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2016 Breakthrough Prize and New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes Awarded

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2016 Breakthrough Prize and New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes Awarded COMMUNICATION 2016 Breakthrough Prize and New Horizons in Mathematics Prizes Awarded Breakthrough Prize: conjecture, which had been reduced to Marden’s Ian Agol conjecture by Thurston and Canary. Ian Agol of the Uni- “Agol, with Storm and Thurston, was the first versity of California to apply Perelman’s work on Ricci flow to a prob- Berkeley and the Insti- lem outside of geometrization to address many tute for Advanced Study important questions about volumes of hyperbolic has been selected as the 3-manifolds. In particular, their paper gave a new recipient of the 2016 proof of a result of Agol-Dunfield that was used Breakthrough Prize in to find the minimal volume closed orientable Mathematics by the hyperbolic 3-manifold (Gabai-Meyerhoff-Milley). Breakthrough Prize Agol, with Codá Marques and Neves, used the Foundation. Agol was min-max theory and the Willmore conjecture (Codá honored “for spectacu- Marques-Neves) to solve a long-standing conjec- lar contributions to low ture of Freedman-He-Wang on Möbius energy of links. Using ideas from sutured manifold theory, dimensional topology Agol found an elegant criterion for a 3-manifold Photo courtey of Ian Agol. and geometric group to have a finite sheeted cover that fibers over the Ian Agol theory, including work circle. This, together with the deep work of Dani on the solutions of the Wise on quasi-convex virtual hierarchy groups and tameness, virtual Haken and virtual fibering con- the foundational work of Haglund-Wise on special jectures.” cube complexes, proved Thurston’s virtual fibering The Notices asked David Gabai of Princeton conjecture for Haken hyperbolic 3-manifolds. Agol University to comment on the work of Agol. Gabai used geometric group theory (in part with Groves responded: “Ian Agol is a brilliant mathematician and Manning) and his 3-manifold intuition to solve who has made many important and fundamental a conjecture of Wise that implied that all closed contributions to such areas as 3-dimensional hyperbolic 3-manifold groups are quasi-convex topology, geometric group theory, hyperbolic virtual hierarchy groups. (This used the Kahn-Mar- geometry, foliation theory, and knot theory. His kovic solution to the surface subgroup problem work utilizes an uncommonly wide range of tech- and the seminal work of Sageev, as shown by niques and methods. Using hyperbolic geometry Bergeron and Wise, who proved that fundamental and 3-manifold topology he proved the Marden groups of closed hyperbolic 3-manifolds satisfy the Tameness conjecture (independently proved by hypothesis of Wise’s conjecture.) In combination Danny Calegari and Gabai). That result is crucial with Agol’s virtual fibering criterion, this proved to many other results in hyperbolic geometry, such the full Thurston virtual fibering conjecture and as the ending lamination theorem of Brock-Canary- hence Waldhausen’s virtual Haken conjecture. Minsky. It also proved the Ahlfors measure (That Waldhausen’s conjecture reduces to one on hyperbolic 3-manfolds relies on Perelman’s geom- For permission to reprint this article, please contact: etrization theorem.) [email protected]. “Beyond solving famous long-standing conjec- DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1090/noti1370 tures, this monumental work proves that the group 558 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 63, NUMBER 5 theory of hyperbolic 3-manifolds has tremendous New structure not incomparable with that of two-di- Horizons in mensional manifolds. Surfaces have great struc- Mathematics ture in large part because (except for the sphere) Prize: Larry they can be reduced to the disc by sequentially Guth cutting along essential curves. This enables one Larry Guth to prove theorems via induction arguments (often of the Mas- very sophisticated). A consequence of this work is sachusetts that given any closed hyperbolic 3-manifold, one Institute of can first pass to a finite sheeted cover and then Technology cut by a single surface and be left with the product has been of a surface with the interval. That in turn is the awarded a starting point for many deep results in 3-manifold New Horizons theory.” in Mathemat- Biographical Sketch ics Prize for his “ingenious Ian Agol was born in 1970 in Hollywood, California. Photo courtesy of MIT. He obtained his PhD in 1998 from the University of and surpris- Larry Guth California San Diego under the direction of Michael ing solutions to Freedman. He taught at the University of Illinois long-standing open problems in symplectic geome- at Chicago from 2001 to 2007 before joining the try, Riemannian geometry, harmonic analysis, and faculty at Berkeley. He was awarded the 2009 Clay combinatorial geometry.” Research Award (with Danny Calegari and David The Notices