Professor Lindsay Childs Elected Emeritus Center Fellow for 2024

The University at Albany Emeritus Center recently elected Lindsay N. Childs as William L. Reese Fellow for 2024. Named after the center’s founding President and benefactor Bill Reese, the Fellows program is designed to confer appropriate honor to UAlbany Emeriti for sustained, consequential, and exemplary post-retirement professionally related contributions and achievements in scholarship/creative productions, teaching, or service, in or outside the University.

Professor Childs retired as a full-time faculty member of the Department of Mathematics in 2011 after a 43-year career at the University at Albany. Since his retirement, he has continued to be highly active professionally — in fact, in his own words he describes retirement as “just another sabbatical!” For example, he taught one course each semester as an adjunct faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University in AY 2012–13 and 2013–14, and he taught Classical Algebra online for UAlbany each summer from 2011 to 2017, a course for which he wrote a textbook in 1979 (new editions in 1995 and 2008) that introduces concepts of abstract algebra and motivates the concepts by real-world applications. By 2017, he realized that he had enough new material on applications to write a textbook in which the primary objective was the applications themselves. The result was “Cryptology and Error Correction: An Algebraic Introduction and Real-World Applications,” published in 2019 by Springer in their series, Springer Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics and Technology. A Japanese translation was published in 2023.

Professor Childs has also been actively engaged in research post-retirement, focusing on his specialty of Hopf algebras and Galois module theory. This is a branch of abstract algebra and algebraic number theory that evolved from the work of Evariste Galois (1811–32) who, in studying the ancient problem of finding solutions of polynomial equations, invented the mathematical theory of groups. Professor Childs has presented results of his work in this area in more than a dozen conferences or workshops since 2011, and especially at an annual conference on applications of higher algebra to number theory hosted by the University of Nebraska at Omaha.  His collaborations with other mathematicians at the Omaha conferences led to his co-authoring the book “Hopf Algebras and Galois Module Theory,” published in 2021 by the American Mathematical Society in its series, Mathematical Surveys and Monographs, volume 260, and, since retirement, to his publication in peer reviewed journals of 13 manuscripts, which collectively have accumulated more than 160 citations in other mathematics research publications.

James Van Vorst, President of the Emeritus Center, says “that the Board is impressed with the work that Professor Childs continues to do after retirement and that he exemplifies the Center’s goal of encouraging emeriti to stay actively engaged with their profession, the community, and the University.” Youqin Huang, Associate Vice Provost for Faculty Success and administrative liaison to the Emeritus Center, says “UAlbany emeriti have a vital role to play in the continued success of our university, and Professor Childs and the Emeritus Center provide wonderful examples of what emeriti excellence can look like.”

For more information about the Emeritus Center and the Fellows Program go to albany.edu/emeritus-center