Cornell Mathematics Doctorates, 1970-1979


From Cornell: A History 1940-2015 by Glenn C. Altschuler and Isaac Kramnick: In 1974, Corson and the Board of Trustees announced the first balanced endowed budget in eight years. But good time were fleeting, as rampant inflation and a dramatic decline in the stock market hit Cornell in 1974 and 1975. Cornell's endowment dropped from $318 million to $271 million. The State of New York cut back $3.3 million in payments to Cornell in 1974, resulting in the loss of ninety jobs. Corson returned to gloom and doom. "Since 1965 I have not seen a situation so uncertain and so potentially serious as the one we face right now" he noted, even though he understood that "the whole Campus is tired of hearing about troubles".

The Johnson Museum of Arts was built in 1973 near White Hall.

The Mathematics Department was hit hard during the budget cuts of seventies but the graduate program produced one hundred seventeen Ph.D.s during that decade, a record. Only eleven of the recipients were women. Thirty nine different faculty supervised these doctorates. The most active faculty during this decade were Anil Nerode (13), Leonard Gross (12), Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg (8), Frank Spitzer (7), and Clifford Earle and Harry Kesten (6).


1970 (17 doctorates)


Leonard Edward Adelson

Title: Singular Perturbations in a Class of Improperly Posed Problems. Advisor: Lawrence Payne. Career: North Adams State College, Massachusetts.

Donald Alvin Alton

Title: Uniformities in Recursively Enumerable Sets. Advisor:Anil Nerode. Career: University of Iowa.

Woodrow Dale Brownawell

Title: Some Transcendence Results for the Exponential Function. Advisor: Stephen H. Schanuel and George Stewart Rinehart. Career: Pennsylvania State University.

William Henry Cutler

Title: Negligibilty and Deficiency in Frechet Manifolds. Advisor: David Henderson. Career: Louisiana State University.

Ross Geoghegan

Title: Topological and Simplicial Properties of Function-Spaces, and a Stability Theorem for Spaces of Homeomorphisms and Embeddings. Advisor: David Henderson. Career: State University of New york, Binghamton.

Victor Wayne Goodman

Title: Regularity Properties of Harmonic Functions on Hilbert Space. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Indiana University.

J. Stephen (John) Halperin

Title: Real Cohomology and Smooth Transformation Groups. Advisor: Hsien Chung Wang. Career: University of Toronto; Universidad de Málaga.

Paul Chester Kainen

Title: Universal Coefficient Theorems and Weak Adjoint Functors. Advisor: Peter Hilton. Career: Case Western Reserve University.

Linda Almgren Kime

Title: On Purely Inseparable Field Extensions: the Diagram of an Extension and Modular Extensions of Unbounded Exponent. Advisor: Moss Sweedler. Career: University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Hui-Hsiung Kuo

Title: Integration Theory on Infinite Dimensional Manifolds. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Louisiana State University.

Robert Alan Morris

Title: The Reciprocity Isomorphisms of Class Field Theory. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Kenneth Wilfred Newman

Title: Topics in the Theory of Irreducible Hopf Algebras. Advisor: Stephen Chase. Career: University of Massachusetts, Boston.

Brian Kenneth O'Byrne

Title:On Finsler Geometry and Applications to Teichmüller Spaces. Advisor: Clifford Earle. Career: unknow.

Loyal Taylor Ollman

Title: Operators on Models. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Financial Industry.

Michael Allen Selby

Title: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions to Insure that a Certain Intrinsic Metric Is Complete. Wolfgang Fuchs. Career: University of Windsor, Ontario.

Robert David Speiser

Title: Cohomology Dimension and Abelian Varieties. Advisor: Robin Cope Hartshorn and Stephen Lichtenbaum. Career: Brigham Young University.

Samuel Stanfield Wagstaff

Title: On Infinite Matroids. Advisor: Oscar Rothaus. Career: Purdue University.


1971 (16 doctorates)


Manju Mathur Bewtra

Title: Double Centralizer Theorems for Algebras. Advisor: Stephen Chase. Career: Carnegie Mellon University.

