Olver named head of the School of Mathematics

Professor Peter J. Olver has been appointed as head of the School of Mathematics effective July 1, 2008. He will succeed Professor Lawrence Gray who will remain a mathematics faculty member and become the school’s director of undergraduate studies.

Olver has served as a faculty member at the University of Minnesota since 1980. Prior to coming to Minnesota, he worked at the University of Oxford in England and the University of Chicago.

Olver’s research revolves around the applications of symmetry and Lie groups to differential equations. Over the years, he has worked in fluid mechanics, integrable systems, elasticity, quantum mechanics, and mathematical physics. Olver has written more than 175 research papers and four books (with two more books in preparation). His text on Lie groups and differential equations was published in 1986, with a second edition in 1993. The research has been translated into Russian and republished in China. He has also published a much-cited text on equivalence, invariants, and symmetry, and a student text on classical invariant theory.

Olver has received numerous honors including being named a 2003 Highly Cited Researcher by Thomson-ISI, a company that tabulates citation statistics and journals’ impact factors. He also was elected a 2004 fellow of the Institute of Physics, UK.

Throughout his career, Olver has been involved in a several professional organizations including the Foundations of Computational Mathematics, where he currently serves as managing editor of the Foundations of Computational Mathematics journal and is a member of the organization’s governing board.

Born in England, Olver emigrated to the United States in 1961 and became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1967. He received a bachelor’s degree in applied mathematics from Brown University in 1973 and a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard University in 1976.