Notebook - July 7, 1999

Stevenson to close
Diverse community of students, faculty will probably end up in Frist

To the dismay of students and faculty members who dine at Stevenson Hall, the university-sponsored eating club, the university will close the club's dining hall, located at 91 Prospect Avenue, in the fall of 2000 when the Frist Campus Center opens. The university will also probably force the club to relocate its lounges, library, computer clusters, and café from 83 Prospect Avenue.

Both 91 and 83 Prospect Avenue will be used for offices when East Pyne undergoes renovation, said Allen J. Sinisgalli, associate provost for research and project administration.

Dean of Students Janina Montero and members of Stevenson will use next year to determine where the Stevenson community will relocate. The most likely spot would be a space in the campus center, said Montero. But they are also looking at other possibilities around campus, including continuing to use the basement café in 83 Prospect Avenue. Although there are no plans for setting aside a separate room in Frist for the Stevenson habitués, said Montero, there are intimate spaces that might support the club's social and dining needs. Some students, however, are skeptical that Frist could provide an intimate setting.

Stevenson was formed as a nonbicker, university-managed dining facility at the initiative of undergraduates in the classes of 1968 and '69. It is home to a socially, academically, and ethnically diverse group of undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members. It attracts those students who are turned off by the social atmosphere and heavy drinking associated with the eating clubs on the Street.

"Stevenson is one of the few places on campus where members of minority groups feel comfortable," wrote Joseph Bulbulia *93, an assistant manager of residential colleges, in an
op-ed column in The Daily Princetonian.

Stevenson provides a welcoming, open atmosphere, said Kitanya Harrison '00, Stevenson's executive-board president. "No one is excluded." Because of the mix of students and faculty, Stevenson is "like a precept but better," she added.

"We all look forward to Frist," graduate student Harry Bone wrote in another column in the Prince, "but no one believes that it can 'replace' Stevenson, any more than it could replace any other club or college."

-- Kathryn Federici Greenwood

Fifteen faculty members retire

Fifteen professors are transferring to emeritus status: Victor H. Brombert (Romance languages and literatures and comparative literature), Clarence F. Brown (comparative literature), R. Elaine Fantham (Latin), Wen C. Fong '51 *58 (art history), Harold P. Furth (astrophysical sciences), Irvin Glassman (mechanical and aerospace engineering), J. Lionel Gossman (Romance languages and literatures), Richard C. Jeffrey *57 (philosophy), Yu-Kung Kao (East Asian studies), Russell M. Kulsrud (astrophysical sciences), Sau-Hai Lam *58 (mechanical and aerospace engineering), Arnold J. Levine (life sciences), James H. Marrow (art and archaeology), Goro Shimura (mathematics), and Charles F. Westoff (demographic studies and sociology).

A specialist in French and comparative literature of the 19th and 20th centuries, Brombert has been a member of the faculty since 1975. His interests also include the history of ideas and comparative studies of narrative. Among other courses, he has taught Modern European Writers (Literature 141) for the past 12 years to more than 300 undergraduates each fall. From 1983 to 1994, he directed the Christian Gauss Seminars in Criticism, and he chaired the Council of the Humanities from 1989 to 1994. A native of Paris, he earned his Ph.D. from Yale in 1953. At Commencement, he received the 1999 President's Award for Distinguished Teaching.

 

Brown, whose field is the interpretation of modern Russian writing, came to Princeton in 1959. He has taught courses on Russian language and literature, on the forms of short fiction, and the literature of fantasy and reality. Brown, who earned his Ph.D. in Russian Literature from Harvard in 1962, is also a cartoonist. His work has appeared in the Saturday Review, Esquire, Playboy, and The Village Voice, among others.

Fantham has been Giger Professor of Latin since 1986. Her main interests are Roman comedy and rhetoric, Latin epic, Roman religion, and the social history of Roman women. Born in England, Fantham earned her Ph.D. at the University of Liverpool in 1962. At Princeton, she chaired the classics department from 1989 to 1992, and she directed the Program in the Ancient World.

 

 

 

A scholar of Chinese art history, Fong was born in Shanghai and received a classical Chinese education, including training as a painter and calligrapher. He joined the faculty in 1954. From 1961 to 1998 he directed the graduate program in Chinese and Japanese art and archaeology. In 1959 he established Princeton's Far Eastern Seminar Archives, which include more than 50,000 photographs of Chinese and Japanese paintings. Faculty curator of Asian art at the Art Museum, Fong has been head of the Asian Art Department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City for the past three decades.