Paul Jude Campbell

Title: Suslin Logic. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Beloit College.

I-Lok Chang

Title: I. Value Distribution of Lacunary Power Series and Lacunary Fourier Series II. Analytic Continuation of a Class of Functions. Advisor: Wolfgang Fuchs. Career: The American University.

Patrick W. Darko

Title: L(p)-Estimates of the Partial d-bar Operator and Sections with Growth. Advisor: Clifford Earle. Career: University of Delaware.

Alan Hetherington Durfee

Title: Diffeomorphism Classification of Isolated Hypersurface Singularities. Advisor: Peter Kahn. Career: Mount Holyoke College. Son of William H. Durfee, Ph.D. 1943, grandson of Walter H. Durfee, Ph.D. 1930, great-grandson of William Pitt Durfee who earned his Ph.D. at Johns Hopkins under of J.J. Sylvester in 1883.

Harvey Jerome Iglarsh

Title: Regularity For The Initial-boundary Value Problem For The Heat Equation In Infinite Dimensions. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Georgetown University.

Sandria Neidus Kerr

Title: Infinite Dimensional Manifolds Modeled On Abstract Wiener Spaces. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Winston-Salem State University.

Ilan Kozma

Title: Some Relations Between Semigroups of Polyhedra. Advisor: Peter Hilton. Career: Weizmann Institute of Science.

George Metakides

Title: Some Results in Metalogic. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Rochester University; University of Patras.

Richard Steven Millman

Title: Complex Structures on Real Product Bundles with Applications to DIfferential Geometry. Advisor: Hsien Chung Wang. Career: Michigan Technological University.

Sampson Akuoko Opoku

Title: On Spaces of Topologically Trivial Holomorphic Principal (Complex Plane)C*-Bundles Over Compact Riemann Surfaces of Genus G G.E.1. Advisor: Clifford Earle. Career:

Youichi Saigusa

Title: On Locally Symmetric Spaces of Arithmetic Type. Advisor: Howard Garland. Career: Kobe University.

Bjorn Schellenberg

Title:The Group of Homotopy Self-Equivalences of some Compact CW-Complexes. Advisor: Paul Olum. Career: College of Mount Saint Vincent Riverdale, NY.

Alan David Sloan

Title: The Relativistic Polaron Without Cutoffs In Two Space Dimensions. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Georgia Institute of Technology; Co-founder of Iterated Systems Inc.; Developed fractal image compression algorithms.

Martin Sternstein

Title: Necessary and Sufficient Conditions For Homotopy Classification by Cohomology and Homotopy Homomorphisms. Advisor: Paul Olum. Career: Ithaca College.

John Brendam Sullivan

Title: The Classification of Hopf Algebras with Integrals. Advisor: Moss Sweedler. Career: University of Washington.


1972 (13 doctorates)

Rudolf Friedrich Beyl

Title: The Classification of Metacyclic p-Groups, and otherApplications of Homological Algebra to Group Theory. Advisor: Peter Hilton. Career: University of Heidelberg.

George Frederick Feissner

Title: A Gaussian Measure Analog to Sobolev's Inequality. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: State University of New York, Cortland.

Clayton Roy Lewis

Title: On Algebraic Tori over Local and Global Fields. Advisor: Stephen Lichtenbaum Career: University of New Brunswick; unknown.

Robert Duncan Little

Title: A Relation Between Obstructions and Functional Cohomology Operations. Advisor: Paul Olum. Career: University of Hawaii.

Lidia Raquel Luquet

Title: p-Norm Inequalities for Entire Functions. Advisors: Wolfgang Fuchs and Harold Widom. Career: Saint Mary's College of California.

Leon Paul Polek

Title: Lattices of Nilpotent Lie Groups and a Duality for Nilpotent Lie Algebras. Advisor: Hsien Chung Wang. Career: Rutgers University, Camden;?

Sally Riedel Sievers

Title: Topics in Ranking-Procedures. Advisor: Jack Kiefer. Career: Wells College.

Frederick Charles Solomon

Title: Random Walks in a Random Environment. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: Warren Wilson College.

