The University of Florida’s Digital Worlds Institute in cooperation with King’s alma mater Morehouse College in Atlanta will kick off the first of the webcasts at 10 a.m. EDT on Friday, April 4, when experts from UF and Morehouse, along with institutions in China, India, Kenya and South Africa, discuss and share in real-time King’s meaning for the 21st century, said James Oliverio, director of UF’s Digital Worlds Institute. The other three programs are also scheduled at 10 a.m. on successive Fridays in April, and all can be viewed on the Internet at www.worldhouse.morehouse.edu.

In his “World House” speech upon accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, King said “modern man has brought this whole world to an awe-inspiring threshold of the future. He has reached new and astonishing peaks of scientific success. He has produced machines that think. Yet, in spite of these spectacular strides in science and technology, and still unlimited ones to come, something basic is missing. There is a sort of poverty of the spirit which stands in glaring contrast to our scientific and technological abundance.”

The UF-Morehouse international conversation will use technology to bridge that divide, Oliverio said. “We’re going to have a cultural exchange, a scholarly dialogue and a motivational call to action for the students of today to carry forward the work of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who proceeded with the nonviolent resistance movement of Mahatma Gandhi in India and influenced Nelson Mandela in South Africa,” he said. “Using technology to literally connect places across the globe simultaneously, we will create a shared virtual space around the world on the network and have performances and workshops over that global platform.”

The outreach developed from a collaboration between UF and Morehouse College, the recipient of about 10,000 pieces of Martin Luther King Jr.’s personal writings in 2006. Terry Mills, a former UF dean who moved to Morehouse last year to become the Margaret Mitchell Marsh Dean of Humanities and Social Sciences, said the idea came in discussions he had with Oliverio about how the two institutions might use the acquisition in educational programming.

The innovativeness of the technology at Digital Worlds Institute, which Mills called the “Imac Theater of Videoconferencing” for its ability to allow multiple partners around the globe to engage in an interactive, unified virtual space, made UF the natural choice to help produce the program, he said. “There are also geographic and historical reasons for the connection, notably Gainesville’s close proximity to St. Augustine where Dr. King had led freedom marches as well as its location near the site of the Rosewood massacre,” Mills said.

The purpose of the global discussions is not only to remind the world of King’s legacy but to keep his vision alive, as his message continues to have relevance today, Oliverio said.

“This is a memorial to Dr. King, not just in the sense of looking backward to some academic papers in a museum, but honoring his life’s work in the hopes that students of today at Morehouse, UF and the other participating institutions will reassess their involvement with their own societies in the same way that Dr. King took a stand against oppression of African Americans in the United States,” he said. “Even at the beginning of the 21st century human kind is still butchering each other in tribal conflicts over economic materialism and resources.”

Although King’s “I Have a Dream” speech is well-known among college students, many are not familiar with the “World House” concept mentioned in his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize speech and his writings where he discusses the need to fight racism, war and poverty, he said.

The topic of the April 4 90-minute session is King’s challenge to citizens in “transcending tribe, race, class, nation and religion to embrace the vision of World House.” Speaker presentations as well as performances by artists, dancers and musicians are planned from each participating location, which, besides UF and Morehouse, are the U.S. Embassy in Beijing, China, the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda in India; Kenyatta University in Nairobi, Kenya; and the U.S. Embassy in Johannesburg, South Africa. UF presenters from the Digital Worlds Institute’s Research, Education and Visualization Environment in 101 Norman Hall include Stephanie Evans, an African American studies and women’s studies professor, and drummer Mohamed DaCosta, a lecturer in UF’s College of Fine Arts School of Theatre and Dance. The 60-minute April 11 session will feature UF social anthropologist Faye Harrison and poet Sharon Burney of UF’s African American Studies Program.

John Richard Stepp, an associate professor of anthropology in the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, presents his findings this week in an artistically displayed scientific exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History as part of The Center for Biodiversity and Conservation’s Thirteenth Annual Symposium in New York. The symposium opens Wednesday and continues through Saturday.

Stepp and his anthropology and ecology graduate students compiled data sets globally and regionally to investigate the relationship between biological and cultural diversity. By analyzing data on human and floral diversity, Stepp found a positive correlation between the number of different plant species and the number of different types of human cultural groups.