 

Furth has made a career of research on controlled fusion, including 10 years as director of the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab. A native of Vienna, he earned his Ph.D. at Harvard in 1960. In the 1960s, Furth and others offered a correct theoretical description of instabilities arising due to resistance in a plasma. Later, he and two others described a method for using energized ion beams to heat a plasma in such a way as to speed fusion reactions -- the breakthrough that allowed the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor to approach the milestone called breakeven, in which the power derived from fusion reactions equals the power put into the plasma.

Glassman is an authority on combustion as applied to problems in energy production, pollution, propulsion, and fire safety. He earned his D.Eng. degree from Johns Hopkins University in 1950, the year he joined the faculty at Princeton. He has received numerous teaching honors. In 1980 students voted his course on Fossil Fuel Energy Conversion as the number one course at Princeton. In 1972 Glassman founded the university's Center for Energy and Environmental Studies, which conducts fundamental research as well as public-policy analysis.

Gossman's interests focus on the relationship between history and literature in 17th- through 19th-century Europe. At Princeton since 1976, he has taught courses on French literature of the 17th and 18th centuries and on European literature and politics of the 19th century. Born in Scotland, Gossman earned his D.Phil. at Oxford in 1957.

Jeffrey is an expert in probability and decision theory. He also teaches logic and the philosophy of science. He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Princeton in 1957 and joined the faculty in 1974. Author of five books, Jeffrey presented a new theory of decision-making under uncertainty and of probable knowledge in The Logic of Decision (1965).

Kulsrud's pioneering work on high- energy plasmas includes methods for predicting the formation of instabilities and developing techniques for better controlling the reaction. Kulsrud earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in 1954, the year he joined the research staff of Project Matterhorn, Princeton's effort to develop controlled nuclear fusion. In 1962 he joined the staff of the Plasma Physics Lab as senior research physicist, and in 1964 he became a lecturer in the astrophysical sciences department. After a year as professor in applied sciences at Yale, Kulsrud returned to Princeton in 1967.

Kao's field is Chinese literature, particularly classical poetry and vernacular fiction. Among Kao's writings are studies of the aesthetic underpinnings of form in T'ang verse and of the evolution of lyric vision in Chinese narrative. He has taught courses on Chinese poetry, fiction, and drama. A native of Mukden, China, Kao earned his Ph.D. in history at Harvard in 1962 and joined the Princeton faculty the following year.

Lam, who joined the faculty in 1960, has made research and teaching contributions in fluid mechanics, plasma and reacting gas dynamics, thermionic energy conversion, chemical and molecular kinetics, control theory, and applied mathematics. As a teacher, Lam has earned a reputation for expressing complicated ideas in a simple way. From 1972 to 1980, he was chairman of the engineering physics program. In the 1980s, he was chairman of the Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering, cochairman of the Program in Applied Mathematics, and associate dean of the engineering school.

Levine, an authority on the molecular basis of cancer and founding chair of the molecular biology department, left Princeton last summer to assume the presidency of Rockefeller University. Levine earned his Ph.D. in 1966 from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine. Two years later, he joined the faculty at Princeton. In 1979 he became chairman of the department of microbiology at the SUNY, Stony Brook School of Medicine. He returned to Princeton to found the Department of Molecular Biology in 1984 and to become Wiess Professor.

Marrow, who came to Princeton in 1991, is a specialist in art of the late Middle Ages in Northern Europe. At Princeton, he taught courses on painting, printmaking, illuminated books and iconography, as well as seminars on Dürer, Fouquet, Bosch, and van Eyck. Marrow received his Ph.D. from Columbia in 1975. Currently a visiting fellow at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, he is collaborating on major exhibitions of illuminated manuscripts at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and at the New York Public Library.

Mathematician Shimura has focused on finding relations among diverse areas of number theory, geometry, and algebra. His work has been instrumental in establishing the modern theory of automorphic forms and especially the theory's relation to arithmetical geometry and number theory. His guiding philosophy, Shimura says, is that for many geometric objects, there is a natural way of presenting them other than the conventional mathematical expressions. Shimura earned his D.Sc. at the University of Tokyo in 1958 and came to Princeton in 1962.

Westoff, former director of the Office of Population Research, has studied fertility and family planning in the United States and developing countries, as well as population policy. After serving in the Navy, Westoff earned his Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1953. Two years later, he joined the Office of Population Research. He joined the Princeton faculty as professor of sociology in 1962 and served as the director of OPR from 1975 to 1992.

Making wavelets

One of the great defenses of the human mind is our ability to use technology without worrying about how it works. Most of us will happily go out for a Sunday drive without giving a moment's thought to the mechanical complexities of the internal combustion engine. And when's the last time you stopped to consider that the sweet tones of your favorite CD are really a string of stored numbers, retranslated into sound?

