Ooguri, Strominger, and Vafa Receive 2008 Eisenbud Prize

January 7, 2008

Providence, RI:

Hirosi Ooguri of the California Institute of Technology and Andrew Strominger and Cumrun Vafa of Harvard University are receiving the 2008 AMS Leonard Eisenbud Prize for Mathematics and Physics.  Presented every three years by the American Mathematical Society, the Eisenbud Prize honors a work or group of works that brings the fields of mathematics and physics closer together.   The prize was awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, California.

Ooguri, Strominger, and Vafa are honored for their paper "Black HoleAttractors and the Topological String" (Physical Review D, 70 (2004)106007).  According to the prize citation, the paper contains "a beautiful and highly unexpected proposal" relating black holes and topology.  "Black holes and enumerative invariants such as Gromov-Witten invariants are both intensively studied, but had not been significantly related to each other prior to this work," the citation says.

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

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Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, the 30,000-member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.