asked Terence Tao of the University Gabai). He received a Guggenheim Fellowship in of California Los Angeles to comment on the work 2005. In 2013 he was awarded, with Daniel Wise, of Guth. Tao responded: “By introducing powerful the AMS Veblen Prize in Geometry. He was elected techniques from geometry and topology, Guth a Fellow of the AMS in 2012. has solved or made key breakthroughs on many fundamental and difficult problems in harmonic Response from Ian Agol analysis, combinatorics, and (most recently) ana- I would like to acknowledge my teachers who lytic number theory. For instance, he ingeniously encouraged my interest in mathematics. This in- used algebraic topology tools relating to the Ham cludes my doctoral advisor, Mike Freedman, whose Sandwich Theorem to prove an important inequal- example encouraged me to be fearless—to work on ity now known as the endpoint multilinear Kakeya hard problems and to not be afraid to admit what I inequality, which, roughly speaking, describes the do not know. I would also like to acknowledge the extent to which ‘transverse’ families of tubes (or many mathematicians whose work mine builds on tubelike objects) can intersect each other. He has and to which I’ve added only a small amount. Their since used this inequality (and variants thereof) vision encouraged me to go places mathematically for many further applications, most recently in that I would not have considered otherwise. I will his solution (with Bourgain and Demeter) of the only single out Daniel Groves and Jason Manning, Vinogradov main conjecture on exponential sums, with whom it has been a pleasure to collaborate. which is connected to such fundamental problems Finally, I’d like to thank my family, especially my in analytic number theory as Waring’s problem (on wife, Michelle, for her support, and my mother, representing large natural numbers as sums of kth Maureen, for all the sacrifices she made to get the powers) and bounds on the Riemann zeta function. best education for my brother and me. With Nets Katz, he unexpectedly deployed tools About the Prize from algebraic geometry (such as the classification The Breakthrough Prize in Mathematics was cre- of ruled surfaces) to almost fully resolve a famous ated by Mark Zuckerberg and Yuri Milner in 2013. problem of Erdo˝s on the minimum number of dis- It aims to recognize major advances in the field, to tinct distances in the plane generated by n points honor the world’s best mathematicians, to support in the plane. Guth’s work has given us several new their future endeavors, and to communicate the toolboxes of techniques that we will be using to excitement of mathematics to the general public. attack further problems in analysis and combi- The prize is accompanied by a cash award of US$3 natorics for many years to come.” (Note: Tao was million. As have all five past math laureates, Agol among those who nominated Guth for this prize.) plans to give US$100,000 of his prize winnings to Biographical Sketch support graduate students from developing coun- Larry Guth received his PhD from the Massachu- tries through the Breakout Graduate Fellowships setts Institute of Technology in 2005 under the administered by the International Mathematical direction of Tomasz Mrowka. He held a professor- Union. Previous winners of the Breakthrough Prize ship at the Courant Institute before joining the MIT are Simon Donaldson, Maxim Kontsevich, Jacob faculty. He received a Sloan Fellowship in 2010. Lurie, Terence Tao, and Richard Taylor (2015). He was an Invited Speaker at the International MAY 2016 NOTICES OF THE AMS 559 Congress of Mathematicians in 2010 and a Simons pletely new territory. In another direction, Neves Investigator in 2014. He received the Salem Prize is one of the leading experts on Lagrangian mean in 2013 and the Clay Research Award (with Nets curvature flow, which is important in connection with Katz) in 2015. Calabi-Yau geometry and mirror symmetry. Among Response from Larry Guth other results, he showed that, in a certain sense, I want to take this moment to thank my teachers, singularities in this flow are unavoidable. my collaborators, and my family. I feel very for- “These are just a few highlights of Neves’s tunate to have spent time with so many special work—there are many other important contri- teachers. I think of them often, especially now butions, for example, to the Yamabe functional that I also teach and I get to try to pass on to my and to the asymptotic geometry of Riemannian students some of the things that I learned. I’ve manifolds—and we can be sure that there will be also been very fortunate in my collaborations, and many more to come. His work is characterized by I think that my best work has been collaborative. exceptional technical power, combining ingenious It has opened up new doors and changed the di- geometrical constructions with deep results from rection of my career. Finally, I want to thank my analysis and PDE.” family for all their love and support.
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