News 2007

Math in Discover's Year in Science

Four developments in mathematics that occurred in 2007 are among Discover magazine's 100 top science stories for the year. The four are:

• Math Advance Threatens Computer Security (#38), about the factorization of a 307-digit number,
• 248-Dimensional Math Problem Solved (#47), about the mapping of E₈,
• Calculus Was Developed in Medieval India (#56), about evidence that 14th century mathematicians in India may have used infinite series, and
• Math Breakthrough Spotted on Mosques (#59), about similarities between some mosaics in medieval mosques and quasi-crystals.

All 100 of the top science stories are in the January issue of Discover. Tony Phillips' Take on Math in the Media covered the E₈ story in April and the mosaic story in March. More on math-related articles appearing in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television is in Math in the Media. [Item posted 12/10/07]

Math Project Wins Third Place in Siemens Competition

Jacob Steinhardt (pictured at left), of Vienna, Virginia, won third place and a US$40,000 scholarship in the 2007-08 Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology for his project, Cayley graphs formed by conjugate generating sets of Sn. Jacob, a senior at Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, plans to study mathematics and become a math professor. A list of all winners in the competition is at the Siemens website. The Siemens Competition is a program of the Siemens Foundation and is administered by the College Board. [Item posted 12/5/07]

Bill LeVeque, 1923-2007

Bill LeVeque, AMS executive director from 1977 to 1988, died this past weekend after a brief illness. LeVeque also served as executive editor of Mathematical Reviews from 1965 to 1966. He passed away at home with his wife, Ann, on Bainbridge Island in Washington. [Item posted 12/3/07]

Math Lecture on Futurama DVD

A lecture by Sarah Greenwald (Appalachian State University) on math references in the TV show Futurama is one of the features on the recently released DVD, Futurama: Bender's Big Score. Also in the straight-to-DVD film, Greenwald has a theorem named after her, the Greenwaldian Theorem. The film is based on the FOX series that ran from 1999 to 2003. At the upcoming Joint Mathematics Meetings in San Diego, Greenwald is a co-organizer, along with Christopher Goff (University of the Pacific), of a panel of math faculty and Hollywood writers, Mathematics and Hollywood. (Photo of Greenwald and Futurama writer and co-creator David X. Cohen, courtesy of Sarah Greenwald.) More on math-related articles appearing in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television is in Math in the Media. [Item posted 11/30/07]

AMS Election Results

George Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, is the new AMS President Elect. Andrews will serve one year as President Elect and then become AMS President in 2009, at the conclusion of the two-year term of the current president, James Glimm. Bernd Sturmfels, University of California, Berkeley, won the election for AMS Vice-President and will serve a three-year term, beginning in 2008. All 2007 election results are online. [Item posted 11/26/07]

New AMS Website Design

The appearance and navigation of the AMS website have been redesigned. New navigation makes it easier for users to link to the Society's popular services and programs (such as MathSciNet, Journals, Books, the AMS Bookstore, and Web Account Information) and to information and resources in Membership, Career Services, Meetings, Surveys & Outreach, Government Relations, Public Awareness, and Customer Services. The new presentation allows members, students, teachers, media, and the general public easier access to information about the AMS and makes it easier to find contacts for AMS offices and departments. The coming year will bring phase two of the project--reorganization of the content. Meanwhile, we invite you to explore throughout the website.

Bazant Named to "Brilliant 10"

(Photo by John Nikolai.)

Martin Bazant, associate professor of applied mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has been named one of Popular Science's "Brilliant 10" for 2007. Bazant is doing research into electrokinetic phenomena in microfluidic devices and has described how to direct fluids in channels that are just a few microns wide. Read more about Bazant's work and link to profiles of the other nine members of Popular Science's list (in the November 2007 issue). More math-related articles appearing in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television are in Math in the Media. [Item posted 10/18/07]

Hurwicz, Maskin, and Myerson Share Nobel Prize

Three theoretical economists whose work has a substantial mathematical component have received the 2007 Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences (officially known as the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel). Leonid Hurwicz of the University of Minnesota, Eric S. Maskin of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and Roger B. Myerson of the University of Chicago were honored "for having laid the foundations of mechanism design theory." Maskin and Myerson both hold Ph.D.s in applied mathematics from Harvard University. According to a press release of the the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, mechanism design theory, initiated by Hurwicz and further developed by Maskin and Myerson, has greatly enhanced understanding of the properties of optimal allocation mechanisms in cases where ideal market conditions - as captured by Adam Smith's classic metaphor of the "invisible hand" - are absent. The theory allows one to distinguish situations in which markets work well from those in which they do not. It has helped economists identify efficient trading mechanisms, regulation schemes, and voting procedures. Today, mechanism design theory plays a central role in many areas of economics and parts of political science. More information is available at the Nobel Prize web site. [Item posted 10/15/07]