This same sort of mathematical deconstruction is used every time you read a word on a computer screen, make an ATM transaction, or snap a digital photograph. In fact, the ability to interpret and electronically store or reproduce any signal -- whether it's a collection of sound waves, a series of characters, or a set of tiny dots that make up a picture -- depends on being able to turn that signal into numerical data that can be read by a computer. Signal processing involves the search for ever more efficient and elegant ways of doing this, and wavelet researchers are at the cutting edge of that effort -- literally.

"Wavelets help us look at mathematical functions with sharp transitions, which represent the 'edges' of the function," explains Ingrid C. Daubechies, a soft-spoken professor of mathematics and applied and computational mathematics, and one of the world's leading experts on wavelet theory. "By that, I mean places where the signal changes abruptly -- for example, the points where a picture suddenly turns from light to dark."

Traditional wave-processing techniques have always had a hard time describing edges. Mathematicians can use classical wave theory (known as Fourier transformations) to graph these sudden changes, but information about when the changes occur gets lost in the process. Wavelets are designed to overcome this limitation: They are mathematical scaling functions that can be stretched out to evaluate the broad features of long, continuous signals (like a swath of blue sky or the hum of background noise) or compressed to evaluate a sudden frequency change (the point at which the sky meets the edge of a building, or someone strikes a cymbal). Different areas of the signal are represented by different coefficients of those wavelets, allowing the entire signal, edges and all, to be succinctly expressed by a list of coefficients -- in other words, as a simple string of numbers.

 

"Daubechies' Wavelets"

By choosing the right wavelet, an engineer or statistician can efficiently compress and store both the frequency and timing of even the most varied signals, in much the same way an orchestral score records the spacing and pitch of musical notes. "It's not that we can do things we couldn't do before," explains Daubechies. "Wavelet theory allows various applications to be done better -- including analyzing data, compressing data, and using data to make computations."

With wavelets, applications are the name of the game. In 1985, as a newly tenured researcher in her hometown of Brussels, Belgium, Daubechies made her first breakthrough by building on the discoveries of geophysicists, mathematicians, and engineers who were already employing a version of wavelets that required the use of mathematical approximations. "It seemed a pity to have to truncate that beautiful math," she recalls. "I thought, 'What if I could come up with a different type of wavelet -- one associated with an algorithm that could accomplish the same thing without approximations?'"

After four months of intense work, she had her algorithm -- the first of a family of mathematical scaling functions known collectively as "Daubechies' Wavelets." She published her seminal paper with a set of precalculated tables -- a practice common for engineers, but almost unheard of in mathematical journals. These tables allowed readers to put her theory into use instantly.

"Without those tables, I don't think the paper would have had the same impact," says Daubechies with a smile. She is seated in her second-floor Fine Tower office, where the window looks out over an expanse of green lawn. The symbolism -- in the ivory tower, yet viscerally grounded -- seems apt. Though her work focuses on mathematical theory, Daubechies was raised as the daughter of a mining engineer and trained as a physicist. She logged seven years as a researcher at AT&T's Bell Labs, and spends a good bit of time giving presentations on wavelets to electrical engineers, statisticians, computer scientists, and other applied-math types.

"I've always been interested in applications -- that's what makes me tick," says Daubechies, who joined the faculty in 1993. "I like to talk to engineers about what they're doing, then trace their ideas back to the underlying mathematics."

 

Compressing FBI files

These days, engineers are listening to her as well. The list of uses for wavelets is long and growing: they're already a staple in astronomy, acoustics, neurophysiology, magnetic resonance imaging, speech discrimination, image processing, optics, and sonar and radar technology, to name just a few fields. The FBI plans on using wavelet techniques to compress their fingerprint files electronically (digitized fingerprints require about 20 times less computer space than the next best method), and software companies are busy hawking do-it-yourself wavelet application programs.

While the impact of wavelet theory continues to ripple outward, Daubechies remains the quintessential calm center. A mother of two (Carolyn, age 8, and Michael, age 11) and the first tenured woman in the math department, she is more interested in showing a visitor the Website for Math Alive, her undergraduate math course for nonmathematicians, than in talking about her own renown. In one of the course's online labs, a student can employ rudimentary wavelet theory to decompose a photo of two parrots into a numerical data

base, then reconstruct the photo with varying degrees of clarity, depending on which mathematical parameters are chosen.

