Newsletter No. 40

No.40 March 1993 CUHK Newsletter CUHK Students Outdo Five Teams i n Chemistry Ol ympiad F o u r third-year chemistry majors from the University won the championship of the fourth Hong Kong Chemistry Olympiad held at, the Hong Kong Science Museum on 20th February. The annual event was j o i n t ly organized by the Hong Kong Chemical Society and the Royal Society of Chemistry to promote local interest in chemistry. This year six tertiary institutions took part in the competition: the University of Hong Kong, the Hong Kong Un i ve r s i ty of Science and Techno l ogy, Hong Kong Baptist College, Hong Kong Polytechnic, the City Polytechnic of Hong Kong, and The Chinese University. Each team was given a topic at 5.00 p.m. one day before the competition, and was required to give a 15-minute presentation on the day of the competition and to answer questions from the floor. The CUHK team was given the topic ‘Liquid Crystals' and was selected as the winner of the competition by a panel of judges, who based their decisions on factors such as novelty, background preparation, and the quality of oral presentation. CUHK representatives are Wong Chi Kin, Dale Ko, Kwan Ki Shun, and Fok Lai Fun. Professor of Community and Family Medicine Warns about Health Threats i n the Environment P r o f . Owen L. Lloyd, professor of community and f ami ly medicine, delivered his inaugural lecture entitled ‘The Environment and Public Health, Past, Present and Future - There Be Dragons...' on 12th February. In his lecture, Prof. Lloyd stressed the importance of a safe environment for the health of the public. In the past, negligence of environmental forces had resulted in disasters like the Black Death and the cholera epidemics of the 19th century. Despite recent advances in preventive medicine and public health medicine, he said, toxic dragons still lurked in the environment and would pose massive threats to our health in the future. They include AIDS, industrial toxins, the expansion of industrial nuclear energy, the gross environmental damage resulting from peacetime accidents or warfare, and most important of all, the ecological threat coming from mankind's multiplying millions. With such threats, Prof. Lloyd concluded, strongly-supported and vigorous disciplines in preventive medicine were more vital now than ever before. Siu-lien Ling Wong Vi s i t i ng Fellow 1992-93 P r o f . Man-Duen Choi, a renowned mathematician and an alumnus of Chung Chi College, re-visited the college as its Siu-lien Ling Wong Visiting Fellow from 8th to 19th February. During his stay at the University, Prof. Choi conducted a series of lectures on topics ranging from 'Factors and Relations in My Mathematical Pursuits', 'Sense and Sensibility beyond Mathematics', 'Mathematical Principles', 'The World in Mathematics', to 'The Days We Were' and 'A Tale of Flower Plucking'. Prof. Choi graduated from The Chinese University in 1967 ， and furthered his studies at the University of Toronto, where he obtained his Ph.D. degree in 1973. He has served as professor of mathematics at the University of Toronto since 1982. Prof. Choi's research interests cover operator theory, operator algebra, matrix theory and the theory of positive polynomials. He has made remarkable contributions to a long standing problem posed by Hilbert on sums of squares and was elected to the Academy of Science by the Royal Society of Canada in 1985. 3