"Möbius Transformations Revealed" Wins Visualization Challenge Honorable Mention

"Möbius Transformations Revealed," a video by Douglas Arnold and Jonathan Rogness (University of Minnesota), won Honorable Mention in the 2007 Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge, sponsored by Science and the National Science Foundation (NSF). The video shows transformations in the plane and then relates them to movements of a sphere. When this item was first posted, "Möbius Transformations Revealed" had about 50,000 hits on YouTube, which is impressive, but recently viewings have soared: It was YouTube's #1 video on November 20 and 21 and now has over a million views. The winning entries in the challenge appear in the September 28 issue of Science and online. The NSF site has details on how to enter the 2008 Challenge. (Image courtesy of Douglas Arnold, Director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications.) More math-related articles appearing in newspapers, magazines, radio, and television are in Math in the Media. [Item posted 10/5/07]

AMS Seeks Comments about Online Grading

The AMS Task Force on the first year of college mathematics is seeking comments about online grading and testing programs. If you have experience or interest in this area, please go here for further information and to add your comments. [Item posted 10/5/07]

László Lovász Receives Bolyai Prize

On September 30, László Lovász received the Bolyai Prize of 50,000 euros (approximately US$71,000). Lovász, a professor of computer science at Eötvös Loránd University in Budapest, Hungary, specializes in combinatorial optimization, algorithms, complexity, graph theory, and random walks. He is the current president of the International Mathematical Union and a recipient of the 1999 Wolf Prize. The Bolyai Prize was presented to Lovász by the president of the Republic of Hungary, László Sólyom. The Bolyai Prize is given by a private foundation, founded by five Hungarian enterpreneurs who wanted to honor scientific achivements of Hungarian scholars, scientists, and - through the example of the awardees - to encourage young people to pursue a career in research. [Item posted 10/5/07]

Ben Green to Receive 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize

(Photo courtesy of the Clay Mathematics Institute.)

Ben Green, Hershel Smith Professor of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge (UK), will receive the 2007 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize "for his phenomenal contributions to number theory by himself and in collaboration with Terence Tao, that have changed the face of combinatorial additive number theory." Tao received the 2006 prize. The 2007 prize also recognizes Green for "his many outstanding results including his resolution of the Cameron-Erdős conjecture, [and] his proof of a version of Roth’s theorem for the primes in his 2005 Annals of Mathematics paper, which ultimately led to his revolutionary joint work with Terence Tao that confirms arbitrarily long arithmetic progressions among the primes." The US$10,000 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize is for outstanding contributions to areas of mathematics influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan. Green will receive the prize at the International Conference on Number Theory, Mathematical Physics, and Special Functions, December 20-22, at SASTRA University in Ramanujan's hometown of Kumbakonam, India. A press release has more information about Green and the prize. [Item posted 10/3/07]

"Girls, Women, and Math" on Science Friday

On Sept. 21, Science Friday's second hour (3-4 p.m. Eastern) on National Public Radio featured a segment on the eight high school girls who represented the US at the China Girls Mathematical Olympiad. Team member Jennifer Iglesias (Aurora, IL) and one of the team coaches, Melanie Wood - Princeton University graduate student and the first female to represent the US at the International Mathematical Olympiad - spoke about their trip, which was sponsored by the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute. Also appearing on the show were Dr. Maria Klawe, president of Harvey Mudd College, who holds a Ph.D. in mathematics, and actress Danica McKellar, author of a new book designed to help middle school girls excel at math. More information about the show is online. [Item posted 9/19/07, updated on 10/3/07]

Seeking Information about the Impact Factor

Over the past year, mathematicians from a variety of countries have written to the International Mathematical Union (IMU) asking it to address the misuse of the Impact Factor in assessing the quality of mathematics research. The IMU executive committee has responded by forming a small ad hoc committee, jointly with the International Council on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) and the Institute for Mathematical Statistics (IMS). Committee members John Ewing (IMU, chair), Peter Taylor (ICIAM), and Robert Adler (IMS) are considering various ways to assess (quantitatively) research in the mathematical sciences, and in particular they are considering the widespread use (and misuse) of the Impact Factor. The committee is seeking your comments about the Impact Factor: both specific comments about instances in which the Impact Factor is being used or has been misused, either by individual institutions or by larger assessment efforts, and general comments on the Impact Factor and its use in assessing mathematics research (the committee is especially interested in gaining insight about the ways in which the Impact Factor is currently used). Please send your comments by September 30 to: research-metrics@ams.org. An online pdf has more information. [Item posted 9/13/07]

