George Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Penn State University, has been selected to receive an honorary degree from SASTRA University in India. The degree will be awarded as part of the 125th anniversary celebration of Srinivasa Ramanujan, an Indian mathematician who, with little formal mathematics training, made extraordinary contributions to the fields of mathematical analysis, number theory, infinite series, and continued fractions. Andrews is an authority on Ramanujan's work, and he is collaborating on a multi-volume study of Ramanujan's lost notebook, which Andrews discovered in the Trinity College Library at Cambridge in 1976.
Andrews studies number theory and the theory of partitions and their applications to statistical mechanics and computer science. He is a Fellow of the National Academy of Sciences, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. He served as the president of the American Mathematical Society from 2009 to 2011. He was appointed to the review-advisory panel of the Simons Foundation in 2010 and, in 2008, he was named as one of three finalists for Baylor University's Robert Foster Cherry Award for Great Teaching, described as the only teaching award presented by a college or university to an individual for exceptional teaching. In 2008, he was awarded an honorary professorship at Nankai University in China. He received the Centennial Award from the Department of Mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1999 in recognition of his contributions to pure mathematics and mathematical education. In addition, Andrews was awarded honorary degrees by the University of Waterloo in Canada in 2004, the University of Florida in 2002, and the University of Parma in Italy in 1998. Throughout his career, he has given numerous invited lectures in the United States and abroad.
A member of the Penn State faculty since 1964, Andrews was named Evan Pugh professor of mathematics in 1981. He served as chair of the department from 1980 to 1982 and from 1995 to 1997, and he also served as the department's associate chair for faculty development. During his career at Penn State, Andrews has served as thesis advisor for numerous doctoral-degree and master's-degree students.
Andrews earned a doctoral degree in mathematics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1964, and bachelor's and master's degrees at Oregon State University in 1960.