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Reid W. Barton Receives 2005 AMS Morgan Prize

Contact: Mike Breen or Annette Emerson
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January 6, 2005

Providence, RI:

Reid W. Barton, a senior mathematics major at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is recieving the 2004 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. This prize is presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The prize will be awarded today at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Atlanta, Georgia.

Barton is honored for his paper "Packing densities of patterns." The prize citation states: "After resolving the basic conceptual issues elegantly, Barton delves into the study of packing densities for specific families of layered patterns. He proves several important results, some generalizing earlier results by [other mathematicians], some opening up new vistas. Barton also outlines a possible program to tackle open questions and formulates new conjectures. This is all in all a remarkable debut paper in the area of pattern research in combinatorics, an area of considerable current interest. Commentators consider Barton's paper the best paper so far on packing densities, and praise it for its clarity, new techniques, and new results."

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

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