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Mathematics People

Union. She is also a member of the board of the College Toro Awarded Assistant Migrant Program (CAMP) at the . This program is federally funded through Blackwell–Tapia Prize the US Department of Education’s Office of Migrant Edu- Tatiana Toro of the University cation. It is designed to outreach to and support students of Washington, Seattle, has been from migrant and seasonal farmworker families during awarded the 2020 Blackwell–Tapia their first year in college. Inspired by the CAMP students, Prize. The prize honors excellence Toro spearheaded an effort to launch the first Latinx in in research among people who have the Mathematical Sciences Conference (LATMATH). This promoted diversity within the math- conference took place at IPAM in April 2015. Participants ematical and statistical sciences. included high school students, undergraduate students, The prize citation reads in part: graduate students, postdoctoral scholars and faculty, and “Toro is an analyst whose work lies researchers in industry and government. In 2018 she co- Tatiana Toro at the interface of geometric measure organized the second Latinx in the Mathematical Sciences theory, harmonic analysis, and par- Conference funded through the Mathematical Sciences tial differential equations. Her work focuses on understand- Institutes Diversity initiative. This conference attracted over ing mathematical questions that arise in an environment 250 participants.” where the known data are very rough. The main premise Toro was born in Bogotá, Colombia, and received her of her work is that under the right lens, objects, which at PhD from in 1992 under the direction first glance might appear to be very irregular, do exhibit of . She held positions at the University of quantifiable regular characteristics. With collaborators, she California, Berkeley, and the before introduced a new framework to study boundary regularity joining the University of Washington. She has been a mem- questions for second-order partial differential operators. ber of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) They laid the foundation for what has become a new, rap- in Berkeley, a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced idly developing area within PDEs. They also brought tools Study of Harvard University, and Chancellor Professor at from geometric measure theory to study basic questions UC Berkeley. She has held two Alfred P. Sloan Foundation about the structure of harmonic measure. Their ideas have Fellowships, a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship, and provided a new and original approach to understanding two Simons Foundation Fellowships. She received the the relationship between the geometry of a domain and the Landolt Distinguished Graduate Mentor Award from the regularity at the boundary of the solutions to second-order University of Washington in 2019. She is a Fellow of the partial differential equations. “Her professional service is a multidimensional en- AMS. She is an elected member of the American Academy deavor. It includes service to the mathematical community of Arts and Sciences and a Miembro Correspondiente de at large, mentoring at different levels of the academic lad- la Academia Colombiana de Ciencias Exactas, Físicas y der, and outreach to elementary schools. Her commitment Naturales. Toro was an invited speaker at the 2010 Inter- toward addressing issues of equity and underrepresentation national Congress of Mathematicians in Hyderabad, India. of certain groups in the mathematical sciences is a guid- She delivered an invited address at the Joint ing principle in each one of these settings. She serves as a Meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana, in 2011 and the member of the Board of Trustees of the Institute for Pure NAM Clayton–Woodard Lecture at the Joint Mathematics and Applied Mathematics (IPAM) at UCLA, a member of Meetings in Seattle in 2016. In 2020 she was the inaugural the Board of Directors of the Banff International Research AMS Mirzakhani Lecture speaker at the Joint Mathematics Station (BIRS), and as cochair of the Scientific Advisory Meetings in Denver, Colorado. She tells the Notices: “I am Committee of MSRI in Berkeley. She is a member of the a swimmer. I have two kids (seventeen and twenty-two), US National Committee for the International Mathematical two dogs, two cats, and a husband, also a mathematician.”

