Joe Iaia's Homepage

I am teaching the following in the Spring of 2013:

Math 1710 Calculus 1, M-R 10:00-10:50, SAGE 230.

Math 5320 Real Analysis 2, , TR 2:00-3:20, GAB 310.

I have been a member of the department of mathematics at the University of North Texas since August 1991 and my research interests are in elliptic partial differential equations.

OK, enough of the serious stuff. I was born and raised in Hartford, Connecticut and am about 25 years old (more or less - born in 1964). I received my B.A. from the College of the Holy Cross (Worcester, MA) in 1986 and my Ph.D. from the University of Pennsylvania in 1991. In August 1991, I joined the department of mathematics at the University of North Texas where I now teach, do research, and otherwise cause trouble.

In case you are wondering, the name Iaia is Sicilian. And no, I'm NOT in the mob. (Or to quote one of my favorite musical artists, John Gorka, ``I'm from New Jersey, my mom's Italian, I've read those mafia books, we don't belong.'' Actually, I'm from New England (Connecticut).

I happen to have a whole bunch of stuffed animals and I have gotten into the habit of naming them after mathematicians. Let's see there's Lobachevsky the Lobster, Kronecker the Krab, Archimedes the Armadillo, Gauss the Mouse, Evariste the Elephant, Pi the Pumpkin, Kovalevsky the Kat, and several others whom I haven't found names for yet. A wonderful book about influential mathematicians throughout the centuries is E.T. Bell's Men of Mathematics. Some other fun nontechnical mathematics books include Peter Beckman's The Story of Pi and John Allen Paulos' Innumeracy. I recently purchased Euclid's Elements - the books which most high school geometry is now based on. They are quite accessible and the Dover publications are filled with lots of comments. By the way, these were written around 300 B.C.E.

Favorite movies: Casablanca, It's a Wonderful Life, All the President's Men, the Godfather, Ishtar (just kidding)

Favorite music: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen Billy Bragg, John Gorka, Elvis Costello, Van Morrison, Randy Newman, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett, Giacomo Puccini, Giuseppi Verdi

Least favorite music: Reba, Michael Bolton, Kenny G, Yanni

Favorite TV and radio shows: Meet the Press, This Week, and a host of things on NPR including Morning Edition, Car Talk, and Wait! Wait! Don't Tell Me.

Hobbies: Learning mathematics, teaching mathematics, going to movies, eating cereal, eating other types of food, doing crossword puzzles, listening to NPR, listening to music, reading about U.S. politics and history - especially about the Presidents.

Presidential Trivia: I'm pretty big into Presidential trivia. I've read a whole bunch about various presidents and other political figures. There are actually a few mathematical/presidential anecdotes. One is that the short autobiographical sketch of Lincoln that circulated during his campaign for the 1860 presidential election claimed that he had read Euclid's Elements. I read recently that Lincoln read Euclid in order to become better at making logical arguments (eventually as an attorney). Another is that James Garfield found one of the many different proofs of the Pythagorean Theorem. Some great books I would recommend are Presidential Anecdotes, Political Campaigns, Congressional Anecdotes, Presidential Wives. These were all written by Paul Boller of TCU. Another great one is Hail to the Chiefs by Barbara Holland. I also have a great book about vice-presidents called Bland Ambition. One realizes after reading this book that we've been terribly lucky that several of these never made it to number one.

My favorite president is Lincoln although I wonder if part of this is due to the myth that surrounds him. I recently read David Herbert Donald's Pulitzer Prize winning biography and it was quite fascinating. I also greatly enjoyed Gore Vidal's historical novel Lincoln.

Here's a quick Presidential trivia quiz: which President later went on to become Chief Justice of the Supreme Court?? Who was the first President to throw out the first ball at a major league baseball game?? What was Joe DiMaggio's lifetime batting average? This is not technically about any of the Presidents, but Joltin' Joe could have been President if he wanted to. Give up??? William Howard Taft answers the first two questions as for the third, .325.

PUBLICATIONS

Traveling Waves and Capillarity Driven Spreading of Shear-Thinning Fluids, Journal of Partial Differential Equations, Vol. 23, No. 1, Feb. 2010, pp. 33-67.

Radial Solutions to a Superlinear Dirichlet Problem Using Bessel Functions, with S. Pudipeddi, Electronic Journal of the Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, 2008, no. 38, pp. 1-13.

Localized Solutions of a Semilinear Elliptic Equation: Loitering at the Hilltop. Electronic Journal of the Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, 2006, No. 12, pp. 1-15.

Nonconvergent Solutions of Laplacian(u) + f(u) = 0 in R^N. Variational methods: open problems, recent progress, and numerical algorithms. Contemporary Mathematics, 357, AMS, 2004, 251-267.

Positive Solution Curves in Semipositone Problems with Concave-Convex Type Nonlinearities, with Sudhasree Gadam. Electronic Journal of the Qualitative Theory of Differential Equations, No. 4, 2001, pp. 1-9.

Uniqueness of Inflection Points for Positive Solutions of a Semilinear Elliptic PDE, Nonlinear Analysis, Vol. 47, 2001, pp. 3231-3233.

Encapsulated-Vortex Solutions to Equivariant Wave Equations: Existence, with Henry Warchall. SIAM Journal of Mathematical Analysis, Vol. 30, No. 1, 1998, pp. 118-139.

Localized Radial Solutions to a Semilinear Elliptic Equation on R^N, Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations - Proceedings of the International Conference on Dynamical Systems and Differential Equations, Springfield, Missouri 1996, Vol. I, 1998, pp. 314-326.

Localized Solutions of Sublinear, Elliptic Equations: Loitering at the Hilltop, with Henry Warchall, Rocky Mountain Journal of Mathematics, Vol. 27, No. 4, Fall 1997, pp. 1131-1157.

Radial Solutions to a p-Laplacian Dirichlet Problem, Applicable Analysis, Vol. 58, 1995, pp. 335-350.

A Priori Estimates for a Semilinear Elliptic PDE, Nonlinear Analysis: Theory, Methods, and Applications, Vol. 24, No. 7, 1995, pp. 1039-1048.

Nonradial Solutions of a Semilinear Elliptic Equation in Two Dimensions, with Henry Warchall, Journal of Differential Equations, Vol. 119, No. 2, July 1995, pp. 533-558.

A Priori Estimates and Uniqueness of Inflection Points for Positive Solutions of Semipositone Problems, Differential and Integral Equations, Vol. 8, No. 2, Feb. 1995, pp. 393-403.

The Weyl Problem for Surfaces of Nonnegative Curvature, Lecture Notes in Pure and Applied Mathematics, Vol. 144: Geometric Analysis and Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations, 1993, pp. 213-220.

Isometric Embeddings of Surfaces with Nonnegative Curvature in R^3, Duke Mathematical Journal, Vol. 67, No. 2, August 1992, pp. 423-459.

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Last update: 1/7/2525.