Professor of Mathematics and Economics, University of California at Irvine
Donald Saari is a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and of Economics as well as the Director of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Sciences at the University of California at Irvine. He received his undergraduate degree from Michigan Technological University and his Ph.D. from Purdue University (advisor: Harry Pollard) where his thesis discussed the collision dynamics of the Newtonian N-body problem. After a postdoctoral position in the Yale University Astronomy Department, Dr. Saari joined the Mathematics Department at Northwestern University where he served as chair of the department and was the first Pancoe Professor of Mathematics. After three decades at Northwestern, in July 2000, he moved to California. Dr. Saari's research interests centre on dynamical systems and their applications to mathematical physics (primarily the Newtonian N-body problem) as well as to mathematical issues from the social sciences coming from economics, voting theory, and evolutionary behaviour. He is the Chief Editor of the "Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society" as well as serving on the editorial boards of several journals on analysis, dynamics, economics, and decision analysis. He is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a Guggenheim Fellow, the past chair of the U.S. National Committee of Mathematics, chair of the U.S. delegation to the 2002 general assembly of the International Mathematical Union, and a member of several NRC committees including Math Science Education Board. He has honorary doctorates from Purdue, Universite de Caen, and Michigan Technological University.