New on MathSciNet - Free Tools and Enhancements

Researchers may now search the MSC (Mathematics Subject Classification scheme), use the Collaboration Distance feature (find a shortest publications-path between two authors), view the Current Journals (indexed in MathSciNet within the past six weeks), and search for Current Publications (books and articles reviewed or indexed within the past six months) without a subscription to MathSciNet. Explore these Free Tools and read more about the new enhancements to MathSciNet for subscribers--Top 10 Lists, additional information in journal citation search results, and author citation search results showing the ten most frequently cited articles for a specified author, and books differentiated from journals by an icon. [Item posted 8/31/07]

2007-2008 AMS Project NExT Fellows

2007-08 AMS Project NExT Fellows, left to right: Carl Toews, Joan Lind, Debbie Yuster, Emily Burkhead, Todd Fisher, Hemanshu Kaul.

The 2007-2008 AMS Project NExT (New Experiences in Teaching) Fellows are listed as follows, with their area of research and affiliation: Emily Gamber Burkhead (topological and symbolic dynamics), Meredith College, Raleigh, NC; Todd Fisher (dynamical systems), Brigham Young University, Provo, UT; Hemanshu Kaul (discrete math and operations research), Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, IL; Joan Lind (complex analysis and stochastic analysis), Belmont University, Nashville, TN; Carl Toews (operator theory/applied mathematics), Duquesne University, Pittsburgh, PA; and Debbie Yuster (combinatorics), Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ (appt. through DIMACS). Project NExT is a program of the Mathematical Association of America, with major funding from The ExxonMobil Foundation. The professional development program for new or recent Ph.D.s in the mathematical sciences addresses all aspects of an academic career: improving the teaching and learning of mathematics, engaging in research and scholarship, and participating in professional activities. It also provides the participants with a network of peers and mentors as they assume these responsibilities. The AMS sponsors six fellows each year. [Item posted 8/14/07]

Atle Selberg, 1917-2007

Atle Selberg, who had a major influence in mathematics and especially in analytic number theory during the 20th century, died on August 6. Born on June 14, 1917, in Langesund, Norway, he received his Ph.D. in 1943 from the University of Oslo. He is perhaps best known for his work on the zeros of the Riemann zeta function, for which he was awarded a Fields Medal in 1950, and for his elementary proof of the prime number theorem. The impact of his work can be seen in the many mathematical terms that bear his name: the Selberg trace formula, the Selberg sieve, the Selberg integral, the Selberg class, and the Selberg zeta function. Since the late 1940s he has been on the faculty of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, and he retired in 1987. His honors include the 1986 Wolf Prize in Mathematics. The biography of Selberg on the MacTutor History of Mathematics web site has further details about his life. [Item posted 8/7/07]

AMS at ICIAM 2007

The American Mathematical Society hosted an exhibit at the 6^th International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) held in Zurich, Switzerland, July 16-20, 2007 at ETH Zürich (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) and Universität Zürich. Over 3,000 individuals attended the Congress (63% from Europe, 21% from North America, 11% from Asia, 2% from Latin America, 2% from Australia, New Zealand, Oceania, and 1% from Africa).

The Society displayed a sampling of publications from the AMS Book program and recent issues of journals, demonstrated MathSciNet, and provided materials from the AMS Public Awareness and Membership offices. The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics exhibited in the adjoining space. The ICIAM website includes the scientific program, the Public Lecture in pdf format, and a gallery of photographs of the opening, prize and closing ceremonies, speakers, panels and social events. [Item posted 8/3/07]

IMO 2007 Results

Russia finished first in the 2007 International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), which recently concluded in Hanoi, Vietnam. Five of the six members of the Russian team earned Gold Medals and the team finished with 184 points (out of a possible 252). China was second with 181 points, followed by Vietnam and South Korea, each with 168 points. The US team finished fifth with a total of 155 points. The individual US results are as follows: Sherry Gong and Alex Zhai won Gold Medals; Eric Larson, Brian Lawrence and Arnav Tripathy won Silver Medals, and Tedrick Leung won a Bronze Medal. All team results are online, with links to more information on the competition. Next year's IMO is in Granada, Spain. [Item posted 7/30/07]