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The Blackwell–Tapia Prize and Conference honor David Codá Marques and his wife, Ana, have two children, Pedro Blackwell, the first African American to be elected to the and Luisa. National Academy of Sciences, and Richard Tapia, recipient Zhiwei Yun of the Massachusetts of the National Medal of Science in 2010. The prize recog- Institute of Technology works at the nizes a mathematician who has contributed significantly to intersection of representation the- research in his or her area of expertise and who has served ory, algebraic geometry, and number as a role model for mathematical scientists and students theory. He uses ideas and techniques from underrepresented minority groups or has contributed from geometry to solve problems in in other significant ways to addressing the problem of un- group representations and number derrepresentation of minorities in math. theory. He has constructed the first examples of motives of type E7 and —Blackwell–Tapia Conference announcement Zhiwei Yun E8 and solved a related inverse Ga- lois problem. In joint work with Wei Zhang, he has given a geometric interpretation of higher Simons Foundation derivatives of L-functions for function fields. Investigators Named Theoretical Computer Science Venkatesan Guruswami of Carnegie The Simons Foundation has named the Simons Founda- Mellon University conducts research tion Investigators for 2020. Following are the investigators that has led to major advances in whose work involves the mathematical sciences. the theory of error-correcting codes, approximate optimization, pseu- Mathematics dorandomness, and related com- Alexei Borodin of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- plexity-theoretic and mathematical ogy studies problems on the interface of representation aspects. His work on list decoding theory and probability that link to , random has yielded codes with minimum matrix theory, and integrable systems. His most recent Venkatesan possible redundancy for correcting work carries over the ideas and techniques of the theory of Guruswami worst-case errors. His recent works symmetric functions to solvable lattice models of statistical include notable progress on polar physics. codes, deletion-correcting codes, codes for cloud storage, Ciprian Manolescu of Stanford and constraint satisfaction problems. He tells the Notices University works in low-dimensional that, in his (sadly limited) spare time, he enjoys traveling, topology and gauge theory. His re- ethnic vegetarian food, racquet sports, crime thrillers, and search is centered on constructing Carnatic (south Indian classical) music. new versions of Floer homology and Omer Reingold of Stanford Uni- versity conducts research in the foun- applying them to questions in topol- dations of computer science and, ogy. With collaborators, he showed most notably, in computational com- that many Floer-theoretic invari- plexity, cryptography, and the socie- ants are algorithmically computable. tal impact of computation. Among Ciprian Manolescu He also developed a new variant his fundamental contributions are of Seiberg–Witten Floer homology, small-memory deterministic graph which he used to prove the existence of nontriangulable walks, explicit constructions of loss- manifolds in high dimensions. Omer Reingold less expander graphs, randomness Fernando Codá Marques of extractors, and pseudorandom func- is a geometer. tions, as well as establishing influential notions in the area His recent work, in collaboration of algorithmic fairness. He is a Fellow of the Association with André Neves, developed a full for Computing Machinery (ACM). His honors include the Morse theory for the area functional 2005 Grace Murray Hopper Award and the 2009 Gödel in closed Riemannian manifolds. Prize. He tells the Notices: “I [have] had an ongoing involve- The ideas introduced by them have ment with theater since my days as a theater major in Talma revitalized the subject, leading to the Yalin arts high school many years ago. In the last couple Fernando discovery that closed minimal sur- of decades I was part of both scripted theater troupes as Codá Marques faces are ubiquitous in these spaces. well as playback theater troupes. Playback theater is a form

October 2020 Notices of the American Mathematical Society 1407 Mathematics People NEWS of improvisational theater based on true stories from the Award committee, organizer and regular contributor of audience. Very recently [I was] appointed to be the artistic annual meetings, cofounder of the CAIMS/SCMAI jour- director of the Yanshufim playback troupe and teaching nal Mathematics in Science and Industry, for spearheading playback theater at Stanford as part of the [computer sci- improvements to CAIMS/SCMAI operations, and for ence] department to enhance students’ collaboration and research capabilities.” his leadership as president-elect, president, and past- David Woodruff of Carnegie Mellon University works in president.” Spiteri received his PhD from the University the foundations of data science, specifically in data streams, of British Columbia. He is the director of the Centre for machine learning, randomized numerical linear algebra, High-Performance Computing at Saskatchewan. He tells sketching, and sparse recovery. One of his breakthroughs the Notices: “My first language is Maltese. I didn’t speak was the first randomized relative error approximation any English before I was three years old. I love languages algorithms for least-squares regression and low-rank approximation that run in input sparsity time (i.e., time and can dabble around in about seven of them (English, proportional to the number of nonzero entries in the Maltese, Spanish, Italian, French, German, and Arabic), all input). His work on data streams includes the first optimal apparently with a Canadian accent, eh.” algorithms for approximately counting distinct elements, Jun Liu of the University of Water- approximating the frequency moments and finding heavy loo received the 