Mathematics People, Volume 47, Number 6
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people.qxp 5/3/00 9:05 AM Page 676 Mathematics People Herald’s research area is 2000 AMS Centennial gauge theory and invariants Fellowships Awarded of knots and three-dimen- sional manifolds. These in- The AMS has awarded four Centennial Fellowships for variants include the Casson 1999–2000. The recipients are SIQI FU, CHRISTOPHER HERALD, invariant, its generalizations, WEI-DONG RUAN, and VASILY STRELA. The amount of the and Floer homology. One of fellowship is currently $39,000, plus an expense allowance his results gives a new inter- of $1,600. pretation of the equivariant (Tristam-Levine) signature of Siqi Fu a knot in terms of the SU(2) representation variety of the Siqi Fu received his Ph.D. from Washington University in knot group. Recently his work Saint Louis in 1994 under the direction of Steven G. Krantz. has been centered around Fu was a visiting assistant Christopher Herald generalizations of the Casson professor at the University of invariant of homology three- California in Irvine and in spheres to higher rank groups and their surgery proper- Riverside and at Texas A&M ties. University from 1994 to 1998. He plans to use the Centennial Fellowship to visit He has been an assistant Harvard University and the University of California, Berkeley. professor at the University of Wyoming since 1998. Wei-Dong Ruan His research has been cen- tered on several complex vari- Wei-Dong Ruan received his Ph.D. from Harvard University ables. He has worked on in- in 1995 under the supervision of Shing-Tung Yau. Ruan variant metrics (e.g., the spent a year in Europe visiting Bergman, Carathéodory, and the Institut des Hautes Études Kobayashi metrics), domains Scientifiques in France and Siqi Fu with noncompact automor- Ruhr-Universität in Bochum, phism groups, and lately the Germany. Since fall 1996 he ∂ -Neumann problem. His cur- has been a Ritt Assistant Pro- rent research interests include compactness and spectral fessor at Columbia University. theory of the ∂ -Neumann problem, and behavior of the He will become an assistant Bergman kernel functions and projections. professor at the University of He plans to use the Centennial Fellowship to visit Prince- Illinois at Chicago in the fall ton University and the University of California, Berkeley. of 2000. Ruan plans to use the Centennial Fellowship to visit Harvard University and Christopher Herald the Institute for Advanced Christopher Herald received his Ph.D. in 1992 from the Wei-Dong Ruan Study in Princeton. University of California, Berkeley, under the direction of Ruan’s research field is dif- Tomasz Mrowka. Herald has been a visiting assistant ferential geometry. He studied the convergence and col- professor at the University of California, Irvine (1992–94), lapsing of Kähler manifolds and showed the contrast a Britton Postdoctoral Fellow at McMaster University between the Kähler and the Riemannian cases. He also (1994–96), and a visiting assistant professor at Swarthmore proved the C∞ convergence of the Bergman metric using College (1994–97). He was also a visitor at the Max-Planck- canonical coordinates for Kähler manifolds. Institut für Mathematik in Bonn (spring 1994). Since 1999 Ruan’s recent work is on Lagrangian torus fibration of he has been an assistant professor at the University of Calabi-Yau manifolds with application to mirror symme- Nevada, Reno. try. He constructed a Lagrangian torus fibration for 676 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 47, NUMBER 6 people.qxp 5/3/00 9:05 AM Page 677 Mathematics People Calabi-Yau hypersurfaces in toric varieties and proved the University of Notre Dame; MICHAEL MOLLOY, University of symplectic topological version of the Strominger-Yau- Toronto; ANDREI OKOUNKOV, University of California, Berkeley; Zaslow mirror conjecture in this case. He plans to explore PETER S. OZSVATH, Michigan State University; BJORN SANDSTEDE, further the rich geometric structures revealed by this Ohio State University; STEVE SHKOLLER, University of California, construction. Davis; GIGLIOLA STAFFILANI, Stanford University; CHRISTOPH Vasily Strela THIELE, University of California, Los Angeles; JOHN A. TOTH, McGill University; THOMAS P. WITELSKI, Duke University; and Vasily Strela received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the Massachu- setts Institute of Technology under the supervision of ERIC ZASLOW, Northwestern University. Gilbert Strang. During 1996–99 Strela held postdoctoral and —Alfred P. Sloan Foundation announcement visiting positions at the Uni- versity of South Carolina; Imperial College, London; and Elliott Receives Synge Award Dartmouth College. Since fall 1999 Strela has been an GEORGE A. ELLIOTT of the University of Toronto has been assistant professor at Drexel chosen as the recipient of the fourth