Ellen Rose Stone

Title: Involutions on Manifolds. Advisor: Roger Livesay. Career: Software Engineer; Treasurer, Health Freedom Action Massachusetts, Inc.

Domingo Toledo

Title: The Atiyah-Bott Formula for Isolated Fixed Points. Advisor: James Eels and Roger Livesay. Career: University of Utah.

Richard Clinton Vile, Jr.

Title: A Spectral Sequence for Cofibrations and Applications to the Computation of Pontryagin Algebras of Loop-Spaces. Advisor: Roger Livesay. Career: BNR, Inc.; Principal Software Engineer at SunGard Data Management.< /p>

John Frederick Yeagley

Title: Locally Strongly Separable Algebras over Connected Commutative Rings. Advisor: Stephen Chase. Career: York College of Pennsylvania.

Robert Zarrow

Title: Symmetric and Quasi-Symmetric Riemann Surfaces. Clifford Earle. Career: Northern Illinois University.

1973 (12 doctorates)


Jairo Ivan Alvarez

Title: The Riesz Decomposition Theorem For Distributions On A Wiener Space. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Governmental Administration, Colombia.

Christopher John Atkin

Title: Filtrations of Banach Manifolds. Advisor: James Eells. Career: Victoria University of Wellington.

Thomas Curtis Craven

Title: Witt Rings and Orderings of Fields. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: University of Hawaii.

John David Emerson

Title: Simple Points of an Affine Algebraic Variety. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Middlebury College.

Eugene Hamilton

Title: The Infinitely Renormalized Field In The Scalar Field Model. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Washington College.

Richard Elam Heisey

Title: Manifolds Modelled on R^(infinity) or Bounded Weak-* Topologies. Advisor: David Henderson. Career: Vanderbilt University.

Vasanti Arun Jategaonkar

Title: Tiled Orders. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Fordham University.

Elyahu Katz

Title: Free-Groups and Co-Products in Topological Categories, and their Application to Principal Fiber Bundles and Principal Co-Fiber Bundles. Advisor: Israel Berstein. Career: University of Guelph, Ontario, Bar Ilan University.

Chamond M. Liu

Title: Cohomology of Locally-Compact Groups. Advisor: Hsien Chung Wang. Career: Fordham University; IBM.

Pierre Jean Malraison, Jr.

Title: Homotopy Associative Categories and Homotopy Equivalences of Categories. Advisor: Jonathan Mock Beck. Career: Autodesk, Inc.; PJM Consulting, LLC.

Kenneth Ira Mandelberg

Title: Quadratic Forms over Semi-local Rings, Amitsur Cohomology and the Brauer Group. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Emory University.

Wesley Eugene Terry

Title: On Equivalent Product Structures and Classification of Keller Retracts. Advisor: David Henderson. Career: New Mexico State University; SUNY Cortland.


1974 (13 doctorates)


James Orvis Berger

Title: Admissibility in Location Parameter Problems. Advisor: Lawrence Brown. Career: Purdue University; Duke University.

Edward Franklin Eisenberg

Title: Effective Isomorphisms of Algebraic Systems. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Massachussetts Institute of Technology; Physician, specialties psychiatry and anesthesiology.

Philip William Lavori

Title: Recursion in Extended Objects of Finite Type. Advisor: Richard Platek and Anil Nerode. Career: Professor of Biomedical Data Sciences, Stanford School of Medicine.

Chao-Chu Liang

Title: Involutions on Homotopy Spheres and Their Gluing Diffeomorphisms. Advisor: Roger Livesay. Career: University of Kansas; ?

Kenneth Gordon Logan

Title: Time Reversible Evolutions in Statistical Mechanics. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: unknown.

Leon Stagg Newman, Jr.

Title: One-Point Compactifications of Hilbert Cube Manifold Factors and Infinite Mapping Cylinders. Advisor: James West. Career: Bell Labs; Chief Technologist, FCC and McKinsey and Company.

Thomas John O'Malley

Title: Advisor: Hsien Chung Wang. Career: University of Mount Union.

