Peter M. Luthy got his Ph.D. from Cornell University; immediately following that, he was a postdoc of Guido’s at Washington University in St. Louis from 2012 to 2015. He is now the chair of the math department at the College of Mount Saint Vincent, a small college in New York City. When he was still in St. Louis, Guido and he talked many times about a course he taught at WashU, year after year, for good freshmen. It was during this time we decided we should write a book based on the course he had designed, and Steve Xiao joined us in the project.
Professor Guido L. Weiss has had a very wide and interesting career. If one enters “Guido Weiss” in Google, several rather long articles about him will appear. We shall describe them in relatively few words that will give an idea of what he has done mathematically. His CV is very broad. All his university degrees are from the University of Chicago. After graduating with a Ph.D., he was on the faculty of DePaul University from 1956 to 1960. After this, from 1960 to 2015 his positions were all at Washington University in St. Louis. During his fifty-five years period he was very active as a mathematician and performed a considerable amount of research and occupied several academic positions. The list of publications (from 1955 to 2012) contains 121 papers (in one of the Google articles) and has published nineteen more articles and is now cooking two more.
His professional experience and honors are considerable. He received honorary professorships from the University of Milano (Bicocca), in Italy, the University of Barcelona, Spain, the Beijing Normal University, in China; the Chauvenent Prize and other similar prizes.
He has been invited to many lectureships all over the world. In particular he has travelled to China many times since 1980 and has “replaced” many Soviet mathematicians as a professor (nine of his fourty-eight Ph.D. students are from China).
Steven S. Xiao earned a Ph.D. in Mathematics from the Institute of Mathematics, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China. He once was one of Professor Weiss’s post-docs and now takes care of all the computing in the department. He also teaches mathematics courses and computer programming courses in the university college.
