David Eisenbud Professorship
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For Your Information wife, Marilyn, Simons manages the Simons Foundation, a News from MSRI charitable organization devoted to scientific research. The Simonses live in Manhattan. MSRI Receives Major Gift Simons is president of Renaissance Technologies James H. Simons, mathematician, philanthropist, and Corporation, a private investment firm dedicated to the one of the world’s most successful hedge fund manag- use of mathematical methods. Renaissance presently has ers, announced in May 2007 a US$10 million gift from over US$30 billion under management. Previously he was the Simons Foundation to the Mathematical Sciences Re- chairman of the mathematics department at the State Uni- search Institute (MSRI), the largest single cash pledge in versity of New York at Stony Brook. Earlier in his career he the institute’s twenty-five-year history. The new funding was a cryptanalyst at the Institute of Defense Analyses in is also the largest gift of endowment made to a U.S.-based Princeton and taught mathematics at the Massachusetts institute dedicated to mathematics. Institute of Technology and Harvard University. The monies will create a US$5 million endowed chair, Simons holds a B.S. in mathematics from MIT and a the “Eisenbud Professorship”, named for David Eisenbud, Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of California, director of MSRI, to support distinguished visiting profes- sors at MSRI. The gift comes as Eisenbud nears the end of Berkeley. His scientific research was in the area of geom- his term as MSRI director (from July 1997 to July 2007) and etry and topology. He received the AMS Veblen Prize in as MSRI prepares to celebrate its twenty-fifth anniversary Geometry in 1975 for work that involved a recasting of in the late fall/winter 2007–08. “I’m particularly honored the subject of area-minimizing multidimensional surfaces. and gratified that Jim Simons has chosen to place a profes- A consequence was the settling of two classical ques- sorship in my name as part of his phenomenal generosity tions, the Bernstein Conjecture and the Plateau Problem. toward mathematics and MSRI,” commented Eisenbud. An Simons’s most influential research involved the discovery additional US$5 million will start a new campaign for an and application of certain measurements, now called the MSRI endowment by matching funds (1:1) raised for the Chern-Simons invariants, that have wide use, particularly institute’s permanent endowment. “The institutions that in theoretical physics. The Chern-Simons invariants were do well over the long term, through good times and bad, a product of his collaboration with Shiing-Shen Chern, are the ones that have substantial endowments. MSRI is MSRI’s cofounder and first director. of enormous importance to the mathematics community, so it gives me the greatest pleasure to see this first major New MSRI Director Named step toward an endowment,” stated Eisenbud. In May 2007, MSRI announced the appointment of MSRI’s chair of the Board of Trustees, Charles Feffer- Robert L. Bryant as director. Bryant’s five-year term at man of Princeton University, remarked, “This wonderful MSRI is effective August 1, 2007. He currently holds the gesture reflects Jim Simons’s deep passion for mathemat- Juanita M. Kreps Chair in Mathematics at Duke University. ics. We hope this extraordinary gift will help bring forth at MSRI future breakthroughs of the stature of the Chern- He succeeds David Eisenbud, who has served as MSRI Simons invariants. We are all deeply grateful.” director since 1997 and is also a tenured professor on the Currently a trustee of MSRI, Simons has been a member faculty at UC Berkeley. In August 2007 Eisenbud will leave of the institute’s board since 1999 and is the founder of MSRI to become a full-time member of the UC Berkeley the New York City-based Math for America, a nonprofit Department of Mathematics. organization with a mission to significantly improve math education in the nation’s public schools. Together with his —From MSRI news releases 894 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 54, NUMBER 7.