Claire Voisin Receives 2007 Satter Prize

January 8, 2007

Providence, RI:

Claire Voisin, of the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the Institut de Mathematiques de Jussieu in Paris, France, has received the 2007 AMS Ruth Lyttle Satter Prize. Presented every two years by the American Mathematical Society, the Satter Prize recognizes an outstanding contribution to mathematics research by a woman in the previous five years. The prize was awarded on Saturday, January 6, 2007, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, Louisiana.

The citation for the 2007 Satter Prize honors Voisin "for her deep contributions to algebraic geometry, and in particular for her recent solutions to two long-standing open problems." One of these, the Kodaira problem, had been open since the 1950s before being solved in Voisin's paper

"On the homotopy types of compact Kähler and complex projective manifolds", Inventiones Mathematicae, 157 (2004), no. 2, 329--343.

In a completely different direction, Voisin solved another problem, known as Green's Conjecture, in her papers

"Green's canonical syzygy conjecture for generic curves of odd genus," Compositio Mathematica, 141 (2005), no. 5, 1163--1190; and

"Green's generic syzygy conjecture for curves of even genus lying on a K3 surface," Journal of the European Mathematical Society, 4 (2002), no. 4, 363--404.

Green's conjecture attracted a huge amount of effort by algebraic geometers over twenty years before finally being settled by Voisin.

Voisin's other honors include the European Mathematical Society Prize (1992), the Servant Prize (1996) and the Sophie Germain Prize (2003) of the Academie des Sciences de Paris, and the silver medal of the CNRS (2006).

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

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