"I find that a lot of students had calculus in high school and didn't like it," she says. "I wanted to teach a different kind of course for students without a predisposition for math, that explains how these mathematical tools are used in everyday life -- in CD players, and transmitting credit-card information, things like that. I think mathematics is beautiful -- but if you haven't been struck by its beauty, studying math is like taking a poetry course that focuses only on rhyming schemes and other techniques, while ignoring the impact of the words. It certainly wouldn't be as enjoyable!"

-- Royce Flippin '80

New editor for PAW

An award-winning journalist, Janice Harayda became editor of the Princeton Alumni Weekly on July 1. Most recently she was the book editor and critic for the Cleveland Plain Dealer and currently is vice-president for awards at the National Book Critics Circle.

Harayda's editorial experience includes a stint as a staff writer for Glamour and as editorial director for Boston magazine. She has written a nonfiction book about being single and a comic novel, The Accidental Bride (St. Martin's Press, 1999). Her book reviews have been published in The Washington Post, The Chicago Tribune, and The Philadelphia Inquirer, and she has written numerous freelance articles for such newspapers as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Christian Science Monitor.

A resident of Princeton, Harayda will be the first paw editor who has not held an undergraduate or graduate degree from Princeton. She replaces J.I. "Jim" Merritt '66, paw's editor since 1989, who is leaving to devote his full time to freelance writing and editing.

Harayda "has worked directly with some of the most respected magazine editors in America," said Peter G. Brown '70, editor-in-chief of The Sciences magazine and chair of the paw board of trustees. "She grew up just north of town, and...Princeton has always been an important presence in her life."

"Paw has a wonderful tradition of both independence and good journalism," said Harayda. "As an adolescent, I remember admiring dispatches by the young Landon Jones '66 in a neighbor's copy of the Princeton Alumni Weekly. They were a revelation to me. For the first time, I realized that a vibrant publishing realm existed beyond the newspapers and mass-market magazines that flowed into my parents' house."

Harayda's appointment was made by the magazine's board of trustees at the recommendation of a search committee that included Brown; Jones, a former paw editor who is currently vice-president of strategic planning for Time Warner Inc.; and Elaine C. Showalter, a professor of English and the humanities.

In Memoriam

Sheldon Judson '40, the Knox Taylor Professor of Geology, Emeritus, died on May 19. He was 80.

A member of the faculty since 1955, he was especially interested in the relationship between the geosciences and archaeology. He was the author of numerous geoarcheological reports, including several studies of paleo-Indian sites in North America, as well as studies of late Paleolithic rock shelters in France. He also worked extensively on Etruscan, Roman, and Greek sites in Italy, and he recently completed a manuscript on the geology and geography of Morgantina, an ancient Greek provincial city in Sicily.

Judson, who served in World War II in the Naval Reserve, completed his Ph.D. in 1948 at Harvard. Chairman of his department at Princeton from 1970 to 1982, he was chair of the University Research Board with the rank of dean from 1972 to 1977. He transferred to emeritus status in 1987. Judson was the author or coauthor of a series of widely used textbooks, including eight editions of Physical Geology and, most recently, Earth: An Introduction to Geologic Change (1995).

Throughout his career, Judson worked to improve science education at all levels. As emeritus professor he worked with the Teacher Preparation Program to create summer workshops in geology, biology, and math for elementary and middle school teachers.

In Brief

Endowed professorship: Charter trustee Anthony B. Evnin '62 has made a $2.5 million gift to the university to endow the Anthony B. Evnin '62 Professorship in Genomics. The Evnin chair is the first to be created for Princeton's new Institute for Genomic Analysis, which will take a multidisciplinary approach to examining how genes control the activities of living organisms. Evnin is a general partner of Venrock Associates of New York, a venture-capital partnership that specializes in information technology and life-science investments. He serves as a director of the Princeton University Investment Company, which oversees Princeton's endowment.

Ensemble in residence: The Brentano String Quartet has been appointed quartet in residence, beginning next fall. The three-year appointment marks the first residency by a musical ensemble at Princeton.

Visiting professors: Physicist Jocelyn Bell Burnell and computer scientist Brian Kernighan *69 will hold the 250th Anniversary Visiting Professorships for Distinguished Teaching next year. Bell Burnell, currently a visiting fellow in the physics department, says, "I'm keen to make physics more accessible to more people, and especially to increase the number of women in the physical sciences." Her research interests are in astrophysics, in particular, "the neutron stars or pulsars that I discovered as a grad student."

Kernighan, who comes to the university from Bell Labs in Murray Hill, New Jersey, plans to teach Computers in Our World. "It's for people who don't expect to be doing computing in any technical field but want to know what it's all about.... An educated person should have a good understanding of how computer hardware, software, and networks operate."

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