“This research shows you can’t isolate biodiversity from cultural diversity, which is important to consider when creating future conservation plans,” Stepp said.

To effectively convey the data to the conference’s audience of policymakers, United Nations representatives and others in a visually compelling manner required the marriage of science and art. Stepp turned to the UF College of Fine Arts graphic design program, MINT, in the school of art and art history for assistance in creating 13 large maps. Each map uses colors and shapes to dynamically render a different data set.

The maps feature some of the regions showing greatest diversity, including Mesoamerica, the Amazon-Andean slope, the greater Himalayas, equatorial Africa, greater Southeast Asia/Melanesia. Stepp said sloping mountainous tropical areas are significant regions for diversity because the range of habitats presented in these areas creates different opportunities for cultural adaptations.

“Sometimes it appears humans have maintained or even created biodiversity,” Stepp said. “Human activity has created different habitats, which can allow for increased biodiversity.”

Building on research published in 2005 in the journal Mountain Research and Development, Stepp’s study used language as one example of cultural diversity.

New Guinea alone contains almost 10 percent of the world’s languages and some of the highest biodiversity in the world, he said.

“Each language represents a culture that is an experiment in what it means to be human,” Stepp said. “Coded within language is sophisticated knowledge of management and interaction with the environment.”

Stepp’s research illustrates that the single biggest predictor of how many languages are spoken in any given area is how many plant species exist in that area. The reverse is also true, he said. Biological diversity and human diversity may share a similar fate. About half of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages are endangered, he said.

Using a geographic information system, Stepp’s research group spatially correlated a number of data sets including all of the world’s languages. The researchers were able to compare this with a sophisticated database containing the distribution of the world’s vascular plant species developed by a team at the University of Bonn led by Wilhelm Barthlott. Other data used were global energy consumption patterns, road networks, population density, bioproductivity, evapotransipration, rainfall and slope. The work is part of an ongoing project funded by The Christensen Fund, based in Palo Alto, Calif.

The students in MINT primarily used Adobe Illustrator to make visual sense of the numbers. MINT director and graphic design assistant professor Connie Hwang said that tool was only one part of the project.

“It’s the innovative and brilliant minds of the students that made this project extraordinary and successful,” she said.

During the project’s three-month timeline during fall 2007, 11 MINT designers tackled the challenge of how to hold the public’s interest while they viewed one map after another. Four lead designers were in charge at the refinement stage. Designer Mason Greenewald carried the project through the production stage.

It was the first time MINT, which takes jobs for clients on and off the UF campus, had worked on a project for display in a national museum.

“Everyone was really interested in working with something informational and environmental, not only for the design, but also for its educational content and its destiny to be shown in the context of a museum for everyone to see,” Hwang said. “Not only did we consider how we could connect with and attract the general public but also how we could highlight the intellectual knowledge and research of the client.”

Stepp said the outcome is fresh and new, not gender, race, or age specific, and easy to digest and comprehend.

“The end result of the project is absolutely stunning, interesting and mesmerizing,” he said. “The MINT designers transformed simple scientific data into something intriguing and beautiful, something that will live in viewer’s mind for a long time.”

In his book, “The Sugar Fix: The High-Fructose Fallout That Is Making You Fat And Sick,” Dr. Richard Johnson reviews the increasing evidence that fructose may play a role in the obesity epidemic and proposes a low-fructose diet he believes could help people lose weight and potentially prevent diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

“We recognize that obesity has multiple causes, including eating too much and exercising too little, but we think a missing piece of the obesity puzzle is fructose intake,” said Johnson, the J. Robert Cade professor of medicine and chief of the division of nephrology, hypertension and transplantation in the UF College of Medicine. “It’s not fructose itself that is the problem, but eating too much of it.”

Americans consume nearly three times as much fructose as a century ago, Johnson said. Although the major source of fructose is soft drinks, it’s found in a variety of foods such as fruit, juice, sweetened cereals and pastries.

“We think fructose makes you obese not simply by the calories it provides but because it also tricks hormonal systems that control appetite,” Johnson said. “You don’t get a sense of being full so you keep eating. It (fructose) may also be important in the development of diabetes, kidney disease and heart disease.

