Emeritus Center Names Lindsay Childs a Reese Fellow for 2024

ALBANY, N.Y.  (June 11, 2024) — The University at Albany Emeritus Center recently elected Lindsay N. Childs as William L. Reese Fellow for 2024. Named after founding President and benefactor Bill Reese, the program is designed to honor to UAlbany emeriti for sustained, consequential and exemplary post-retirement professionally related contributions and achievements in scholarship and creative productions, teaching or service, in or outside the University.

Childs retired as a full-time faculty member of the Department of Mathematics in 2011 after a 43-year career at UAlbany. 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 as an adjunct faculty member at Virginia Commonwealth University in 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. His new textbook, Cryptology and Error Correction: An Algebraic Introduction and Real-World Applications, was published in 2019 by Springer in the series, Springer Undergraduate Texts in Mathematics and Technology. A Japanese translation was published in 2023.

Childs has also been actively engaged in research post-retirement, focusing on his specialty of Hopf algebras and Galois module theory, 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. Childs has presented results of his work in this area at more than a dozen conferences or workshops since 2011, including at an annual conference on applications of higher algebra to number theory hosted by the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The Emeritus Center helped support his travel to these meetings five times with grants from the Three Voices program. 

Childs’ 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 and, since retirement, to the publication in peer-reviewed journals of 13 manuscripts, which collectively have accumulated more than 160 citations in other mathematics research publications.

Childs “exemplifies the center’s goal of encouraging emeriti to stay actively engaged with their profession, the community and the University,” according to Emeritus Center President James Van Vorst.

Youqin Huang, associate vice provost for faculty success and the administrative liaison to the Emeritus Center, said “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 visit the website.