In Memoriam

Naresh Jain

NARESH JAIN, A LONG-TIME PROFESSOR of mathematics and former head of the School of Mathematics, died Jan. 1, 2009. He was 71.

Born in India, Jain received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1956 from Meerut College, India, and a master of science in mathematics in 1958 from the University of Lucknow, India. He earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Stanford University in 1965.

Prior to joining the University of Minnesota in 1965 as an assistant professor of mathematics, he served as a lecturer at Banaras Hindu University in India and as a teaching assistant at Stanford University.

Jain became associate head of the School of Mathematics in 1990, serving in that role until becoming head of the school in 1995. During his tenure, Jain fostered the research and teaching missions of the mathematics department by hiring outstanding faculty and supporting educational initiatives. Examples include the Institute of Technology calculus program and research experiences for undergraduates and helping to develop the University’s Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics. He also worked closely with the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA). In 2003, he stepped down as head and returned to teaching and his research.

Jain’s area of expertise was probability theory, specifically Doeblin Markov processes, random walk asymptotics, Gaussian processes, and theory of large deviations. He authored numerous papers and was a frequent probability theory lecturer at conferences worldwide. He also was associate editor for the Institute of Mathematical Statistics’ Annals of Probability publication.