Peter J. Olver received his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1976 under the guidance of Prof. Garrett Birkhoff. After being a Dickson Instructor at the University of Chicago and a postdoc at the University of Oxford, he has been on the faculty of the School of Mathematics at the University of Minnesota since 1980, and a full professor since 1985. As of July, 2008, he has been serving as the Head of the Department. His research interests revolve around the applications of symmetry and Lie groups to differential equations. He is the author of over 140 papers in refereed journals, and over 45 in conference proceedings. He was named a Highly Cited Researcher'' by Thomson ISI in 2003. He has written 5 books, including the definitive text on applications of Lie groups to differential equations, which was published in 1986, translated into Russian, and also republished in China.