Gabriel Michael Obi

Title: L^p Spaces with Continuously Mixed Norms with Application to Hypercontractive Semigroups. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: Computer Professionals Registration Council of Nigeria.

Jeffrey Brian Remmel

Title: Co-recursively Enumerable Structures. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: University of California San Diego.

Robert Joseph Stanton

Title: On Mean Convergence of Fourier Series on Compact Lie Groups. Advisor: Anthony Knapp. Career: The Ohio State University.

Richard Leslie Thompson

Title: Equilibrium States on Thin Energy Shells. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: State University of New York, Bingharnton; Founding member of the Bhaktivedanta Institute, the scientific branch of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness.

Peter Anthony Tomas

Title: On Radial Fourier Multipliers. Advisor: Anthony Knapp. Career: The University of Texas, Austin.

Graham Hilton Toomer

Title: Lusternik-Schnirelmann Category and the Moore Spectral Sequence. Advisor: Israel Berstein. Career: Ohio State University; ?


1975 (6 doctorates)


Subinoy Chakravarty

Title:The Set Where a Transcendental Entire Function is Large and an Allied Problem. Advisor: Wolfgang Fuchs. Career: Research Consultant.

Susan Carol Geller

Title: On the GE(sub n) of a Ring and Some New Algebraic K-Groups. Advisor: Stephen Chase. Career: Texas A&M University.

Roy Johnson King

Title: Stochastic Integrals And Metadistributions: Applications To Stochastic Partial Differential Equations And Quantum Field Theory. Advisor: Leonard Gross and Kiyosi Ito. Career: Associate Professor (Psychiatry) Stanford University.

Marco Fidel Suarez

Title: Galois Cohomology in Dedekind Domains. Advisor: Shankar Sen. Career: unknown.

David Louis Tanny

Title:On Branching Processes in Random Environments. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: York University.

Stuart Sui-Sheng Wang

Title: Separable Algebras and Free Cubic Extensions over Commutative Rings. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Oakland University.


1976 (14 doctorates)


Joanne Rose Bogart

Title: Ring Extensions, Separable and Purely Inseparable, and Wedderburn Specters. Advisor: Moss Sweedler. Career: Software Developer, Research at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory.

Bonnie Gold

Title: Compact and w-compact formulas in Lw1%2Cw. Advisor: Michael Morley. Career: Monmouth University.

David S. Griffeath

Title: Coupling Methods for Markov Processes. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: University of Wisconsin.

Alan Kenneth Jones

Title: Path Spaces which are Hilbert Cube Manifolds. Advisor: James West. Career: University of Oklahoma; Boeing Company.

Iraj Kalantari

Title: Structural Properties of the Lattice of Recursively Enumerable Subspaces. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: University of Western Illinois.

Jerrold Lewis Kleinstein

Title: Abstract Witt Rings. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: State University of New York at Stony Brook; ?

Thomas Madison Lamm

Title: A Dual Reciprocity Map for Local Fields. Advisor: Stephen Lichtenbaum. Career: Berea College, KY.

Alan David MacDermot

Title: A Lattice Approximation To The Y2 Euclidean Quantum Field Theory And A Correlation Inequality. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: System Engineer, IBM.

Terrence Staples Millar

Title: Theory of Recursively Presented Models. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: University of Wisconsin.

Allen Theodore Retzlaff

Title: Recursive and Simple Vector Spaces. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Senior Scientist Baxter Labs of Xerox Corp., Rochester.

David Alan Riffelmacher

Title: Three Partial Orders Arising from Multiplication Alternation by Two Cycles. Advisor: Moss Sweedler. Career: Bell Laboratories.

Grant Alden Ritter

Title: Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: University of Florida.

Alexander Sze

Title: On the Values of L-Functions at Negative Integers. Advisor: Stephen Lichtenbaum. Career: Massachusetts Inslitute of Technology; Administrator, Concordia College.

Michael C. Venning

Title: The Structure of Aleph-zero Categorical Structures. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Physician, New York City.


1977 (12 doctorates)


Maury Daniel Bramson

Title: Maximal Displacement of Branching Brownian Motion. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: University of Minnesota. Speaker at the 1994 International Congress of Mathematicians in Zurich.