2020 CAIMS/PIMS hitters, as well as optimal lower bounds for the complexity Early Career Award “in recognition of certain algorithms. The Simons Investigators Program provides a stable of his contributions to mathemati- base of support for outstanding scientists, enabling them cal control theory for cyber-physical to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions. systems, using innovative approaches that combine theoretical depth and —From a Simons Foundation announcement computational analysis, applied to Jun Liu problems that are of practical im- Prizes of CAIMS portance.” He received his PhD in 2010 from the University of Waterloo. In his spare time, The Canadian Applied and Industrial Mathematics Society (CAIMS) has awarded several prizes for 2020. Liu enjoys spending time with his family, reading, watch- Vakhtang Putkaradze of the Uni- ing movies (especially documentaries), camping, hiking, versity of Alberta has been awarded playing soccer, and watching his sons play hockey. the 2020 CAIMS-Fields Industrial Steven Ruuth of Simon Fraser Research Prize of CAIMS and the University received the 2020 CAIMS Fields Institute for his work in geo- Research Prize “in recognition of metric mechanics, an area that unifies dynamical systems, the calculus of his outstanding contribution to the variations, continuum mechanics, development of robust numerical and related topics with a geometric methods for time dependent partial Vakhtang Putkaradze perspective. Putkaradze received his differential equations and interfacial PhD in physics in 1997 from the dynamics, and the impact of his work . He is currently site director of Steven Ruuth in scientific computing.” He received the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (PIMS) at the University of Alberta. He enjoys spending time out- his PhD in 1996 from the University doors with his family, participating in of British Columbia. He received the CAIMS Doctoral such activities as hiking, biking, and Dissertation Award in 1996 and the Germund Dahlquist playing soccer. Prize from the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathe- Raymond Spiteri of the Univer- matics (SIAM) in 2011. He enjoys packrafting and Arctic sity of Saskatchewan was awarded travel, and last year he visited Tuktut Nogait National Park the CAIMS Arthur Beaumont Dis- tinguished Service Award “in rec- in Canada’s Northwest Territories for fifteen days of river ognition of his outstanding service travel and backpacking. to CAIMS/SCMAI as member and Raymond Spiteri chair of the Doctoral Dissertation —From CAIMS announcements

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enthusiasm about the importance of understanding math- NCTM Lifetime Achievement ematical concepts and her beliefs that any child can learn mathematics and that every teacher must understand the Awards Given concepts that they are teaching.” Her service to the NCTM The National Council of Teachers of Mathematics (NCTM) includes serving on several committees and working with has awarded its Lifetime Achievement Awards to Karen conferences as chair, cochair, or member of regional meet- Karp of Johns Hopkins University and Rita Janes of New- ings and the 2005 NCTM annual meeting. She has written foundland and Labrador, Canada. books, chapters, articles, television scripts, and assessment According to the prize citation, items for the Student Achievement Indicators Program; has Karp has “dedicated her life to not worked on curriculum committees; and has conducted only mathematics but also the in- summer institutes for mathematics teachers. Her honors tersection of mathematics education include the Barnes Award for outstanding contributions to and special education.” Karp received the professional development of teachers in the province of her degree in elementary education Newfoundland and Labrador and the Queen Elizabeth II with a concentration in mathematics Diamond Jubilee Medal for her dedicated service to peers, and science from Adelphi University community, and Canada. and spent much of her career at the —From an NCTM announcement Karen Karp University of Louisville. At Johns Hopkins she is currently advisement coordinator of the EdD program, mentoring doctoral Wang and Xu Awarded students as well as the faculty advisers who oversee the students through their dissertations. Karp has served as Traub Prize in IBC president of the Association of Mathematics Teacher Ed- ucators (AMTE), has held numerous positions with the Heping Wang of Capital Normal University, Beijing, , Greater Louisville Council of Teachers of Mathematics and Guiqiao Xu of Tianjin Normal University, Tianjin, and the Nassau County, New York, Mathematics Teachers China, have been awarded the 2020 Joseph F. Traub Prize Association, and has served on the board of directors, as for Achievement in Information-Based Complexity. They well as on more than forty committees, for the NCTM. She will share the cash prize of US$3,000, and each will receive was coprincipal investigator on an NSF grant that brought a plaque. together mathematics educators and special educators to develop ways to support students with special needs. Her —Joseph F. Traub Prize Committee announcement awards include Outstanding Faculty Mentor Award of the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, as well as the University of Louisville’s Outstanding Doctoral Mentor Constantin Awarded Award, the President’s Distinguished Teaching Award, and Wittgenstein Prize the President’s Distinguished Service Award for a Career of Service. She was a member of the International Congress Adrian Constantin of the University of Vienna has been on Mathematics Education's study group on students with awarded the 2020 Wittgenstein Prize. According to the cita- special needs and has facilitated countless workshops and tion, Constantin is a specialist in the waves and currents of professional development sessions. She has authored or the oceans and the atmosphere, and his research helps to coauthored more than thirty books and more