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Allen Knutson and Terence Tao Receive 2005 AMS Conant Prize

Contact: Mike Breen or Annette Emerson
AMS Public Awareness Officers
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Phone: 401-455-4000 or
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January 6, 2005

Providence, RI:

Allen Knutson of the University of California, Berkeley, and Terence Tao of the University of California, Los Angeles, are receiving the 2005 AMS Levi L. Conant Prize. Presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Conant Prize recognizes an outstanding expository paper published in either the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS in the preceding five years. The prize will be awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia.

Knutson and Tao are honored for their stimulating article "Honeycombs and Sums of Hermitian Matrices," NOTICES OF THE AMS 48 (2001), no. 2, 175-186 (available in PDF format at http://www.ams.org/notices/200102/fea-knutson.pdf). The article describes the solution of a mathematical problem that has connections to quantum theory and that was first posed in 1912 by the renowned mathematician Hermann Weyl. "The story that is recounted brushes against symplectic geometry, invariant theory, combinatorics, and computational complexity, but the authors deftly keep the reader from getting overwhelmed by technicalities," the citation states. "By skillfully combining honeycomb diagrams with a high level of exposition, Knutson and Tao make this fascinating subject accessible to a wide mathematical audience."

Find out more about AMS prizes at http://www.ams.org/prizes-awards.

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