He became
a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1971, and has been President of both the Royal Statistical
Society and the London Mathematical Society. He also chairs the Statistics Commission,
which monitors the integrity of official statistics in the UK.
Luc Lemaire (Vice-President) received a Doctorat from the Université Libre de Bruxelles in 1975 and
a Ph.D. from the University of Warwick in 1977. From 1971 to 1982 he held a research position at the
Belgian F.N.R.S., and has been a professor at the Université Libre de Bruxelles since then. His
research interests lie in differential geometry and the calculus of variations, with a particular interest
in the theory of harmonic maps.
A former chairman of the Belgian Mathematical Society, Luc has been associated with the European
Mathematical Society since its creation in 1990, being a member of the Council from 1990 to 1997, a
member of the group on relations with European Institutions since 1990, Liaison Officer with the
European Union since 1993, Vice-President 1999, and now Chair of the General meetings committee.
Bodil Branner (Vice-President) is a professor at the Technical University of Denmark, Lyngby
(Copenhagen). She graduated from the University of Aarhus in 1967 in algebraic topology, but for
the last 20 years has concentrated on problems within dynamical systems, in particular in holomorphic
dynamics. She has been a visiting professor at Cornell University and the Université de Paris-
Sud, and a visitor at the Max-Planck-Institut für Mathematik in Bonn and the Mathematical Sciences
Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley.
Bodil has been involved in establishing the network of European Women in Mathematics from its
beginning in 1986. Since 1992 she has been a delegate of the EMS Council, representing individual
members, and has been a member of the Executive Committee since 1997. She was recently
President of the Danish Mathematical Society and a member of the Danish Natural Science Research
Council. She is currently a member of the EURESCO committee under the European Science
Foundation, representing the EMS.
Helge Holden (Secretary) was born in Oslo, Norway in 1956. He received his Ph.D. from the
University of Oslo in 1985. After a year as a postdoc at the Courant Institute in New York, he accepted
a position in Trondheim at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, where he was promoted
to full professor in 1991.
Helge’s area of research is partial differential equations. His first work was in the mathematical theory
of Schrödinger operators, and he then moved on to stochastic partial differential equations, flow
in porous media, hyperbolic conservation laws, and completely integrable systems.
He is currently Vice-President of ECMI, the European Consortium for Mathematics in Industry.
Olli Martio (Treasurer) received his Ph.D. at the University of Helsinki in 1967. He became
an Associate Professor at the University of Helsinki in 1972, a professor at the University of
Jyväskylä in 1980, and from 1993 he has been a professor and Head of Department of
Mathematics in Helsinki. He has been a visiting professor in the University of Michigan,
Norwegian Institute of Technology and Universidad Autonoma de Madrid. He has been an
editor of Mathematica Scandinavica and Acta Mathematica. he is a member of several editorial
boards and currently edits the Finnish journal Ann. Acad. Sci. Fenn. Math.
His research interests include function theory (quasiconformal maps), non-linear potential
theory and associated partial differential equations. He has organised several conferences
and edited nine international conference proceedings, starting with the Nordic
Summer School in quasiconformal mappings in Helsinki in 1971.
Olli has held various positions in the Finnish Mathematical Society. He has been the
President of the Finnish Academy of Sciences and Letters and a member of the Committee
for Natural Sciences in the Academy of Finland, as well as a member of several European
Union Scientific Panels for Mathematics. He is a honorary doctor of the Linköping Institute
of Technology, the University of Volgograd and the University of Jyväskylä, as well as a honorary
professor of the University of Brasov.
EMS NEWS
EMS March 2003 7