“An additional problem is that the more fructose you eat, the more sensitive you become to it,” Johnson said. “If you want to have success losing weight, you have to cut out fructose for two weeks. At that point you are no longer as sensitive and you can resume a low-fructose diet with ease.”

Johnson’s book, which was published by Rodale, contains a diet he developed with nutritionist and dietitian Elizabeth Gollub, as well as tables listing the fructose contents of common foods. Fructose content is not found on most labels.

Unlike other low-carbohydrate diets, which require dieters to reduce all carbs, Johnson’s plan targets fructose. Starchy foods like potatoes and rice aren’t a no-no as in low-carb diets. And after the first two weeks, dieters can resume eating fruit and having treats such as cake in moderation.

“Most people are used to eating about 50 percent of their diet as carbohydrates,” Johnson said “When you cut it way back and have a very high-protein, high-fat diet, it’s very hard to sustain. It’s also not necessarily healthy. What’s great about our diet is we can maintain a normal carbohydrate-protein-fat balance, and when you do that, the diet is much easier to sustain.”

Johnson became interested in fructose while studying hypertension. He and his colleagues discovered that uric acid increased blood pressure in animals and that ingesting fructose seemed to spur production of uric acid. Reducing uric acid in these animals helped control blood pressure and other problems such as pre-diabetes.

“The effect of fructose to cause pre-diabetes and raise blood pressure may be more important than its effects to increase weight,” Johnson said. “Our studies suggest that, even if one can control one’s weight, that excessive intake of fructose may increase the risk for high blood pressure and diabetes. Going on a low-fructose diet will have benefits above and beyond losing weight.”

The research in Johnson’s book came from studies in his own lab as well as from other scientists studying fructose in cells, animals and humans at other institutions, he said.

He also reviews the history of fructose consumption, comparing it with the rise of obesity. The two histories mirror each other, he writes.

Although fructose consumption was already on the rise when high-fructose corn syrup was invented, the introduction of this sweetener in the late 1960s accelerated the increase. High-fructose corn syrup contains about as much fructose as table sugar but is cheaper to produce, leading companies to produce bigger portions of sweets and soft drinks for the same price, Johnson said.

Today, Americans eat 30 percent more fructose than they did in the 1970s and three times as much as in 1900, when the obesity rate was 5 percent, Johnson said. About 33 percent of adults are now overweight or obese, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“After reading this book I found myself looking more carefully at labels, looking specifically for high-fructose corn syrup,” said Dr. Andrew Whelton, an adjunct professor of medicine and the former director of clinical nephrology at Johns Hopkins University. “I was amazed to see it so often.

“Although this book was put together for a lay audience, I thought it would be useful for health-care providers, particularly for anyone who deals with issues of obesity and diabetes.”

Reported this month in the online edition of the Journal of Proteome Research, the advance could one day lead to earlier detection and improved treatment of some types of cancer as well as other diseases.

“With many diseases, the problem has been that we really don’t know what to look for,” said Weihong Tan, a professor of chemistry and the lead author of the paper. “What we’ve done is create a technique to identify the biomarkers despite that limitation.”

Doctors often diagnose cancer and other diseases based on the appearance of a tumor or a patient’s symptoms. While such traditional methods can be effective, they sometimes identify a disease only after it is established. For example, clinicians may get tipped off to the presence of lung cancer — which kills more people than any other type of cancer — based on visible images of a tumor that appear on radiological exams of a patient’s lungs.

Because earlier detection typically improves outcomes, doctors would like to spot disease at the molecular level, before it grows or spreads and manifests itself in more obvious and harmful ways. Given that diseased cells’ molecular structures differ from those of healthy ones, that approach should be possible, and researchers have had some success finding such “biomarkers” using antibodies, Tan said. But despite years of research, biomarkers for most diseases remain elusive or unreliable, he said.

His group turned to “aptamers,” single-strand chains of DNA or RNA that recognize and bind to target protein molecules, as a new tool. His paper reports the first-ever successful use of the aptamers to discover a molecular biomarker — in this case, one for leukemia.

Tan said his group used cell-SELEX, a process his group developed and patented.

Researchers create trillions of different varieties of aptamers in a solution. They then immerse cells known to carry the sought-after disease in the solution. After an incubation period, they rinse the cells.

