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Mathematics People

Doolittle Receives 2023 Adrien Pouliot Award

The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) presented Edward Doolittle with the 2023 Adrien Pouliot Award in recognition of his outstanding contributions to mathematics education.

Doolittle is Kanyen’kehake, a member of the Lower Mohawk band of Six Nations. He earned a PhD in pure mathematics from the University of Toronto in 1997 with his thesis on partial differential equations. Since 2001, Doolittle has been first a faculty member at First Nations University of Canada (formerly the Saskatchewan Indian Federated College). His duties there include teaching, research, working with Elders, service to the university, and service to Indigenous communities.

Doolittle is an internationally recognized leader on indigenous mathematics and related concepts such as indigenizing mathematics, traditional mathematics, and ethnomathematics. For two decades he has worked tirelessly to introduce insights around the ways in which mathematics as a field of study intersects with indigenous knowledge systems, and the educational possibilities afforded by those different views of mathematics.

Canadian Mathematical Society

Zhang Awarded SASTRA Ramanujan Prize

The 2023 SASTRA Ramanujan Prize has been awarded to Ruixiang Zhang of the University of California, Berkeley. “In summary, Zhang is an original and highly skilled mathematician who has had a large impact in a wide range of areas,” the prize citation noted. “He is a rising world leader in the field of harmonic analysis and in its striking applications, and amply merits this award.”

Zhang received his BS degree in mathematics from Peking University (2012) and his PhD in mathematics under the supervision of Peter Sarnak at Princeton University (2017). He has held positions as a visiting member at the Institute for Advanced Study (2017–2018 and 2020–2021) and as Van Vleck Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin (2018–2021). Since 2021, he has been an assistant professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Awards for Zhang include the Gold Medal at the 2008 International Mathematics Olympiad and a Silver Medal for his doctoral thesis at the New World Mathematics Awards. He currently holds a Sloan Fellowship (2022–2024) and an NSF CAREER award (2022–2027).

The annual prize is for outstanding contributions by individuals not exceeding the age of 32 in areas of mathematics influenced by Srinivasa Ramanujan in a broad sense. “The age limit has been set at 32 because Ramanujan achieved so much in his brief life of 32 years,” according to the citation. The prize is awarded at an annual international conference in number theory at SASTRA University in Kumbakonam, India (Ramanujan’s hometown).

Pozharska Wins Traub Young Researcher Award

Kateryna Pozharska, Institute of Mathematics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, Kyiv, and Chemnitz University of Technology, is the winner of the 2023 Joseph F. Traub Information-Based Complexity Young Researcher Award. The honor is awarded by the Journal of Complexity for significant contributions to information-based complexity by a young researcher who has not reached their 35th birthday by September 30 in the year of the award. The award consists of $1000 and is sponsored by Elsevier. The award committee consisted of the former winners, David Krieg (2020), Michaela Szölgyenyi (2021) and Mathias Sonnleitner (2022), and the editors Henryk Woźniakowski and Erich Novak.

Journal of Complexity

Tardos Awarded Knuth Prize

Éva Tardos, the Jacob Gould Schurman Professor of Computer Science and department chair in Cornell University’s Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, has been awarded the Donald E. Knuth Prize, which recognizes visionaries in computer science whose work has had foundational, long-term impact.

Tardos is considered a pioneer who has shaped multiple areas of algorithms, including foundational work in combinatorial algorithms, approximation algorithms, and algorithmic game theory. She was honored for “her extensive research contributions and field leadership, namely co-authoring an influential textbook, Algorithm Design, co-editing the Handbook of Game Theory, serving as editor-in-chief of the Journal of the ACM and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM) Journal on Computing and chairing program committees for several leading field conferences,” according to the prize citation.

“As a theoretician, I’m honored to be recognized with the Knuth Prize by my original home community,” Tardos said. “I truly appreciate it.”

Cornell University

Schilling to Deliver Noether Lecture

Anne Schilling of the University of California Davis will deliver the 2024 AWM-AMS Noether Lecture at JMM 2024 in San Francisco. These one-hour expository lectures are presented at the Joint Mathematics Meetings each January.

Schilling is professor and chair of the Mathematics Department at UC Davis, which she joined in 2000. Previously she held a Moore Instructorship at MIT and was a postdoc at the Institute for Theoretical Physics at the University of Amsterdam. Schilling has been awarded a Humboldt Research Fellowship (2002), a Simons Fellowship (2012–2013), and was named an AMS Fellow (2019).

The Association for Women in Mathematics established the Emmy Noether Lectures in 1980 to honor women who have made fundamental and sustained contributions to the mathematical sciences. In April 2013 the lecture was renamed “AWM-AMS Noether Lecture” and in 2015 was jointly sponsored by the AWM and the American Mathematical Society (AMS).

The lectures honor Emmy Noether (1882–1935), one of the great mathematicians of her time, whose life and work remain a tremendous inspiration.

Association for Women in Mathematics