Bass Receives National Medal of Science

Hyman Bass, former president of the AMS and current professor of mathematics and education at the University of Michigan, is a recipient of the 2006 National Medal of Science. Bass received the award for "his fundamental contributions to pure mathematics, especially in the creation of algebraic K-theory, his profound influence on mathematics education, and his service to the mathematics research and education communities. With his unique combination of gifts he has had enormous impact over the course of a half century." Bass is one of eight recipients of the 2006 National Medal of Science. The award honors individuals for pioneering scientific research that enhances understanding of the world. President Bush presented the awards to the 2006 and 2005 recipients - the latter group including Bradley Efron - in a White House ceremony on July 27. A University of Michigan press release has more information on Bass and the 2006 laureates. (Photo by Mike Gould, University of Michigan School of Education.) [Item posted 7/23/07 and updated 8/16/07]

Petters on NOVA

Arlie Petters, professor of mathematics and physics at Duke University, will be featured in an upcoming segment of the PBS show NOVA. Most PBS stations will air the show on Tuesday, July 24. Petters' field of research is gravitational lensing. A summary of the show is online. [Item posted 7/19/07]

Bulletin of the AMS - 1891 to Present Online

Readers may now view online the first century of the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society, from 1891 to 1991, searchable and fully integrated with the modern Bulletin. Whenever possible, items in reference lists are linked to their corresponding items in Mathematical Reviews, often making it possible to navigate directly to the reference itself. The digitization was carried out through the Digital Mathematics Library Project of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute and was funded by a grant from the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation. The approximately 84,000 pages of the Bulletin are freely accessible to all. The archive is also online at Project Euclid. [Item posted 7/9/07]

Santosa Named Next Director of IMA

Fadil Santosa has been named the next director of the Institute for Mathematics and its Applications (IMA), effective July 1, 2008. He will replace Doug Arnold, IMA director since 2001. Previously Santosa held positions at Cornell University and the University of Delaware. He has also been an associate director at IMA from 1997 to 2001, and served as its deputy director from 2001 to 2004. Currently Santosa is director of the Minnesota Center for Industrial Mathematics. In a University of Minnesota press release Santosa said, "I am a firm believer in the IMA's mission and I am truly honored to have been chosen to lead the institute." The IMA, which is on the University of Minnesota campus, was established in 1982 by the National Science Foundation. Its primary mission is to increase the impact of mathematics by fostering interdisciplinary research. (Photo courtesy of the University of Minnesota.) [Item posted 6/27/07]

Langlands and Taylor Awarded Shaw Prize

Robert Langlands of the Institute for Advanced Study and Richard Taylor of Harvard University will share the 2007 Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences "for initiating and developing a grand unifying vision of mathematics that connects prime numbers with symmetry." The prize carries a cash award of US$1 million. The Shaw Prize is an international award to honor individuals who are active in their respective fields and who have achieved distinguished and significant advances, who have made outstanding contributions in culture and the arts, or who in other domains have achieved excellence. The prize is administered by the Shaw Prize Foundation, based in Hong Kong. Previous recipients of the Shaw Prize in Mathematical Sciences are David Mumford and Wen-Tsun Wu (2006), Andrew Wiles (2005), and Shiing-Shen Chern (2004). Further information and complete citations for Langlands and Taylor are available on the Shaw Prize web site. [Item posted 6/12/07]

AMS Statements on Boycotts

Recently, the UK University and College Union has discussed possible academic boycotts. When similar discussions took place previously, the January 2003 Council of the AMS endorsed two statements concerning the free exchange of scientists and boycotts. One was Resolution 7, passed by the General Assembly of the International Mathematical Union, and the other was a statement about the importance of international collaboration made by the Council of the US National Academy of Sciences. These two statements continue to represent the position of the Society. [Item posted 6/8/07]

Notices of the AMS - New Online Format

The June/July issue of Notices of the AMS is posted online in a new format. Readers may now choose to view the entire issue in pdf--page-by-page as one would browse the print issue--or navigate from the Notices home page (current issue) to any section or page. Also new, readers can email the feature articles to colleagues, and link directly from the issue to obtain information for Notices authors, contact editors and staff, see advertisements, and view issues going back to 1995. See the new online Notices. [Item posted 6/8/07]

Efron to Receive National Medal of Science

Bradley Efron, the Max H. Stein Professor and professor of statistics and of health research and policy at Stanford University, is among eight scientists chosen to receive the 2005 National Medal of Science. Efron was cited "for his contributions to theoretical and applied statistics, especially the bootstrap sampling technique; for his extraordinary geometric insight into nonlinear statistical problems; and for applications in medicine, physics and astronomy." Efron earned his doctorate in statistics from Stanford in 1964 and joined the Stanford faculty in 1965. A winner of a 1983 MacArthur Fellowship, he has served as president of the American Statistical Association and of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics. A Stanford University news release has more information. [Item posted 6/1/07]

Scripps National Spelling Bee Champ Prefers Math

Evan O'Dorney, 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion, prefers math and scores well in math competitions. Photo courtesy of the Venture School.

