Friends and colleagues of Professor James Meiss have organized a conference in honor of his 60th birthday, sponsored by the Department of Applied Mathematics.
Jim received a Ph.D. in physics from the University of California at Berkeley in 1980. He then moved to Austin Texas to join the Institute for Fusion Physics at the University of Texas. In 1989 he and his wife Mary Sue moved to Boulder where Jim was appointed as a Professor in the new Program in Applied Mathematics at the University of Colorado. The program was founded in 1989 with Professor Mark Ablowitz as director and Professor James Curry as associate director. Jim and Professor Harvey Segur were the first appointments made to start this new program. These four founding members were key to building the Program, which has grown and changed to become the current Department of Applied Mathematics.
Jim collaborated with Robert MacKay to edit the book聽Hamiltonian Dynamical Systems: a reprint selection. While in Texas Jim and R. D. Hazeltine co-authored the book 鈥淧lasma Confinement鈥�. Jim鈥檚 most recent book is 鈥淒ifferential Dynamical Systems鈥�.聽 For a full account of Jim鈥檚 research contributions the place to look is his聽. His numerous research articles are listed under the following topics: area preserving maps, symplectic maps, computational topology, anti-integrability, polynomial maps, twistless bifurcations, invariant tori, volume preserving maps, piecewise smooth bifurcations, transitory dynamics.
Jim's Ph.D. students are Hyung tae Kook, Qi Chen, Erik Bollt, David Sterling, Vanessa Robins, Adriana Gomez, Paul Mullowney, Derin Wysham, David Simpson, Brock Mosovsky and Adam Fox. He co-supervised David Sholl, Srinath Vadlamani, Kristine Snyder, Zachary Alexander, Theodore Galanthay and Seksun Sirisubtawee, and his postdoctoral fellows are Hector Lomel铆, Gareth Roberts, Holger Dullin and Panos Panayotaros.
Jim organized the 1995 SIAM Dynamical Systems Meeting in Snowbird Utah, served as an editor of聽聽, and as an associate editor for the聽.
Jim is a delight to know as a colleague and as a friend. His insights and contributions to science and mathematics are profound, yet he makes everything look so easy.
-Bob Easton, Professor Emeritus