Richard Beals
Professor of Mathematics
Richard Beals, A.B., PhD Yale University, faculty member at Yale since 1977: Your career has shown tripartite excellence: in research, in teaching, and in administrative matters. In mathematics, your insights and technical skills have pioneered techniques used by other mathematicians and produced results sought by physicists and engineers. You have studied ordinary and partial differential equations, which govern the scattering of electrons, the destructiveness of earthquakes and the shape of solitary waves. Your four books and many articles show your interests and expertise in a variety of areas, from operator theory, global and functional analysis, and psuedodifferential operators to inverse scattering theory, transport theory, mathematical economics and foundations of measurement.
For your accomplishments as a teacher you twice won teaching awards, at the University of Chicago in 1972 and again at Yale in 1989. Your administrative skills and general thoughtfulness and good judgment have made you a sought-after editor, committeeman, and review panelist throughout the world of science and mathematics, and here at Yale as well. Yalie through and through, your university is extremely proud to claim you as its own, and as you retire, gratefully sends you off with a Bulldog cheer.