Eighth grader Evan O'Dorney won the Scripps National Spelling Bee last night. In the final round he correctly spelled "serrefine" (a small forceps for clamping a blood vessel). However, he admitted on national television that he really prefers math and music. Evan, taught at home through the Venture School of San Ramon CA, has already covered some college and graduate level math and physics, including differential and integral calculus, tensor analysis, and dynamic systems, and he reportedly prefers theoretical math. This year he began attending the Berkeley Math Circle, and has earned a perfect score in the American Mathematics Competition for 10th grade, the American Invitational Mathematics Examination, and the Bay Area Math Olympiad, and he was a multiple-year top scorer in the Sandia Go Figure Mathematical Challenge. For now, however, Evan has won US$45,000 as the 2007 Scripps National Spelling Bee champion. [Item posted 6/1/07]

2007 US IMO Team

The six members of the US team who will compete in the 48th International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) are:

• Sherry Gong, senior, Phillips Exeter Academy (NH)
• Eric Larson, sophomore, South Eugene High School (OR)
• Brian Lawrence, senior, Montgomery Blair High School (MD)
• Tedrick Leung, senior, North Hollywood High School (CA)
• Arnav Tripathy, senior, East Chapel Hill High School (NC)
• Alex Zhai, junior, University Laboratory High School (IL)

The 2007 IMO will take place in Hanoi (Vietnam) from July 19 to 31. The two-day test begins on July 25. [Item posted 5/29/07]

King of Norway Presents Abel Prize to Varadhan

King Harald congratulates Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York with the Abel Prize 2007. (Photo: Scanpix)

Norway's King Harald presented the 2007 Abel Prize to Srinivasa S.R. Varadhan on May 22, "for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations." The Abel website has more information about Varadhan, the prize, and all the ceremonies. [Item posted 5/23/07]

2007 Intel International Science and Engineeering Fair Award Winners

Science Service, in partnership with the Intel Foundation, has announced the awards for the 2007 International Science and Engineering Fair (ISEF), held in Albuquerque, NM, May 13-19. Among the winners were high school students in mathematics.

Dmitry Vaintrob (South Eugene High School, Eugene, OR) won the Intel Foundation Young Scientist Award of US$50,000. He is one of the three top students. His presentation, "The String Topology BV Algebra, Hochschild Cohomology and the Goldman Bracket on Surfaces," also earned him Intel ISEF Best of Category Award of US$5000, Mathematical Sciences First Award of US$3,000, and the Seaborg SIYSS Award, an all-expense-paid trip to attend the Stockholm International Youth Science Seminar during the Nobel Prize Ceremonies in December.

The following mathematics students also won "Best in Category" Mathematical Sciences awards, presented by Alcatel-Lucent:
* Second Award of US$1,500: Daniel Karoly Bezdek (Notre Dame High School, Calgary, Alberta, Canada) for "Short Billiards", Ardit Kroni (Synge Street CBS, Dublin, Ireland) for "Infinite Product Expansions of the nth Root" and Arkajit Dey (The Harker School, San Jose, CA) for "Tree-realizability of a Distance Matrix";
* Third Award of US$1,000: Joel Antonio Morales-Rosado (Escuela Florencia Garcia, Las Piedras, PR) for "Reconnaissance Mechanism for the Polygonal Numbers", Hagai Helman (Reut School, Jerusalem, Israel) for "Function Pools", Cheng-Tao Chung (Taipei Municipal Jianguo High School, Taipei, Taiwan, Chinese Taipei) for "EASE Polygons Are Not Easy", and Akhil Mathew (Madison High School, Madison, NJ) for "Investigations in Analysis";
* Fourth Award of US $500: Prachi Janardan Pai (School of Science and Technology, Beaverton, OR) for "Mathematical Determinism in the Creative Process of Musical Composition", Albert Chiehyang Liu (Kaohsiung Municipal Kaohsiung Senior High School, Kaohsiung City, Taiwan, Chinese Taipei) for "Endless Propagation--the Arithmetic Rules of Regular Pentagons", John Imbrie-Moore (Charlottesville High School, Charlottesville, VA) for "Mathematical Modeling of the Speed of Evolution in Asexual Populations", Sarah Lee Sellers (Hedgesville High School, Hedgesville, WV) for "Prime Magic Square: Possible or Impossible?" and Mark Krummelbein (Lemvig High School, Lemvig, Denmark) for "Cryptology Using the 'Butterfly Equation'". Team Projects in Mathematical Sciences won Second and Fourth Awards. See detailed information on ISEF 2007 and all the winners. [Item posted 5/23/07]

