HTML Preview Academic Promotion Letter Of Recommendation page number 1.
Academic Promotion Letter of Recommendation
Sept. 10, 2016
Professor Hugo J. Junghenn
Department of Mathematics
George Washington University
Washington, D.C., 20052
Dear Professor Junghenn,
This is a letter of recommendation on behalf of Dr. Rodica Simion, in support of her promotion to
full Professor at GW.
Let me start with a word about Rodica's field, algebraic combinatorics. This field is one of the
fastest growing areas in mathematics both in volume, quality, and prestige. What can be a better
proof of the centrality of this area than the fact that this full year, it is the subject matter of the
prestigious Mathematical Science Research Institute (MSRI) at Berkeley, sharing the honor with
low-dimensional topology. And what can be a better proof of the eminence of Rodica than the
fact that she is one of the main organizers of this special year, along with Richard Stanley and
several other distinguished combinatorialists.
I have known Rodica since her Ph.D., and watched her professional development from promise
to fulfillment. She was always very deep, and has gotten deeper an deeper as the years went by.
She also became broader and broader and now is one of the greatest experts in the world in
MIT-style, abstract, combinatorics, while at the same time is still one of the leaders in classical
enumeration and bijective combinatorics.
Her breadth and depth were manifest this June when she gave a plenary talk at the SIAM
meeting on Discrete Mathematics, in front of an audience of several hundred participants, that I
was fortunate to attend. In a spell-binding lucid talk, she outlined the
fascinating connection between convex polytopes and enumeration. I just received the paper
that was based on the lecture. It is a masterpiece of exposition and research.
Rodica was a pioneer in enumerating permutations with forbidden patterns. Her seminal paper
with Frank Schmidt is often cited, and lead to much further work by many researchers. This is
now a full-fledged area in enumerative combinatorics.
Rodica is also a great expert in combinatorial special function theory. Her work with Dennis
Stanton is first-class. They probably hold the world-record for the number
of meaningful combinatorial parameters one can put on special functions: the octa-basic
Laguerre polynomials are amazing.
Rodica has also mastered the powerful Schutzenberger methodology as can be witnessed by her
very elegant papers with Alain Denise and Serge Dulucq.
Another recent breakthrough, that will make Rodica immortal, is the simsun permutations, so
named by Richard Stanley, after Rodica simion and Sheila sundram. These permutations are
widely studied and discussed by Stanley and his students, and I am sure will find many more
applications.