than eighty better predict the extent of climate phenomena and natural articles and book chapters. In her free time she loves being disasters. Constantin was born in Timisoara, Romania. He with her family at the lake, reading to grandchildren, and has been a professor at the University of Vienna since 2008. doing puzzles of any kind. His honors include the Göran Gustafsson Prize from the The citation for Janes states: “Rita Janes has been exem- Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the Friedrich Wilhelm plary as a teacher at all levels, a mathematics coordinator, Bessel Prize from the German Humboldt Foundation, and a university instructor, a researcher, a writer of mathematics an ERC Advanced Grant. The Wittgenstein Prize carries materials and assessments, a moving force in curriculum a cash value of up to 1.5 million euros (approximately work, a leader in professional development, and a confer- US$1,700,000) to support research for five years following ence planner and speaker.” She spent ten years teaching the award. It is awarded by the Austrian Science Fund on at the Memorial University of Newfoundland and has behalf of the Austrian Ministry for Science. been a mentor for teachers “throughout Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, and the United States with her —Wittgenstein Prize announcement

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• Kaisa Matomäki, University of Turku, for research AWM Schafer Prizes in number theory, including results on the dis- tribution of multiplicative functions over short Awarded intervals of numbers. The Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) has • Phan Thành Nam, Ludwig Maximilian University awarded the 2020 Alice T. Schafer Prize, which recognizes of Munich, for research in analysis and mathemat- excellence in research by an undergraduate woman, to ical physics, in particular in many-body quantum Natalia Pacheco-Tallaj of Harvard University. She has mechanics, spectral theory, calculus of variations, been involved in research dating back to high school and and partial differential equations and numerical continued through her undergraduate career, participat- analysis. ing in REUs at the University of Michigan and Williams • Joaquim Serra, ETH Zurich, for research in ellip- College. As an undergraduate, she has done research in tic and parabolic partial differential equations, knot theory and has published several papers. She has also reaction-diffusion equations, free boundary prob- excelled in course work, including graduate-level courses, lems, and integro-differential equations. and independent reading with mentors. Yuhan (Michelle) • Jack Thorne, University of Cambridge, for work Jiang of the University of California, Berkeley, was named in number theory and arithmetic aspects of the runner-up for the prize. Her research includes algebraic , especially in algebraic num- geometry of singular plane curves, algebraic combinator- ber theory. ics, and . Honorable mentions were • , École Polytechnique Fédérale awarded to Teresa Yu of Williams College, Marisa Gaetz de Lausanne, for work in number theory and opti- of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alice Lin mal configurations on manifolds, for her work in of Princeton University. solving the sphere-packing problem in dimensions 8 and 24, and for research on spherical designs. —From an AWM announcement The Felix Klein Prize is awarded to a scientist, or a group of at most three scientists, under the age of thirty-eight for using sophisticated methods to give an outstanding EMS Prizes Awarded solution, which meets with the complete satisfaction of industry, to a concrete and difficult industrial problem. The European Mathematical Society (EMS) has awarded ten The recipient of the 2020 Klein Prize is Arnulf Jentzen of EMS Prizes, the Felix Klein Prize, and the Otto Neugebauer the University of Munster for research on machine-learn- Prize for 2020. ing approximation algorithms, computational stochastics, The EMS Prizes are awarded to researchers not older numerical analysis for high-dimensional partial differential than thirty-five years of European nationality or working equations, stochastic analysis, and computational finance. in Europe in recognition of excellent contributions in The Otto Neugebauer Prize is awarded for highly original mathematics. The awardees for 2020 are: and influential work in the field of history of mathematics • Karim Adiprasito, Hebrew University of Jerusalem that enhances our understanding of either the development and the University of Copenhagen, for work in the of mathematics or a particular mathematical subject in any field of combinatorics, combining methods from period and in any geographical region. The 2020 Prize was algebra, geometry, and topology in innovative ways awarded to Karine Chemla of CNRS for research on the and solving problems in a wide range of areas. history of mathematics within ancient China, geometry in • Ana Caraiani, Imperial College London, for France in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the work in classical and p-adic Langlands programs, theory of the history of mathematics, with a focus on the Shimura varieties, and arithmetic geometry. relationships between mathematics and the cultures in • Alexander Efimov, Steklov Mathematical Institute relation to which they are produced. of RAS, Russia, for work in algebraic geometry, The prize lectures will be given at the Eighth European mirror symmetry, and quantum algebra. Congress of Mathematics in June 2021. • Simion Filip, University of Chicago, for studies of the interactions between dynamical systems, espe- —From an EMS announcement cially on locally homogeneous and Teichmüller spaces, and algebraic geometry, particularly Hodge theory and complex geometry. 2020 SIAM Prizes • Aleksandr Logunov, Princeton University, for work in harmonic analysis, potential theory, and The Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) geometric analysis. has awarded a number of prizes for 2020.