Robert L. Bryant Named New Director of MSRI

Robert L. Bryant has been appointed as the next director of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley. Bryant, who currently holds the Juanita M. Kreps Chair in Mathematics at Duke University, will take up the MSRI directorship on August 1, 2007. He is a distinguished differential geometer whose research interests center on exterior differential systems and the geometry of differential equations as well as their applications to Riemannian geometry, special holonomy, and mathematical physics. He currently serves as Vice President of the AMS. Bryant succeeds David Eisenbud, who has served as MSRI director since 1997 and will now become a full-time faculty member at UC Berkeley. MSRI's news release includes more information about Bryant. (Photo courtesy of MSRI.) [Item posted 5/11/07]

American Academy of Arts & Sciences Fellows Elected

The 2007 class of Fellows in the American Academy of Arts & Sciences includes the following people elected from the mathematical sciences:

• F. Michael Christ, University of California, Berkeley
• Robert L. Griess, Jr., University of Michigan
• Ehud Hrushovski, Hebrew University (Jerusalem)
• Victor Kac, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Jon Kleinberg, Cornell University
• Peter Wai-Kwong Li, University of California, Irvine
• Tomasz Mrowka, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Michael E. Taylor, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
• Robert J. Zimmer, University of Chicago

Over 200 new Fellows and 24 Foreign Honorary Members were elected this year. They will be inducted on October 6 at the Academy's headquarters in Cambridge, MA. The full list of this year's class is linked from an Academy press release. [Item posted 5/2/07]

Mathematicians Elected to National Academy of Sciences

The National Academy of Sciences (NAS) announced the election of Robert L. Bryant of Duke University, Richard Durrett of Cornell University, David Gottlieb of Brown University, Curtis McMullen of Harvard University, and Harold M. Stark of the University of California, San Diego as members of the Academy. Pierre Deligne of the Institute for Advanced Study and John Kingman of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at the University of Cambridge in England were elected as foreign associates. Seventy-two new members were elected this year, as were 18 foreign associates. The NAS is a private organization of scientists and engineers, established in 1863. An NAS news release has a list of all people honored in this year's election. [Item posted 5/1/07]

2007 Clay Research Awards Announced

The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announces the recipients of the 2007 Clay Research Awards: Alex Eskin (University of Chicago), "for his work on rational billiards and geometric group theory, in particular, his crucial contribution to joint work with David Fisher and Kevin Whyte establishing the quasi-isometric rigidity of sol"; Christopher Hacon (University of Utah) and James McKernan (UC Santa Barbara) "for their work in advancing our understanding of the birational geometry of algebraic varieties in dimension greater than three, in particular, for their inductive proof of the existence of flips"; and Michael Harris (Université de Paris VII) and Richard Taylor (Harvard University) "for their work on local and global Galois representations, partly in collaboration with Clozel and Shephard-Barron, culminating in the solution of the Sato-Tate conjecture for elliptic curves with non-integral j-invariants." The awards will be presented on May 14 during the Clay Research Conference. The Clay news release includes information on the award, brief biographies of the winners, and details about the upcoming conference. [Item posted 4/19/07]

NUMB3RS Wins NSB Public Service Award

Co-creators Cheryl Heuton and Nick Falacci Photo: Robert Voets/CBS, courtesy of the National Science Foundation