Ching-Shui Cheng

Title: Optimal Designs for the Elimination of Heterogeneity. Advisor: Jack Kiefer. Career: University of California Berkeley.

Karel Ehrlich

Title: Finiteness Obstruction of Fiber Spaces. Advisor: Peter Kahn and Israel Berstein. Career: Director, AT&T Laboratories.

Lawrence F. Gray

Title: Controlled Spin-Flip Systems. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: University of Minnesota.

Kanji Ichihara

Title: Some Global Properties of Symmetric Diffusion Processes. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: Meijo University.

Steven Arthur Kalikov

Title: Generalized Random Walk in a Random Environment. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: University of Memphis.

Aurel Kleinerman

Title: Limit Theorems for Infinitely Divisible Random Fields. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: Founder and CEO, MITEM Corporation.

Peter Martin Knopf

Title: Weak-Type Multipliers. Advisor: Robert Strichartz. Career: Pace University.

Robert Henry Lewis

Title: Homology Decompositions and Cofibrations of Nonsimply-connected Spaces. Advisor: Peter Kahn and Paul Olum. Career: Fordham University.

Charlotte Rose Lin

Title: Recursion Theory on Countable Abelian Groups. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Senior Manager and Staff Scientist, Boeing Corporation.

Peter Mansfield

Title: On Logarithmic Sobolev Inequalities. Advisor: Leonard Gross. Career: unknown .

Joseph Edward Pasciak

Title: A Penalty Correction Method for Elliptic Problems and Extrapolation with Parabolic Problems. Advisor: James Bramble. Career: Texas A&M University.


1978 (3 doctorates)


Robert Scott Fowler

Title: Local Holomorphic Families of Discs. Advisor: Clifford Earle. Career: Pennsylvania State University; University of Puget Sound .

Peter Edwin La Roche

Title:Contributions to Recursive Algebra. Advisor: Anil Nerode. Career: Industry, Rochester, N.Y.

William Irwin Notz

Title: Two Problems in Optimal Design Theory. Advisor: Jack Kiefer. Career: The Ohio State University.


1979(11 doctorates)


John Bruce Bell

Title: The Noncharacteristic Cauchy Problem for Time Dependent Equations. Advisor: Lawrence Payne. Career: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory.

Wesley James Browning

Title: Homotopy Types of Certain Finite CW-complexes with Finite Fundamental Group. Advisor: Marshall Cohen. Career: Real Change street newspaper in Seattle Washington.

Mark Steven Freeland

Title: Abstract Witt Rings: Signatures of Arbitrary Level. Advisor: Alex F.T.W. Rosenberg. Career: Bell Labs; Hunter Systems.

Norman Goldstein

Title: Families of Varieties and a Second Lefschetz Theorem for Manifold Sections in Complex Projective Space. Advisor: Andrew Sommese. Career: Software Engineer.

Cheng-Tan Hsiao

Title: The Stochastic Time Evolution of Gaussian Interacting Systems. Advisor: Frank Spitzer. Career: National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan.

James Edward Hutton

Title: The Recurrence and Transience of Two-Dimensional Linear Birth and Death Processes. Advisor: Harry Kesten. Career: Bucknell University.

Nicholas S. Miller

Title: Pseudodifferential Operators and Weighted Sobolev Spaces. Advisor: Robert Strichartz. Career: Gustavus Adolphus College; Industry.

Kenneth Norman Moss

Title: Homology of the Special Linear Group of the Ring of Integers Localized Away from a Prime. Advisor: Kenneth Brown. Career: University of Houston.

Patricia Liliane Sipe

Title: Roots of the Canonical Bundle of the Universal Teichmüller Curve. Advisor: Clifford Earle. Career: Smith College.

Michael I. Taksar

Title: Translation Invariant Regenerative Sets and Subprocesses of Markov Processes. Advisor: Eugene Dynkin. Career: State University of New York at Stony Brook.

Catherine Mary Wagner

Title: On Martin's Conjecture. Advisor: Michael Morley. Career: Education, Cornell.