Hans Kaper is the new editor-in-chief of SIAM News.
In January, Hans Kaper will officially move into the newly created position of editor-in-chief of
SIAM News. His very successful trial run as a guest editor of our ICIAM 2011 coverage bodes well for an increasingly lively, well-rounded, and authoritative publication.
A SIAM Fellow (class of 2009), Kaper was named Senior Mathematician Emeritus at Argonne National Laboratory on his retirement in 2008. Many readers will know him from his tenure (2001–2008) as a program director at the National Science Foundation. He is currently an adjunct professor in the Department of Mathematics and Statistics at Georgetown University, and he maintains ties in Illinois as an adjunct professor in the School of Music at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.
He identifies his current research interest as the application of dynamical systems techniques to the Earth’s climate system. In related projects, he is a co-author of the forthcoming SIAM book Mathematics and Climate, co-director of the NSF-funded Mathematics and Climate Research Network, and a SIAM representative to Mathematics of Planet Earth 2013. He worked recently with SIAM News staff to assemble a new editorial board, whose names appear in the masthead.
In recent weeks, an unsettling real-world development—the ruling of an Italian judge in the case of six seismologists on trial for having failed to pinpoint the time of an earthquake that devastated the town of L’Aquila—set Kaper and the new editorial board in motion. A request to William Newman of UCLA for a perspective on the implications of the Italian case rapidly produced the article "The Dawn of the Age of Ignorance and Misinformation." that appears in this month's SIAM News. This issue, says editorial board member Mac Hyman, “could affect any of our members engaged in using mathematical analysis and models, including computer simulations, to make predictions where there are economic or public health consequences."