Mathematics People

Mathematics People In collaboration with Severa, he developed a theory of Walsh Awarded ICTP-IMU moduli spaces of flat connections on ‘quilted surfaces’, Ramanujan Prize with varying structure groups for different regions of the surface. They found that these moduli spaces have Miguel Walsh of the University of Oxford has been natural quasi-Poisson structures and suggested a univer- awarded the 2014 Ramanujan Prize of the Abdus Salam sal quantization scheme applicable in this setup. Other International Center for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the accomplishments include an integration procedure for Department of Science and Technology (DST, Government exact Courant algebroids (with Severa), a classification of of India), and the International Mathematical Union (IMU). Dirac Lie groups (with Meinrenken), and the linear ‘derived’ Walsh was recognized for his “outstanding contributions to ergodic theory and number theory, including a proof symplectic category (with Weinstein). of the norm convergence of multiple polynomial or nilpo- “Mˇarcut¸ has made fundamental contributions to the tent ergodic averages, a long-standing problem in ergodic global geometry of Poisson structures, most notably theory, and important results in inverse sieve problems through his (semi-)local forms and rigidity results. Such leading to a sharp bound on the number of rational points results range from generalizations of Conn’s linearization on curves.” theorem to explicit computations of moduli spaces of Walsh was born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1987. He Poisson structures. First of all, he extended the geometric received his Ph.D. from the University of Buenos Aires in approach of Crainic-Fernandes, proving a generalization 2012. He is the youngest recipient so far of the Ramanu- of Conn’s theorem around symplectic leaves. He also jan Prize. His research focuses on inverse problems in clarified and simplified the original analytic approach of arithmetic combinatorics, the limiting behavior of ergodic Conn, making it available for the study of other geometric averages, and the estimation of rational points on curves. structures and allowing him to prove a much more general He received the MCA Prize of the Mathematical Congress rigidity result (around Poisson submanifolds); as an ap- of the Americas in 2013 and is a current Clay Research plication, he provided the first explicit computation of a Fellow. nontrivial Poisson moduli space. Other accomplishments The Ramanujan Prize is awarded annually to a re- searcher from a developing country who is younger than include a direct geometric proof of the existence of sym- forty-five years of age on December 31 of the year of the plectic realizations (with Crainic), the study of obstruc- award and who has conducted outstanding research in a tions and deformations of log-symplectic structures (with developing country. Researchers working in any branch of Osorno Torres), and the study of transversals in Poisson the mathematical sciences are eligible. The prize carries geometry (with Frejlich).” a cash award of US$15,000, and the recipient is invited to David Li-Bland received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics deliver a lecture at ICTP. from the University of Toronto in 2012 under the direction —Elaine Kehoe of Eckhard Meinrenken. He is currently an NSF Postdoc- toral Fellow at Berkeley. Ioan Mˇarcut¸ received his Ph.D. degree in mathematics from the University of Utrecht in Lichnerowicz Prize Awarded 2013 under the supervision of Marius Crainic. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Illinois. David Li-Bland of the University of California Berkeley The Lichnerowicz Prize is awarded every two years and Ioan M˘arcut ¸ of the University of Illinois at Urbana- Champaign have been awarded the 2014 André Lichnero- at the International Conference on Poisson Geometry in wicz Prize for notable contributions to Poisson geometry. Mathematics and Physics to researchers who have com- The prize citations read in part: “Li-Bland has made pleted their doctorates at most eight years before the year important contributions to Dirac and Poisson geometry. of the conference. In his thesis, he introduced and studied the infinitesimal counterparts of Courant groupoids and Dirac groupoids. —From a Poisson Conference announcement NOVEMBER 2014 NOTICES OF THE AMS 1253 Mathematics People tools rely on POR, and this approach has been applied to 2014 Computer-Aided many different contexts and continues to have impact to Verification Award Announced this day.… “In summary, POR is one of the major contributions to Patrice Godefroid, Microsoft Research; Doron Peled, the field of automated verification in the last two decades. Bar Ilan University; Antti Valmari, Tampere University; Its development contributed in a crucial way to make and Pierre Wolper, Université de Liège, have been named model checking successful and practically applicable to the recipients of the 2014 Computer-Aided Verification concurrent systems. This success is due to the seminal (CAV) award “for the development of partial-order- work that Godefroid, Peled, Valmari, and Wolper did in reduction algorithms for efficient state-space exploration the first half of the 1990s.” of concurrent systems.” The CAV Award is given annually in recognition of a The prize citation reads in part: “Concurrency is omni- specific fundamental contribution or a series of outstand- present in computer systems, at all levels, from concurrent ing contributions to computer-aided verification and software running over multicore platforms to distributed includes a cash prize of US$10,000. applications running over large-scale networks. The automated verification of such systems is a challenging —Marta Kwiatkowska problem, due to the highly complex interactions between University of Oxford their components. Standard verification algorithms based on systematic state-space exploration face the well-known state-explosion problem when applied to such systems: Beltrán and Braverman the size of the state space of concurrent systems grows exponentially in the number of their components. Awarded Second Smale Prize “A major approach for tackling this problem and de- The Society for the Foundations of Computational Mathe- veloping scalable algorithms for automated verification matics has announced the awarding of the second Stephen of concurrent systems comes from so-called partial-order Smale Prize to Carlos Beltrán of the University of Can- reduction (POR) techniques, which leverage the fact that tabria and Mark Braverman of Princeton University. The there often are a huge number of computations that lead Smale Prize was created to recognize the work of a young to the same observable states (i.e., states that are relevant mathematician in the areas at the heart of the society’s for checking the property under consideration) but differ interests and to help to promote his or her integration only in the order in which some parallel actions are inter- among the leaders of the scientific community. leaved. These actions are actually independent of one an- Beltrán was honored “for his brilliant contributions to other (in the sense that they are not conflicting, so partially fundamental problems in the foundations of computa- ordered), thus their total ordering in a particular execution tional mathematics.” According to the prize citation, his is not relevant. Therefore the idea is to consider such com- work “embodies original approaches that combine the putations as equivalent, so that only one representative use of complex geometric structure and analytic power of each equivalence class needs to be considered during to make important progress on problems which have the state-space exploration. The notion of independence been the focus of intense research efforts by others. An was first formulated in 1977 by Antoni Mazurkiewicz and important part of his work has been devoted to polynomial has been studied since then in the context of concurrency system solving, producing with Luis M. Pardo a Las Vegas semantics by a number of authors. Nevertheless, it was algorithm for Smale’s seventeenth problem and studying not until the first half of the 1990s that these ideas have the underlying geometry with Mike Shub and others. His been applied in algorithmic verification. work on producing equidistributed points on the sphere “While the POR idea seems natural and simple in defines the state of the art on Smale’s seventh problem. principle, the difficulty is in designing efficient search With Anton Leykin, he has provided tools to adapt nu- algorithms that determine on-the-fly, i.e., during the merical methods to supply proofs in algebraic geometry. state-space exploration of the system, which branches In addition, his work with Oscar González and Ignacio to prune and which ones to explore, while ensuring (1) Santamaría on interference alignment (solving a problem that redundant explorations are avoided and (2) that the in information theory, open for more than ten years) is state-space exploration is still complete, i.e., no computa- also a milestone.” tion equivalence class (modulo reordering of independent Braverman was honored “for his pioneering work on actions) is missed. In the period 1990–1994, Godefroid, the foundations of computational mathematics.” Ac- Peled, Valmari, and Wolper investigated this problem and cording to the prize citation, he “has made fundamental defined algorithms for solving it based on the notions of contributions to our understanding of computability stubborn, sleep,

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