John L. Synge Award University. by the Royal Society of Canada for his work in the His research interests field of operator algebras, particularly on derivations, include wavelet and multi- approximately finite-dimensional algebras, C-K-theory, wavelet theory, signal pro- noncommutative tori, and Schrödinger operators. cessing, and financial mathe- The John L. Synge Award was established to honor matics. Recently he has been John Lighton Synge, Fellow of the Royal Society and of the working on stochastic mod- Vasily Strela Royal Society of Canada. It is given at irregular intervals els of images and applications in noise removal. He plans to visit the Courant Institute of for outstanding research in any branch of the mathemat- Mathematical Sciences at New York University and, for a ical sciences. The award consists of a diploma and a cash short period, MIT. prize of $1,500. Previous recipients of the award were Please note: Information about the competition for the James Arthur (1987), Israel Michael Sigal (1993), and 2001–2002 AMS Centennial Fellowships will be published Joel Feldman (1996). in the “Mathematics Opportunities” section of an upcom- ing issue of the Notices. —From a Royal Society of Canada announcement —Allyn Jackson Rao Wins Parzen Prize Sloan Fellows Announced The Emanuel and Carol Parzen Prize for Statistical Inno- vation for 2000 has been awarded to C. RADHAKRISHNA RAO The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has announced the names of Pennsylvania State University for “outstanding distinc- of 104 outstanding young scientists and economists who tion and eminence in research on the theory of statistics, have been selected to receive Sloan Research Fellowships. Grants of $40,000 for a two-year period are administered in applications of statistical methods in diverse fields, in by each fellow’s institution. Once chosen, fellows are free providing international leadership for fifty-five years in to pursue whatever lines of inquiry most interest them, and directing statistical research centers, in continuing impact they are permitted to employ fellowship funds in a wide through his vision and effectiveness as a scholar and variety of ways to further their research aims. teacher, and in extensive service to American and inter- More than four hundred nominations for the 2000 national society.” awards were reviewed by a committee of distinguished The Parzen Prize is awarded in even-numbered years by scientists. The mathematicians on the committee were the Department of Statistics at Texas A&M University to George C. Papanicolaou, Stanford University; Peter Sarnak, North American statisticians who have made outstanding Princeton University; and Ronald J. Stern, University of and influential contributions to the development of California, Irvine. applicable and innovative statistical methods. The 2000 The Sloan Fellows in mathematics are: DAVID ADALSTEINSSON, Parzen Prize Committee members were Herman Chernoff, University of North Carolina; DMITRY DOLGOPYAT, Pennsylvania J. H. Matis, H. J. Newton, Grace Wahba, and Marvin Zelen. State University; GIOVANNI FORNI, Princeton University; THOMAS H. GEISSER, University of Southern California; The prize consists of a $1,000 honorarium and travel to WILLIAM A. GRAHAM, University of Georgia; JAN HESTHAVEN, College Station, Texas, to present a lecture at the prize Brown University; ELENY-NICOLETA IONEL, University of ceremony. Wisconsin; IGOR KUKAVICA, University of Southern California; ALEXANDER LEIBMAN, Ohio State University; XIAOBO LIU, —Department of Statistics, Texas A&M University JUNE/JULY 2000 NOTICES OF THE AMS 677 people.qxp 5/3/00 9:05 AM Page 678 Mathematics People GENADY P. CHEREPANOV, Naval Research Laboratory, Wash- Rollo Davidson Prizes ington: Russia; LEROY A. FRANKLIN, Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology: Iceland; LEW FRIEDLAND, State University of New Awarded York, College at Geneseo: Hungary; MARIA GUADALUPE MARTINEZ, University of California, San Diego: Germany; The trustees of the Rollo Davidson Trust have awarded the SANFORD S. MILLER, State University of New York, College at Rollo Davidson Prizes for 2000 to KURT JOHANSSON of Brockport: Romania; MOSHE ROSENFELD, Pacific Lutheran the Royal Institute of Technology, Sweden, for his work on University: Czech Republic; LEONARD R. RUBIN, University of understanding the Tracy-Widom distribution in a range of Oklahoma: Croatia; EDWARD G. SEWELL, University of Texas, contexts, including longest increasing subsequences and El Paso: Argentina; and ANDREW J. VINCE, University of Florida: random matrices, and to DAVID WILSON of Microsoft Turkey. Research for his work in discrete probability and computer algorithms, in particular exact simulation and —From the Chronicle of Higher Education coupling from the past. The prize was established to commemorate the life