Cornelia Marschall Smith Award Professor of the Year to Present Lecture

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WACO, Texas (Sept. 23, 2016) — Johnny Henderson, Ph.D., Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and 2016 Cornelia Marschall Smith Professor of the Year, will present a lecture on “Uniqueness Implies Existence for Boundary Value Problems for Third Order Ordinary Differential Equations” at 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Sept. 29, in room H101 of the Hankamer Building, 1428 S. Fifth St.
“When I received the announcement that I had been selected as the recipient of the Cornelia Marschall Smith award, the prospect of joining the company of such prominent earlier recipients was difficult to initially grasp,” said Henderson. “It still is.”

“The topic of my lecture runs through a vein that has been very much a part of my research for a long time. It deals somewhat with questions for which I can provide some insight for a broad audience and at the same time lose many with the details. Of course, the audience’s realization that such questions are even studied is a primary goal of the lecture.”
Henderson has authored many books and more than 500 journal publications. He has spoken at hundreds of conferences and colloquia and collaborated with more than 100 researchers from around the world. He received the Mathematical Association of America Southeastern Section Award for Distinguished Teaching and was among the inaugural class of international mathematicians named Fellows of the American Mathematical Society (AMS) in 2012.
The Cornelia Marschall Smith Award is presented annually to a Baylor faculty member who makes a superlative contribution to the learning environment at Baylor, including teaching, which is judged to be of the highest order of intellectual acumen and pedagogical effectiveness; research, which is recognized as outstanding by the national and/or international as well as local community of scholars; and service, which is regarded as exemplary in building the character of intellectual community at Baylor.

Dr. Cornelia Marschall Smith was an alumna, professor and chair of Baylor’s biology department. She wrote several books in the 1980s on Robert Browning and his poetry from her office in Armstrong Browning Library. Born in 1896 in a log cabin near Fredericksburg, Texas, Dr. Smith followed her sister to Baylor and taught German to the children of President Samuel Palmer Brooks. She earned a B.A. (1918) at Baylor, an M.A. (1925) at the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. (1928) at Johns Hopkins. Widely celebrated for fine teaching and generous mentoring, she also was a research scientist and a principled and thoughtful Christian. She remained a lively contributor to all dimensions of Baylor’s community — including musical, cultural and athletic events — almost until her death at the age of 101 in 1997.

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by Kelsey Dehnel, student newswriter, (254) 710-6805
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