NEWS Mathematics People contrast electrical impedance Takeda Awarded 2017–2018 tomography, as well as model Centennial Fellowship reduction techniques for para- bolic and hyperbolic partial The AMS has awarded its Cen- differential equations.” tennial Fellowship for 2017– Borcea received her PhD 2018 to Shuichiro Takeda. from Stanford University and Takeda’s research focuses on has since spent time at the Cal- automorphic forms and rep- ifornia Institute of Technology, resentations of p-adic groups, Rice University, the Mathemati- especially from the point of Liliana Borcea cal Sciences Research Institute, view of the Langlands program. Stanford University, and the He will use the Centennial Fel- École Normale Supérieure, Paris. Currently Peter Field lowship to visit the National Collegiate Professor of Mathematics at Michigan, she is Shuichiro Takeda University of Singapore and deeply involved in service to the applied and computa- work with Wee Teck Gan dur- tional mathematics community, in particular on editorial ing the academic year 2017–2018. boards and as an elected member of the SIAM Council. Takeda obtained a bachelor's degree in mechanical The Sonia Kovalevsky Lectureship honors significant engineering from Tokyo University of Science, master's de- contributions by women to applied or computational grees in philosophy and mathematics from San Francisco mathematics. State University, and a PhD in 2006 from the University —From an AWM announcement of Pennsylvania. After postdoctoral positions at the Uni- versity of California at San Diego, Ben-Gurion University in Israel, and Purdue University, since 2011 he has been Pardon Receives Waterman assistant and now associate professor at the University of Missouri at Columbia. Award The Fellowship carries a stipend of US$91,000, an ex- John Pardon of Princeton pense allowance of US$9,100, and a complimentary Society University has been named membership for one year. the recipient of the Alan T. Wa- Please note: Information about the competition for the terman Award of the National 2018–2019 AMS Centennial Fellowships will be published Science Foundation (NSF) for in the “Mathematics Opportunities” section of an upcom- “revolutionary, groundbreak- ing issue of the Notices. ing results in geometry and —Allyn Jackson topology.” The award is the nation’s highest honor for sci- entists and engineers younger Borcea Awarded Kovalevsky John Pardon than thirty-five. It consists of a five-year grant worth US$1 Lectureship million. Liliana Borcea of the University of Michigan has been The prize citation reads: “Pardon is a Clay Research chosen as the AWM-SIAM Sonia Kovalevsky Lecturer Fellow and professor of mathematics at Princeton by the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM) University. His research focuses on geometry and and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics topology, the study of properties of shapes that are unaf- (SIAM). She was honored “for her distinguished scientific fected by deformations, such as stretching or twisting. contributions to the mathematical and numerical analysis He is known for solving problems that stumped other of wave propagation in random media, array imaging in mathematicians for decades and generating solutions that complex environments, and inverse problems in high- provide new tools for geometric analysis. JUNE/JULY 2017 NOTICES OF THE AMS 595 Mathematics People NEWS “In 2013, Pardon published a solution to the Hilbert- Thomas C. Hales. She has been a postdoctoral fellow at Smith conjecture, a mathematical proposition involving the University of Toronto and at the Fields Institute for the actions of groups of ‘manifolds’ in three dimensions. Research in Mathematical Sciences and spent a year at the Manifolds include spheres and doughnut-shaped objects. Institute for Advanced Study. “The conjecture originates from one of the twenty-three The Michler Prize grants a midcareer woman in aca- problems published in 1900 by German mathematician demia a residential fellowship in the Cornell University David Hilbert, which helped guide the course of twentieth- mathematics department without teaching obligations. century mathematics. American topologist Paul Althaus Smith proposed a stronger version of the problem in —From an AWM announcement 1941. This problem has connections to many other areas of mathematics and physics. Pardon’s publication was notable for proving this long-standing conjecture, a major Ribet Awarded Brouwer Medal achievement in mathematics. “Prior to that publication, as a senior undergraduate at Kenneth A. Ribet of the Uni- Princeton, Pardon answered a question posed in 1983 by versity of California Berkeley Russian mathematician Mikhail Gromov regarding ‘knots,’ and president of the AMS has mathematical structures that resemble physical knots, but been awarded the 2017 Brou- are closed, instead of having any ends. wer Medal by the Royal Dutch “Gromov’s question involved a special class of knots Mathematical Society (KWG). called ‘torus knots.’ He asked whether these knots could According to the prize citation, be tied without altering or distorting their topology. he was honored “for his contri- Pardon figured out a way to use the distortion between butions to number theory, in two properties of knots—their intrinsic and extrinsic dis- particular for the groundbreak- tances—to control their topology. He showed that torus Kenneth A. Ribet ing work in which he applies knots are limited by their geometric properties, and can methods of algebraic geometry be tied without altering their topology. to number theoretical problems. This work later became “Pardon’s solution has important applications in fluid of decisive importance for the proof of Fermat’s Last dynamics and electrodynamics, calculating forces in- Theorem.” The prize is awarded every three years to a volved in aircraft movement, predicting weather patterns, mathematician of international renown. determining the flow of liquids through water treatment —From a KWG announcement plant pipelines, determining the flow of electrical charges, and more.” Pardon received his PhD in 2015 from Stanford Univer- Clay Research Awards sity under the direction of Yakov Eliashberg. He was the recipient of an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship and of Presented the Morgan Prize in 2012. The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) has made a number —From a National Science Foundation announcement of Research Awards for 2017. Aleksandr Logunov of Tel Aviv University and Che- byshev Laboratory, St. Petersburg State University, and Gordon Awarded AWM Eugenia Malinnikova of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology have received a Clay Research Michler Prize Award “in recognition of their introduction of a novel geo- Julia Gordon of the Univer- metric combinatorial method to study doubling properties sity of British Columbia has of solutions to elliptic eigenvalue problems.” According been named the recipient of to the prize citation, this work “has led to the solution of the 2017–2018 Ruth I. Michler long-standing problems in spectral geometry, for instance Memorial Prize of the Associa- the optimal lower bound on the measure of the nodal tion for Women in Mathematics set of an eigenfunction of the Laplace-Beltrami operator (AWM). Gordon was selected in a compact smooth manifold (Yau and Nadirashvili’s to receive the Michler Prize conjectures).” because of her “wide range of Jason Miller of Cambridge University and Scott mathematical talents” and the Sheffield of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Julia Gordon connection of her work with have received a Clay Research Award “in recognition the research of several Cornell of their groundbreaking and conceptually novel work faculty members. Gordon’s re- on the geometry of the Gaussian free field and its search is in the areas of representation theory of p-adic application to the solution of open problems in the theory groups and of motivic integration. of two-dimensional random structures.” The prize citation Gordon received her PhD in 2003 from the Uni- reads: “The two-dimensional Gaussian free field (GFF) is a versity of Michigan, Ann Arbor, under the direction of classical and fundamental object in probability theory and 596 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 64, NUMBER 6 Mathematics People NEWS field theory. It is a random and Gaussian generalized function Simons Fellows in Mathematics h defined in a planar domain The Simons Foundation Mathematics and Physical Sci- D. Despite its roughness and ences (MPS) division supports research in mathematics, the fact that it is not a continu- theoretical physics, and theoretical computer science. The ous function, it possesses a MPS division provides funding for individuals, institutions, spatial Markov property that and science infrastructure. The Fellows Program provides explains why it is the natural funds to faculty for up to a semester-long research leave counterpart of Brownian mo- from classroom teaching and administrative obligations. tion when the time-line is re- The mathematical scientists who have been awarded Jason Miller Simons Fellowships for 2017 are: placed by the two-dimensional Matthew Baker, Georgia Institute of Technology set D. Miller and Sheffield have • •David Ben-Zvi, University of Texas at Austin studied what can be viewed as •Mladen Bestvina, University of Utah level-lines of h and more gen- •Lewis Bowen, University of Texas at Austin erally flow lines of the vector •Tobias Colding, Massachusetts Institute of Tech- fields exp(iah), where a is any nology given constant.