Curriculum Vitae
Leonard L. Scott, Jr. is the Joseph Moore McConnell and David Meade Bernard Professor Emeritus in the Mathematics Department of the University of Virginia. He was born on October 17, 1942 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He received a B.A. from Vanderbilt in 1964, an M.A. from Yale in 1966, and a Ph.D. in Mathematics from Yale in 1968. His dissertation advisor was Walter Feit. Leonard Scott was then instructor in the Mathematics Department at the University of Chicago in 1968-1970, where his postdoctoral mentor was John Thompson. Scott afterwards returned to Yale as an Assistant Professor in 1970-1971 and then accepted an Associate Professorship in the Center for Advanced Study and Department of Mathematics, University of Virginia, 1971-1973. He was Associate Professor from 1971-1978, becoming a full Professor in 1978, and appointed to the McConnell/Bernard chair in 1987, becoming Emeritus in 2011. He was again a member of the University of Virginia Center for Advanced Study in 1986-7. In 2012 he was made a Fellow of the AMS.
Visiting positions: Visiting Associate Professor in the Department of Mathematics, University of Michigan, 1974-75; Visiting Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Yale University, fall 1978; member of the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, NJ (by invitation of Armand Borel), spring 1979; Visiting SERC Senior Fellow, Queen Mary College, University of London, winter and spring 1983; member, MSRI, fall 1990 and spring 2008; Visiting SERC Senior Fellow, Oxford University, and Visiting Fellow, All Souls College, Oxford, winter and spring 1992. In 1999-2000 Scott held, jointly with his Virginia position, the position of Senior research advisor to the Boston firm, Thinking Investments/Athena Capital. In fall 2003 he was a Karcher visitor for a month at the University of Oklahoma Department of Mathematics. Other visits of similar intermediate term duration include the University of Chicago, spring 1986; ETH, Zurich, and the University of Manchester, summer, 1988; The University of New South Wales, Sydney, fall 1996, spring 1997, fall 2006, spring 2008, spring 2013; The Newton Institute, Cambridge, spring 1997; AIM Institute, Palo Alto, summer 2007 and 2012. There were also numerous shorter visits to the University of Stuttgart in the 1980s and, more recently, in 2011
From 1975 to the present Leonard Scott has graduated 10 Ph.D. students. He has had 10 postdoctoral students and visitors, most recently Paramsamy Karuppuchamy in 2006-2009, and Andrew Francis in 1998-2000 and in several shorter visits as recently as 2003. Hebing Rui was a short-term postdoctoral visitor in 2004. Also, Peter Hoefsmit, Ove Kroll, George Avrunin, Wolfgang Kimmerle, Jie Du, Wayne Wheeler, and Peter Blanchard (a former Ph.D. student) were earlier postodoctoral students or visitors, for varying periods. Finally, from the late 1990s to the present, Leonard Scott has served as mentor to eight undergraduate researchers from the University of Virgina and two from Cambridge University.
Leonard Scott was on the editorial board of the AMS University Lecture Series (chair 1993-1999) and is currently an editor of the Journal of Algebra. He has served as a nationally elected member of the AMS (American Mathematical Society) Nominating committee and the AMS Editorial Boards committee. He serves often as a National Science Foundation referee and panel member. His own research has been supported by the National Science Foundation for almost 40 years, dating back to 1972. In addition to the AMS, he is a member of AAAS (the American Association for the Advancement of Science).