To mark the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Illinois Journal of Mathematics, a special volume of articles was published last year in honor of Joseph L. Doob (1910–2004), a founding editor who was instrumental in getting the journal started. The book is titled, “Joseph Doob: A Collection of Mathematical Articles in His Memory,” edited by Donald Burkholder.
To further honor Doob, the IJM has agreed to sponsor a Doob lecture to be given at the annual Stochastic Processes and Applications (SPA) meetings. In return, the Doob lecturer is invited to contribute a paper based on the lecture to the IJM. The inaugural Doob lecture was given during the 2007 SPA meeting which was hosted by the University of Illinois. The arrangement is ongoing, with the next Doob lecture scheduled to be given at the 2009 SPA meeting in Berlin. The Doob lecture is a joint Institute of Mathematical Statistics-Bernoulli Society lecture.
In addition to the Doob volume and an earlier publication of the first in the standalone series, “The Mathematical Legacy of Reinhold Baer,” the IJM has just published the third volume in the series, “A Collection of Articles in Honor of Phillip Griffith,” edited by Luchezar Avramov, Sankar Dutta, and Hans-Bjorn Foxby. The Griffith volume contains 5 invited articles, several by former students, covering many aspects of commutative algebra on which Griffith’s work has exerted a significant influence. The book is based on lectures given at the Commutative Algebra Conference Honoring the Contributions of Phillip Griffith, which marked the occasion of Professor Griffith’s retirement from the University of Illinois.
