Memorial fund honors student

A memorial fund was established to honor fifth-year Mathematics graduate student Al-Moez Alimohamed, who was slain in August during a robbery near 47th and Pine streets. "We talked about it in the Math Department two weeks after his death," Mathematics Professor Wolfgang Ziller said last night. "We decided that we should do something because he was very special." The fund will establish an annual Al-Moez Alimohamed Teaching Award for a graduate student showing excellence in teaching. In addition, funds will be used to create a Graduate Students Reference Library, in what is currently the Mathematics graduate student lounge in the David Rittenhouse Laboratory. "It isn't going to be thousands of books, but some which are fundamental for research," said Mathematics Department Undergraduate Chairperson Dennis DeTurck. DeTurck said the library will not lend out books, but would provide a resource of "basic stuff." He added that the lounge has ample space for a library. "We're hoping to stock [the library] with a combination of things that we might have to buy and books donated by faculty from their own collections," he said. Ziller said there was a consensus among the faculty in the department that the memorial would properly remember Alimohamed. "Moez was an excellent teacher," Ziller said. "He was also an excellent researcher." Ziller said that "the paper that [Alimohamed] wrote just before his death was accepted in a journal for publication, the Theoretical Computer Science." The journal is "the pre-eminent journal of that subject," he added. "Moez was in fact a gifted teacher as well as being a prominent research mathematician, and we thought a good way to memorialize him in the Mathematics Department would be to make an award to teaching [and create a library]," DeTurck said. The four juveniles and one 18-year-old charged with Alimohamed's death are scheduled to go on trial in January.

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