Mathematics People Please note: Information about the competition for the 2015–2016 AMS Centennial 2016–17 AMS Centennial Fellowships will be published in Fellowships Awarded the “Mathematics Opportunities” section of an upcoming issue of the Notices. The AMS has awarded its Centennial Fellowships for 2015–16 to Kyungyong Lee and Christian Schnell. —Allyn Jackson The fellowship carries a stipend of US$87,000, an expense allowance of US$8,700, and a complimentary Society mem- bership for one year. Barry Simon Awarded Bolyai Kyungyong Lee Prize Kyungyong Lee received his PhD in Barry Simon of the California Institute of Technology has 2008 from the University of Michigan been awarded the 2015 International János Bolyai Prize at Ann Arbor under the direction of in Mathematics for his 2005 book Orthogonal Polynomi- als on the Unit Circle. According to the prize citation, at Wayne State Robert Lazarsfeld. He has held postdoc- toral positions at Purdue University and the book “is a monumental treatise that connects two the University of Connecticut. He has important fields of mathematics: the theory of orthogonal been an assistant professor at Wayne polynomials and operator theory. This connected view has turned out to be extremely fertile in both areas, leading University. Photo courtesy of the Department of Mathematics State University since 2011 and will be Kyungyong Lee an assistant professor at the University to applications in various directions from stochastic pro- cesses to theoretical physics. Barry Simon’s monograph of Nebraska–Lincoln starting in 2016. contains the classical theory, all the new developments, Lee’s research focuses on problems at the intersection of as well as many of their applications. The book became algebra, combinatorics, geometry, and topology. In par- an instant success—a worthy successor [to] the Hungarian ticular, he is currently interested in cluster algebras. He mathematician Gábor Szeg˝o's classic treatise on orthogo- will use the Centennial Fellowship to visit the University nal polynomials written in 1939.” of Michigan and the University of Connecticut for several The Bolyai Prize is awarded every five years in recogni- months during 2015–16. tion of internationally outstanding mathematics work. It carries a cash award of US$25,000. Christian Schnell Christian Schnell was born in Germany —From a Hungarian Academy of Sciences announcement in 1979. He received his PhD from the Schnell. Ohio State University in 2008 under the direction of Herb Clemens and Stewart and Strogatz Receive held postdoctoral positions at the Uni- versity of Illinois at Chicago, the Kavli Lewis Thomas Prize Institute for the Physics and Mathemat- Ian Stewart of Warwick University and Steven Strogatz ics of the Universe, and the University of Cornell University have been awarded the 2015 Lewis Photo courtesy of Christian of Bonn. Since 2012 he has been an Christian Schnell Thomas Prize for Writing about Science. assistant professor at Stony Brook Ian Stewart is an active research mathematician with University. Schnell’s research is in the field of algebraic more than 180 published papers. He has published over geometry and Hodge theory. He is interested in global eighty books, including Mathematics of Life, Why Beauty properties of variations of Hodge structure, in the struc- Is Truth, What Shape Is a Snowflake?, and In Pursuit of ture of D-modules on Abelian varieties, and, more broadly, the Unknown. He is also coauthor of the bestselling series in applications of Hodge theory to questions in algebraic The Science of Discworld I, II, III, and IV and two science geometry. He plans to use the fellowship to participate in fiction novels, Wheelers and Heaven. Stewart’s Letters to a a program about Hodge theory at the Simons Center for Young Mathematician won the Peano Prize, and The Sym- Geometry and Physics, to visit the École Polytechnique in metry Perspective (written jointly with Martin Golubitsky) Paris and the Research Institute for Mathematical Sciences won the Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer Prize. A member of the in Kyoto, and to work with Claude Sabbah on a book about Royal Society, he is also the recipient of the Royal Society’s mixed Hodge modules. Faraday Medal, the Gold Medal of the Institute for 674 NOTICES OF THE AMS VOLUME 62, NUMBER 6 Mathematics People Mathematics and Its Applications, and the Public Under- standing of Science Award from the American Association Megiddo Awarded for the Advancement of Science. von Neumann Prize Steven Strogatz is a renowned teacher and one of the world’s most highly cited mathematicians. He has blogged Nimrod Megiddo of the IBM Corporation Research Divi- about math for the New York Times and has been a fre- sion has been awarded the 2014 John von Neumann The- quent guest on RadioLab. He is the author of Nonlinear ory Prize, the highest prize given in the field of operations Dynamics and Chaos, Sync, The Calculus of Friendship, research and management science. According to the prize and The Joy of x. His honors include a Presidential Young citation, he has had a “profound impact on the theory