The CBS-TV series NUMB3RS and its creators, Cheryl Heuton and Nick Falacci, have won this year's group Public Service Award from the National Science Board for "their contributions toward increasing scientific and mathematical literacy on a broad scale." The show is about a math professor, played by David Krumholtz, who collaborates with his brother, an FBI agent played by Rob Morrow, to solve crimes. It is the most watched show on Friday nights, with nearly 12 million viewers. The series producers have consulted with mathematicians to bring realism and accuracy to the show's stories. Cryptanalysis, probability theory, game theory, decision theory, principal components analysis, multivariate time series analysis, and astrophysics are among the disciplines employed in the series thus far. The series has also led to efforts to involve students in the mathematics in the show, including We All Use Math Every Day. The show and creators will receive the award at a ceremony May 14 in Washington, D.C. The National Science Board is an independent body of policy advisors to the President and Congress, and is the oversight body for the National Science Foundation (NSF). The annual Public Service Award recognizes individuals and organizations for their contributions to increase public understanding of science and engineering. A news release with further details is available on the NSF web site. [Item posted 4/17/07]

2006 Putnam Results

Below are the team and individual winners of the 67th William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition, held December 2. The first-place team, Princeton University, receives US$25,000, and each Princeton team member receives $1000. Team winners, in order, with team members in alphabetical order, are:

• Princeton University (Ana Caraiani, Andrei Negut, and Aaron C. Pixton)
• Harvard University (Tiankai Liu, Alison B. Miller, and Tong Zhang)
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Oleg Golberg, Daniel M. Kane, and Kuat T. Yessenov)
• University of Toronto (Tianyi David Han, János Kramár, and Viktoriya Krakovna)
• University of Chicago (David Coley, Junehyuk Jung, and Zhiwei Calvin Lin)

The Putnam Fellows, the top five individual scorers, each receive $2500. They are, in alphabetical order:

• Hansheng Diao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Daniel M. Kane (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)
• Tiankai Liu (Harvard University)
• Po-Ru Loh (California Institute of Technology)
• Yufei Zhao (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

Alison B. Miller, of the second-place Harvard team, is the winner of the Elizabeth Lowell Putnam Prize, which is awarded to a woman whose performance on the exam is "particularly meritorious," and has a cash award of $1000. The Putnam Competition is for North American undergraduates and is administered by the Mathematical Association of America. Problems, solutions, and results from the 2006 exam and from previous exams, are online. [Item posted 4/11/07]

Varadhan to Receive 2007 Abel Prize

Abel Prize winner Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan Photo by Cheryl Sylivant

The Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters has announced that Srinivasa S. R. Varadhan of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences is the winner of the 2007 Abel Prize. Varadhan was awarded the prize "for his fundamental contributions to probability theory and in particular for creating a unified theory of large deviations." The Abel Committee also said that "Varadhan's theory of large deviations provides a unifying and efficient method for clarifying a rich variety of phenomena arising in complex stochastic systems, in fields as diverse as quantum field theory, statistical physics, population dynamics, econometrics and finance, and traffic engineering....Varadhan's work has great conceptual strength and ageless beauty. His ideas have been hugely influential and will continue to stimulate further research for a long time." The prize, which was first awarded in 2003, is worth over US$975,000. Varadhan is the second member of the Courant Institute to win the prize - Peter Lax won in 2005. Norway's King Harald will present the prize to Varadhan on May 22. The Abel Prize website has more information about Varadhan and the prize. [Item posted 3/22/07]

Team Calculates Structure of Exceptional Lie Group E₈

After four years of intensive collaboration, 18 leading mathematicians and computer scientists from the U.S. and Europe have successfully mapped the exceptional Lie group E₈, one of the largest and most complicated structures in mathematics. The E₈ calculation is part of a project sponsored by the American Institute of Mathematics and the National Science Foundation, known as the Atlas of Lie Groups and Representations. The goal of the Atlas project is to determine the unitary representations of all the Lie groups (E₈ is the largest of the exceptional Lie groups). The E₈ calculation is a major step and suggests that the Atlas team is well on the way to solving this problem. "E₈ was discovered over a century ago, in 1887, and until now, no one thought the structure could ever be understood," said Jeffrey Adams, Project Leader and Mathematics Professor at the University of Maryland. "This groundbreaking achievement is significant both as an advance in basic knowledge, as well as a major advance in the use of large scale computing to solve complicated mathematical problems." The findings will be unveiled today at 2pm Eastern time, at a presentation by David Vogan, Professor of Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and member of the team that mapped E₈. For details on E₈ visit http://aimath.org/E8/. (From an AIM news release.) [Item posted 3/19/07]