The vast majority of the aptamers wash away, but those with stronger molecular affinity for the diseased cells remain. The researchers repeat the process several times, eventually shrinking the pool of aptamers to as few as 10 to 25 very strongly attached aptamers — those most closely associated with the diseased cells. Analysis then reveals these aptamers’ molecular structure, as well as the molecular structure of the cells’ biomarkers they bind to.

“As long as the molecules in question are expressed in a substantially different way on diseased and normal cells, they can be identified,” Tan said.

Rebecca Sutphen, associate professor and director of the Genetic Counseling & Testing Service at the H. Lee Moffitt Cancer Center & Research Institute in Tampa, said improved diagnosis may not be the only application of the research.

“The opportunity to identify cancer cell-specific biomarkers and potentially detect small numbers of cancer cells has many potential clinical applications, including disease detection, better imaging of tumors and even potential application for stem cells,” she said.

Other biomarkers have been found for leukemia, but none is particularly reliable, Tan said. Tan and his colleagues reported using aptamers to recognize cancer cells in a 2006 paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Tan said the latest paper advances that work by revealing the target biomarkers the selected aptamers recognize, Tan said. These targets will form a molecular foundation in understanding diseases, he said.

“In 2006, we did not know what the aptamer recognized on the cancer cell surface,” he said. “In this current work, we report discovering these biomarkers, which then form the molecular foundation for us to understand the cancer and to prepare different molecular tools for molecular medicine.”

Tan said the research is particularly promising because aptamers are relatively easy and inexpensive to manufacture compared with antibodies. “This offers the potential for wider application,” he said, adding that aptamers could one day be used not only to detect disease, but also to ferry therapeutic agents to diseased cells.

The research was funded in part with two grants from the National Institutes of Health. It was also funded with two grants from Florida’s Bankhead-Coley Cancer Research Program and one grant from the State of Florida Center of Excellence in Bio/nano sensors.

The paper’s co-authors are Dihua Shangguan, Zehui Cao, Ling Meng, Prabodhika Mallikaratchy, Kwame Sefah, Hui Wang and Ying Li.

So Michael Gutter, an assistant professor in family financial management with UF’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, has compiled a list of Americans’ top 10 tax-season gaffes.

1. Not making use of VITA (Volunteer Income Tax Assistance) sites. If your taxes aren’t terribly complicated–you don’t own a business or have a lot of investment income to report–then VITA is an underused resource worth checking out.

“That’s the first thing I would tell people, is to make use of those sites. They have a lot of oversight by state regulatory agencies and the IRS and they’re audited internally before tax forms are sent up and approved and they’re e-filed for free,” he said. “It’s a free service, done by people who literally work with tax code day in and day out.”

Check with your local county extension office or the Florida Prosperity Campaign, www.prosperitycampaign.com, to find your closest VITA site.

2. Not keeping organized records and missing deductions or credits you deserve.

Gutter said taxpayers should keep in mind that the tax code is designed to promote and encourage good-citizen type behavior: Getting an education, taking care of your children, buying a home, giving to charity, etc.

“There are so many opportunities for people to try and save legitimately between deductions and credits,” he said. “A tax credit is a dollar for dollar reduction in your tax liability, so by not taking advantage of it, you’re really giving away your own money.”

3. Not using your kids to your best (tax-saving) advantage.

If you have children, Gutter said, a number of tax credits might be relevant for you. If you have college-age offspring, there are even more.

Go to www.irs.gov and search “education tax credit.”

4. Not realizing that if you’re struggling financially, you might be eligible for the Earned Income Tax Credit, a credit for low-income workers. Even if your income isn’t high enough to require a tax return, you can still get the credit.

Go to www.irs.gov and type “Earned Income Tax Credit” in the search box.

5. Spending your tax-refund windfall instead of filling out IRS Form 8888. The 2-year-old form can be used to automatically funnel your tax refund into one or more accounts, such as a savings account or an IRA or other safe place where you won’t be tempted to spend it on an impulse item.

Go to www.form8888.org

“It helps people with the self-control issue that we all have with money,” Gutter said. “It burns a hole in everyone’s pocket, it just depends on what temperature it burns in your pocket and how fast.”

He advises taxpayers to use tax refunds sensibly: Reduce debt first, put money toward retirement or pay bills.

