Home Page of Professor William Sit

Welcome to the Home Page of
William Sit, Professor Emeritus
Department of Mathematics
The City College of The City University of New York
160 Convent Avenue, New York, NY 10031
Office: R6/202C (North Academic Center)
Office Tel: 212-650-5179
Office Fax: 212-862-0004
Email: wyscc@sci.ccny.cuny.edu
Home Page: http://scisun.sci.ccny.cuny.edu/~wyscc/

Home Research Software Activities

Research

My research interests are differential algebra, computer algebra, and their intersection. One area of differential algebra studies the solution space of systems of partial differential polynomial equations and develops algorithms to simplify such systems when possible. I have published algorithms on parametric linear systems, on quasi-algebraic sets, on simplifying over-determined non-linear systems of ordinary differential equations, and on finding first integrals of autonomous systems. Other symbolic computation projects involved Mathematica Notebooks for differential equations, Rota-Baxter algebras, and crossnumber puzzles.

Software

The algorithms on parametric linear equations, first integrals, and non-linear ordinary differential equations are implmented in Axiom. I have also implemented a package DiffEqn consisting of tutorial notebooks for differential equations in Mathematica for student use.

Activities

I organized the Kolchin Seminar in Differential Algebra for many years, including a Special Year in Differential Algebra in 1995. I am active in the computer algebra research community, having co-edited two conference proceedings (DART 2002, and ASCM 2003) and one special issue (Differential Algebra and Differential Equations) of the Journal of Symbolic Computation in 1998. I co-organized (with Jerry Ianni, La Guardia Community College) the East Coast Computer Algebra Day (ECCAD) conference in 2002 and served on the Advisory Committee for ECCAD 2003-2005. I also served on the Program Committees for International Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Computation (ISSAC) in 2001, for Differential Algebra and Related Topics (DART) in 2002, and co-chaired the Program Committee (with Ziming Li, Chinese Academy of Science) for Asian Symposium on Computer Mathematics (ASCM), 2003.

Recently, I co-organized an International Workshop on Differential Algebra and Related Topics (DART II) which was held on April 12, 13, 2007 at Rutgers University at Newark, N.J. and a Special Session in Differential Algebra for the Eastern Section AMS Meeting on April 14,15, 2007, which was held at Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ.

Currently, I co-organize the Kolchin Seminar in Differential Algebra with Jerry Kovacic (CCNY, visiting), Phyllis Cassidy (CCNY, visiting), and Richard Churchill (Hunter College). I have also been invited to co-organize and co-chair a program committee of an international conference on Differential Algebra and Related Computer Algebra, to be held at the University of Catania, Catania, Italy in 2008, in memory of the late Professor Giuseppa Carrà-Ferro, a pioneer researcher in computational differential algebra.

Responsibilities

I have retired from teaching since September, 2006 and have no official departmental or college responsibilities. Before retirement, I actively participated in committee work both departmentally, and college-wide. I was a member of the Executive Committee for the Strategic Plan. I worked on the College-wide Resource Subcommittee of the Faculty Senate, and served as a representative of the Faculty Senate on the Tech Fee Committee. I was the chair for the Applied Mathematics Program Committee of the Mathematics Department, the faculty supervisor for the Advanced Computation (Artino) Lab, and course supervisor for Math 391 (Differential Equations).

Created by William Sit, Last updated May 15, 2007