The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected six NYU faculty as fellows: Marsha Berger, a professor of computer science and mathematics, Philosophy Professor Beatrice Longuenesse, Economics Professor David Pearce, History Professor Barbara Weinstein as well as Marcel Kahan and Geoffrey Miller, both professors in NYU’s School of Law.
The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AAAS) has elected six New York University faculty as fellows: Marsha Berger, a professor of computer science and mathematics, Philosophy Professor Beatrice Longuenesse, Economics Professor David Pearce, History Professor Barbara Weinstein as well as Marcel Kahan and Geoffrey Miller, both professors in NYU’s School of Law.
The six are among the 212 Fellows elected this year. Others include the following: actor Daniel Day-Lewis; economist Monika Piazzesi; and, Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen. A complete list of the 2011 class of new members is located here.
Berger, a professor in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, conducts research in scientific computing, a field that draws both on computer science and mathematics. Her early focus was simulating fluid flows using adaptive methods that capture the varying nature of solutions. She then turned to “Cartesian embedded boundary” methods, developing ways to compute flow around airplanes and other complex geometric structures. She and NASA collaborator Mike Aftosmis developed a software package that has been used in numerous design projects for aircraft and spacecraft, including the space shuttle redesign. Most recently, she has collaborated with Randy LeVeque and David George to apply adaptive methods to tsunami modeling.
Kahan, George T. Lowy Professor of Law at NYU’s School of Law, approaches corporate law from a law-and-economics perspective. His scholarship focuses on shareholder voting, state competition in corporate law, the regulation of takeovers, as well as the contractual provisions in credit agreements and bond indentures. Kahan has written more than 40 articles for law reviews, finance journals, and professional publications. His articles have been awarded the Merton Miller Prize for the best paper submitted to the Journal of Business and the De Brauw Prize for the best paper in the ECGI Law Working Paper series. Thirteen of his articles have been selected as among the best on corporate and securities law by the Corporate Practice Commentator.
Longuenesse, whose current research focuses on problems of self-consciousness and self-reference, has authored Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998, a revised and expanded version of Kant et le Pouvoir de Juger, 1993), Kant on the Human Standpoint (2005), and Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (2007, a revised and expanded version of Hegel et la Critique de la Métaphysique, 1981), among other works. She is the co-editor, with Daniel Garber, of Kant and the Early Moderns (2008).
Miller, Stuyvesant P. Comfort Professor at NYU’s School of Law, uses economic methods to understand a wide variety of legal phenomena, including complex litigation, the law of financial institutions, family law, and contract law; American legal history, and ancient and biblical law. He is a founder of the Society for Empirical Legal Studies, a scholarly organization devoted to promoting the use of statistical and other empirical methods for the study of legal rules and institutions. Miller is also the director of the Center for Financial Institutions at NYU Law. His books include Ways of a King: Political Ideas in the Bible (forthcoming 2012); Risk, Trust and Moral Hazard in Financial Markets (2011); The Origins of the Necessary and Proper Clause (2010, with Gary Lawson, Robert Natelson, and Guy Seidman); and The Economics of Ancient Law (2010, editor).
Pearce is an economic theorist who has contributed to the areas of strategic dynamics and the foundations of game theory. One of the originators of the idea of rationalizability in noncooperative games, he also worked with Dilip Abreu and Ennio Stacchetti to develop a collection of dynamic programming concepts for infinitely repeated games. These results are used widely in many areas including macroeconomic theory, under the name APS. With the same co-authors, he is studying bilateral negotiations and the kinds of reputations the bargainers try to establish. He has served as Chair of the Departments of Economics of Yale and of NYU.
Weinstein’s scholarship is focused on Brazil in the 19th and 20th centuries, with notable consideration of the country’s sharply contrasting regional histories as well as its different political, economic, and social trajectories and varying transnational connections. Weinstein, the Silver Professor of History at NYU, has published: For Social Peace in Brazil: Industrialists and the Remaking of the Working Class in Sao Paulo, 1920-1964 (1996); The Amazon Rubber Boom, 1850-1920 (1983); and “Postcolonial Brazil,” which appeared in The Oxford Handbook of Latin American History (2010), among other works.
The new class will be inducted at a ceremony on October 1, at the Academy’s headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Founded in 1780 by John Adams, James Bowdoin, John Hancock, and others, AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation, including George Washington and Ben Franklin in the 18th century, Daniel Webster and Ralph Waldo Emerson in the 19th, and Albert Einstein and Winston Churchill in the 20th. The current membership includes more than 250 Nobel Laureates and more than 60 Pulitzer Prize winners.