6. Not realizing you can go back and amend previous years’ returns.

If you find this year that you haven’t been taking a tax deduction you’re legitimately eligible for, Gutter says, it’s perfectly acceptable to go back and file amended returns for those years.

7. Buying into the hype over speedy refund anticipation loans.

Unless you are in a true financial emergency, tax refund anticipation loans are “not typically in people’s best interest,” Gutter said.

The loans are similar to paycheck advance loans, he said. The “refund” you get is generally the refund you would have gotten if you’d waited–minus a fee or interest.

8. Not realizing you can make IRA contributions for the previous year up until tax filing day.
So until April 15, 2008, you can contribute to your IRA for tax year 2007.

9. Delaying filing a return without a good reason.

This just leaves your refund in the government’s hands when it could be accruing interest for you, Gutter said. There are some instances where it might make sense to sit on one’s tax return until the last minute–such as waiting to pay Uncle Sam if you still owe taxes, as a way to keep the money working for you until the last moment.

10. Breaking the law by lying on your taxes or not filing a return at all.

“We always tell people, even if you owe the IRS money, work on it–you’re not going to get away with this for very long,” he said. “And if you don’t know how to file your taxes, get some help. But not filing is not in your best interest.”

“A tremendous slowdown is forecast over the next few years compared to what we’ve experienced during the last five years,” said Stan Smith, director of UF’s Bureau of Economic and Business Research. “The state has not experienced a decline of this magnitude since the mid-’70s, when we were in a national recession.”

The Sunshine State is expected to add an average of only about 209,000 residents a year between 2007 and 2010, compared with annual increases of about 418,000 people between 2002 and 2006, he said.

Although Florida remains a major destination for retirees, far more young and middle-aged people move into the state to find work than their older counterparts arrive to retire, Smith said. But declining job opportunities have stanched the influx of younger people, he said.

“The vast majority of Florida’s population growth is due to migration, and during a recession the rate of job creation slows down in Florida,” he said.

The biggest group moving to the state during the last four or five decades has typically been those in their 20s and 30s, with those 65 and older accounting for only about 15 percent of in-migration, Smith said. But younger people in their 20s and 30s also make up the biggest share of those leaving the state, which is why Florida became the nation’s oldest state after World War II, he said.

Robust real estate markets and burgeoning construction fueled Florida’s growth from 2002 to 2006, just as it did during the boom years of 1971 to 1974, Smith said. In turn, the housing market’s decline dramatically curbed population growth after 2006, just as a national recession in the ’70s sharply limited expansion between 1974 and 1977, he said.

Another reason growth typically slows during a recession in addition to the availability of fewer jobs is that people have difficulty selling their houses, which delays their move, he said.

“We’ve certainly seen a slowdown in economic growth nationally, and it’s even possible we may be in a recession right now, although we won’t know for sure until later this year,” he said.

Projections call for Florida’s population to return to more normal growth levels of about 317,000 a year between 2010 and 2020, similar to the 1980s and 1990s, Smith said. Although there also was a slowdown in growth during recessions in the 1980s and 1990s, it was nowhere near the steep decline of the 1970s or that which is taking place now, he said.

“It’s really sort of a boom-and-bust pattern that we have seen in Florida,” Smith said. “The years between 2002 and 2006 were the biggest in terms of absolute increases since the early ’70s, and then just as we experienced in the ’70s we are going from a period of high- to low-growth numbers.”

The county projected to grow the fastest in percentage terms between 2007 and 2010, Lafayette in Florida’s Big Bend, is something of an anomaly because it owes its top spot to prison construction, Smith said. It is predicted to grow from 8,215 in 2007 to 9,200 in 2010, he said.

Otherwise, many of the high-growth counties are the same as in past years, he said.

Flagler, which was the fastest-growing county between 2000 and 2007, jumping from 49,832 to an estimated 93,568, is expected to continue to expand at a rapid rate, to 103,500 by 2010, Smith said. Its coastal location, proximity to Jacksonville and relatively low cost of living, as well as the presence of the large Palm Coast development, contribute to its high ranking, he said.

Other rapidly growing counties are Sumter, which owes its surge in part to prison expansion and the increasing number of residents at The Villages retirement community, and Osceola County, which receives spillover from nearby Orlando.