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Nick Trefethen of the University of Oxford was awarded innovative contributions to the analysis, perturbation the John von Neumann Lectureship “for outstanding and theory, and numerical solution of nonlinear eigenvalue distinguished contributions to the field of applied mathe- problems.” matics and for the effective communication of these ideas Shephard Prizes were awarded to the following: to the community.” Kenneth Falconer, FRSE, of the University of St An- Anna Seigal of the University of Oxford received the drews, for his “many original and profound results in Richard C. DiPrima Prize for an early-career researcher who fractal geometry, particularly the description, occurrence, has done outstanding research in applied mathematics and geometrical properties and dimensional analysis of fractal who has completed his or her doctoral dissertation and all sets and measures.” other requirements for his or her doctorate. Des Higham, FRSE, of the University of Edinburgh for Kaushik Bhattacharya of the California Institute of seeking to make the theory, application, and insights from Technology received the Theodore von Karman Prize, network science accessible to wide audiences, with much ef- awarded for a notable application of mathematics to me- fort invested in public events and transparent descriptions. chanics and/or the engineering sciences. Whitehead Prizes were awarded to the following indi- Roland Glowinski of the University of Houston was viduals: awarded the W. T. and Idalia Reid Prize for research in, or Maria Bruna of the University of Cambridge “in recog- other contributions to, the broadly defined areas of differ- nition of her outstanding research in asymptotic homoge- ential equations and control theory. nization, most prominently in the systematic development Tony F. Chan of King Abdullah University of Science and of continuum models of interacting particles systems.” Technology received the award for Distinguished Service Ben Davison of the University of Edinburgh “in recog- to the Profession. nition of his outstanding contributions to the foundations, Rajiv Maheswaran of Second Spectrum was awarded the the structure, and applications of Donaldson–Thomas Gerald and Judith Porter Public Lectureship, given every invariants.” year at the Joint Mathematics Meetings on a mathematical Adam Harper of the University of Warwick “for his deep topic accessible to the broader community. The topic of his and important contributions to analytic number theory lecture is “The Fantastic Intersection of Math and Sports: and, in particular, for his work on the value distribution Where No One Is Afraid of a Decimal Point.” of the Riemann zeta function and random multiplicative of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol- functions using sophisticated ideas and techniques from ogy was awarded the I. E. Block Community Lectureship. probability theory.” The topic of his lecture was “Mathematics Meets Origami.” Holly Krieger of the University of Cambridge “for her deep contributions to arithmetic dynamics, to equidistri- —From SIAM announcements bution, and to bifurcation loci in families of rational maps and for her recent proof (with DeMarco and Ye) of uniform boundedness results for numbers of torsion points on Prizes of the London families of bielliptic genus two curves in their Jacobians.” Andrea Mondino of the University of Oxford “in Mathematical Society recognition of his contributions to geometric analysis in differential and metric settings. In particular, he has played The London Mathematical Society (LMS) has honored the a central part in the development of the theory of metric following mathematical scientists with its prizes for 2020. measure spaces with Ricci curvature lower bounds.” Martin Liebeck of Imperial College London was awarded Henry Wilton of the University of Cambridge “for his the Pólya Prize for his “profound and prodigious contribu- remarkable contributions to geometric and combinatorial tions to group theory, particularly the subgroup structure group theory.” of simple groups and probabilistic group theory.” Peter Clarkson of the University of Kent was awarded —From an LMS announcement the Senior Anne Bennett Prize “in recognition of his tireless work to support gender equality in UK mathematics, and Credits particularly for his leadership in developing good practice Photo of Tatiana Toro is courtesy of University of Washing- among departments of mathematical sciences.” ton. Thomas Hales of the University of Pittsburgh was Photo of Ciprian Manolescu is courtesy of Chloe Reynolds. awarded the Senior Berwick Prize in recognition of his book Photo of Zhiwei Yun is courtesy of Allegra Boverman. Photo of Venkatesan Guruswami is courtesy of Muli Safra. Dense sphere packings: A blueprint for formal proofs, published Photo of Omer Reingold is courtesy of Amanda Law. in the LMS Lecture Note Series in 2012. Photo of Raymond Spiteri is courtesy of Sofia Spiteri. Françoise Tisseur of the University of Manchester was Photo of Steven Ruuth is courtesy of Yinshan Zhao. awarded the Fröhlich Prize “for her important and highly Photo of Karen Karp is courtesy of Pamela Karp.

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