2007 Intel Science Talent Search Winners

Second-place winner John Vincent Pardon

Third-place winner Dmitry Vaintrob

Sixth-place winner Gregory Brockman

Three mathematics projects were among the top six finishers announced in the 2007 Intel Science Talent Search (ISTS). John Vincent Pardon, 17 of Chapel Hill, NC, won second place and a US$75,000 scholarship for showing that a rectifiable closed curve can be deformed via an expansive motion to form a convex set. Dmitry Vaintrob, 18 of Eugene, OR, won third place and a $50,000 scholarship for proving that in an important class of spaces, loop homology and Hochschild cohomology coincide. Gregory Brockman, 18, of Thompson, ND, won sixth place and a $25,000 scholarship for his analysis of Ducci sequences. The top award, a $100,000 scholarship, went to Mary Masterson of Oklahoma City who built an accurate spectrograph for about $300. The ISTS site has background information on the top ten finishers and descriptions of their projects. [Item posted 3/16/07]

Digital Mathematics Registry

The Digital Mathematics Registry, a new public service by the AMS through Mathematical Reviews, provides centralized access to collections of digitized publications in the mathematical sciences. The registry is primarily focused on older material from journals and journal-like book series that originally appeared in print but now is available in digital form. The registry is organized both by the collections and by the individual journals (or series) themselves, providing links to each that will be regularly verified and updated. [Item posted 3/5/07]

AMS Epsilon Fund Makes 2007 Awards

The AMS has chosen six summer mathematics programs to receive Epsilon grants for 2007: Ross Mathematics Program (The Ohio State University); Texas State University Honors Summer Math Camp (Texas State University, San Marcos); Michigan Math and Science Scholars Summer Program (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor); PROMYS (Boston University); Hampshire College Summer Studies in Mathematics (Amherst, MA); and SEARCH (Mount Holyoke College, South Hadley, MA). [Item posted 3/5/07]

2007 Erdős Memorial Lecture

This year's Erdős Memorial Lecture will be given by Andrew J. Granville (Université de Montréal) on March 3 as part of the Spring Southeastern Section Meeting at Davidson College. Granville's talk is entitled Erdős's Dream and Pretentious Characters. The Erdős Memorial Lecture is an annual invited address made possible by a fund created by Andrew Beal, a Dallas banker. The lecture is named for mathematician Paul Erdős (1913-1996). The AMS website has more information on this year's lecture. [Item posted 2/21/07]

Furstenberg and Smale to Receive Wolf Prize

Harry Furstenberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Stephen Smale (University of California, Berkeley) will share the US$100,000 2006-7 Wolf Prize in Mathematics. Furstenberg was honored "for his profound contributions to ergodic theory, probability, topological dynamics, analysis on symmetric spaces and homogeneous flows." Smale was honored for his "ground-breaking contributions that have played a fundamental role in shaping differential topology, dynamical systems, mathematical economics, and other subjects in mathematics." The prize will be awarded in May in Israel. The Wolf Foundation website has more information. [Item posted 1/16/07]

2007 AMS Prizes Awarded in New Orleans

On Saturday January 6, 2007, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans, the AMS awarded its prizes for 2007.

Steele Prize: David Mumford for Exposition, Karen Uhlenbeck for a Seminal Research Contribution, and Henry McKean for Lifetime Achievement
AMS-SIAM Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics: Craig Tracy and Harold Widom
Veblen Prize in Geometry: Peter Kronheimer, Tomasz Mrowka, Peter Ozsváth, and Zoltán Szabó
Satter Prize in Mathematics: Claire Voisin
Robbins Prize for an outstanding paper: Samuel P. Ferguson and Thomas C. Hales
Moore Research Article Prize: Ivan Shestakov and Ualbai Umirbaev
Conant Prize for an outstanding article in the Notices of the AMS or the Bulletin of the AMS: Jeffrey Weeks
AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research by an Undergraduate Student: Daniel Kane

In addition, the Joint Policy Board for Mathematics presented its Communications Award to Steven H. Strogatz.

The AMS press release page has further details about the prizewinners. The complete prize citations, together with biographical sketches and the prizewinners' responses, may be found in the prize booklet. [Item posted 1/8/07]

Martin Kruskal, 1925-2006

Martin Kruskal died December 26 at the age of 81. He won the National Medal of Science in 1993 and a Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research in 2006, along with Clifford Gardner, John Greene, and Robert Miura, for their paper "Korteweg-deVries equation and generalizations.VI. Methods for exact solution" (Communications on Pure and Applied Mathematics, 1974). He was professor emeritus at Princeton University and David Hilbert Professor of Mathematics at Rutgers University. Kruskal was a member of the National Academy of Sciences, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a foreign member of the Royal Society of London and the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, and an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. More on Kruskal is in an address given on occasion of the conferment to him of an Honorary Degree of Doctor of Science from Heriot-Watt University. [Item posted 1/2/07]

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