of Investigator Award; the E. M. Baker Award for Excellence linear programming. His work on the probabilistic analysis in Undergraduate Teaching, the Massachusetts Institute of of the simplex method, alone and with Adler, established Technology’s highest teaching prize; the Joint Policy Board some of the most important results in the area, including for Mathematics Communications Award; the AAAS Public the best (quadratic) bound for the complexity of a com- Engagement with Science Award; and membership in the plete parametric pivoting method and an explanation of American Academy of Arts and Sciences. why this is possible for the lexicographic version but not The Lewis Thomas Prize was established in 1993 by the the standard Lemke perturbation. He also established a trustees of Rockefeller University. The prize honors the quadratic lower bound for this method. This, along with rare individual who bridges the worlds of science and the work of Smale, Borgwardt, and Haimovich, together with humanities—whose voice and vision can tell us about sci- independent proofs of the quadratic result by Adler-Karp- ence’s aesthetic and philosophical dimensions, providing Shamir and Todd, provided the first theoretical justifica- not merely new information but cause for reflection, even tion for the success of the simplex method.” Megiddo revelation. It was named after its first recipient, writer, educator, and physician-scientist Lewis Thomas, renowned has done important work in the theory of interior-point author of The Lives of a Cell. Past recipients of the prize methods and algorithmic game theory and has studied include Abraham Pais, Freeman Dyson, Steven Weinberg, the question of whether there is a strongly polynomial and Martin Rees. algorithm for linear programming. The von Neumann Prize carries a cash award of US$5,000. —From a Rockefeller University announcement —From an INFORMS announcement Fischer and Ruzhansky Awarded Sunyer Prize Prizes of the Canadian Veronique Fischer and Michael Ruzhansky of Impe- Mathematical Society rial College, London, have been awarded the 2014 Ferran The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has awarded a Sunyer i Balaguer Prize for their monograph Quantization number of prizes for 2015. on Nilpotent Lie Groups. The prize citation reads: “The Dong Li of the University of British Columbia has theory of quantization was initiated at the end of the been awarded the Coxeter-James Prize for his work in 1920s in mathematical physics. The mathematical aspect mathematical fluid dynamics, nonlinear dispersive equa- of this theory concerned with the analysis of operators tions, and mathematical physics. The prize honors young has been intensively developed during the past fifty years. mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions Nowadays, it is widely accepted and used as a powerful to mathematical research. tool to study different questions in the theory of partial Alejandro Adem of the University of British Columbia differential equations. However, the settings of these has been awarded the Jeffery-Williams Prize for Research studies have been mainly Euclidean and commutative in nature. This monograph presents the recent advances Excellence for his work in group cohomology and the ge- of the theories of quantization and pseudodifferential ometry of group actions. According to the prize citation, operators on compact and nilpotent Lie groups. It he “is fascinated by the deep mathematics and beauty also contains applications to noncommutative global associated to symmetry groups, which manifest them- analysis and to partial differential equations, in selves both in nature and across a variety of scientific particular on the Heisenberg group. The prize car- disciplines.” He is managing editor of both Memoirs and ries a cash award of 15,000 euros (approximately Transactions of the AMS and is a Fellow of the AMS. The US$16,000). It is awarded for a mathematical prize is awarded to mathematicians who have made out- monograph of an expository nature presenting the standing contributions to mathematical research. latest developments in an active area of research in Jane Ye of the University of Victoria has been awarded mathematics in which the recipient has made impor- the Krieger-Nelson Prize for her work in optimization, tant contributions. The winning monograph will be optimal control theory, and variational analysis and its ap- published by Birkhäuser Verlag in the series Progress in plication in economics, engineering, management science, Mathematics. operations research, and statistics. According to the prize citation, in her work as an applied mathematician, she de- —From a Ferran Sunyer i Balaguer velops powerful theoretical tools and designs algorithms Foundation announcement to attack some complicated optimization questions. The JUNE/JULY 2015 NOTICES OF THE AMS 675 Mathematics People prize is awarded for outstanding research by a woman mathematician. Allen Awarded Kovalevsky Jamie Mulholland of Simon Fraser University has Lectureship been awarded the Excellence in Teaching Award for his innovative teaching techniques.