In terms of absolute numbers, the counties expected to make the biggest gains between 2007 and 2010 are Miami-Dade, from 2,462,292 to 2,512,300; followed by Orange, from 1,105,603 to 1,154,200; and Hillsborough, from 1,192,861 to 1,234,900.

UF Graduate Research Professor John Griggs Thompson and European mathematician Jacques Tits won the 2008 Abel Prize for Mathematics and will split the $1.2 million award, the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters announced.

Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters President Ole Didrik Lærum called Thompson from Norway at 6 a.m. EDT to give him the good news.

Thompson was surprised to get the call but he had actually heard some gossip previously, he said this morning.

“I’m devoted to mathematics; it’s my life’s work, so to see the Norwegians recognize that, it puts mathematics on the map,” Thompson said. “It’s a win-win situation.”

There is no Nobel Prize in mathematics, but the Abel prize is the closest equivalent. Created in 2003 and named after the Norwegian mathematician Neils Henrik Abel, the prize recognizes “outstanding scientific work in the field of mathematics,” according to the Norwegian Academy.

Thompson and Tits were awarded the Abel Prize for their contributions to what is called group theory, a branch of mathematics that focuses on the study of symmetry, such as the symmetry of geometric figures or algebraic equations. They have invented important new concepts and proved fundamental results in this field, according to the academy’s announcement.

“The achievements of John Thompson and Jacques Tits are of extraordinary depth and
influence. They complement each other and together form the backbone of modern group theory,” the Abel committee stated in the announcement.

Krishnaswami Alladi, chairman of UF’s mathematics department, said the award contributes greatly to the department’s and UF’s international academic reputation.

“We take immense pride from this,” he said. “The math department’s reputation has been growing steadily in recent years, but having a faculty member win the Abel prize catapults us to another level entirely. It also speaks very highly of the research and scholarship of the math department and, more generally, of the entire university.”

Thompson, 75, has been a professor at UF since 1993. He is the world’s leading authority in group theory, which traces its origins to the work of 19th-century French mathematician Evariste Galois, who, while still in his teens, discovered fundamental symmetry properties related to the solution of polynomial equations.

Thompson’s achievement in group theory began early, while he was still a graduate student in the 1950s at the University of Chicago. There, Thompson solved a famous 60-year-old problem in group theory.

According to Alladi, it was obvious from Thompson’s doctoral thesis that “his ideas would lead to a new era in group theory.”

That prediction was quickly borne out. In the 1960s, Thompson collaborated with famed mathematician Walter Feit to solve the so-called “odd order” problem. The proof, or mathematical argument of the solution, required a series of equations that filled 253 pages — an entire issue of the Pacific Journal of Mathematics.

Alladi said Thompson’s achievements and leadership helped spur a worldwide effort among dozens of mathematicians to solve one of the biggest problems in mathematics, the classification of finite simple groups. That effort was completed in recent years, after four decades of intense investigation guided by Thompson, he said.

Thompson also has also been very active during his tenure at UF, Alladi said.

“He has helped us build a world-class group in algebra,” Alladi said, adding that the department had founded a research professorship in his honor for top recent doctoral graduates in mathematics.

Solving the “odd order” problem won Thompson the American Mathematical Society’s Cole Prize in 1966. Four years later, he won Fields Medal, one of the highest awards in mathematics. Many other awards and medals followed and, in 2000, Thompson was one of 12 recipients of the National Medal of Science awarded by President Bill Clinton.

Tits, the other recipient of the Abel prize, is a professor at the Collège de France.

A reception to celebrate the announcement is set for 4:30 p.m. today at UF’s Keene Faculty Center. The event is free and open to the public, and expected attendees include UF President Bernie Machen and Berit Johne, counselor for science at the Norwegian Embassy in Washington. Johne will read a congratulatory message from the Norwegian Ambassador.

WHAT: The university community is invited to a reception to honor Thompson for his achievement.

WHEN: 4:30 p.m. today.

WHERE: Keene Faculty Center, Dauer Hall.

BACKGROUND: Thompson was notified this morning by the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters that he and Jacques Tits, a professor at the Coll?ge de France, won the Abel Prize for 2008 for their achievements in shaping modern group theory. They will share a $1.2 million prize.

CONTACT: Krishna Alladi, chairman, department of mathematics, 352-514-6526, alladi@math.ufl.edu