Department News
Archive of past news
Simon Donaldson, Royal Society Research Professor at Imperial College,
London, has been awarded the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in
Mathematics for 2008 by Northwestern University.
Donaldson's breakthrough work developed new techniques in the geometry of
four-manifolds and the study of their smooth structures.
His methods,
have been described as extremely subtle, using difficult
nonlinear partial differential equations. Using instantons, solutions to
the equations of Yang-Mills gauge theory, he gained important insight into
the structure of closed four-manifolds. Gauge theory techniques also
enabled him to show the existence of four-manifolds with no smooth
structure and others with infinitely many. His work has provided the
seminal steps for the work of others in study of four-manifolds.” More
recently, Donaldson has made fundamental contributions to the understanding
of symplectic manifolds, the phase-spaces of classical mechanics, and he
shows that a surprisingly large part of the theory of algebraic geometry
extends to them.
List and information about previous winners of
Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics
Kevin Costello has been awarded an Alfred P Sloan Fellowship for 2008-10.
David Nadler has been awarded an Alfred P Sloan Fellowship for the two years 2007-09.
The department's distinguished lecture series begun so successfully this year by Peter Sarnak has been endowed by a generous gift from Mark and Joanna Pinsky. It will become known as the Mark and Joanna Pinsky Distinguished Lecture Series.
We are sad to announce that Allen Devinatz, Professor Emeritus, died February 5, 2008. Allen was a member of the department from 1967 to 1992. The research of Allen Devinatz extended over a variety of areas related to the spectral and scattering theory of partial differential operators. A unifying theme of his work was the study of "rough" data, either initial conditions or coefficients. Among his main contributions were 1) The study of the self-adjointness of Schrodinger operators with potentials of low regularity, 2) The spectral structure and asymptotic behavior of Schrodinger operators with highly oscillatory potentials and 3) The global space-time smoothing effect of the Schrodinger evolution equation subject to initial data of low regularity.
Martina Bode has won the Charles Deering McCormick University Distinguished Lecturership for 2007. This university wide award recognizes outstanding instruction by a member of the Lecturer Faculty, and only one is given each year. This Lecturership is awarded to a faculty member who has consistently demonstrated outstanding performance in classroom teaching or who has developed significant innovations which have also influenced the methods and teaching effectiveness of other faculty.
Scott Bailey, one of our graduate students, is the recipient of the "WCAS Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award" for 2007-8.
Congratulations to the Northwestern team of undergraduates who were ranked 23th out of the 516 participating institutions in the 68th William Lowell Putnam Competition held on Saturday, December 1st, 2007. This very good ranking is even better than last year's rank of 32. We had a number of individuals who did well, including Samuel Ruth and Michael Skalak who each made the list of top 500 participants. Congratulations to all who participated and to Frank Calegari, Elton Hsu and Miguel Lerma who helped prepare the team.
Melanie Rubin, Graduate Program Assistant, is the recipient of a WCAS "Sunshine Award!". This award is for someone "who represents and is the face of the department or program and who constantly displays a smile and welcoming attitude to students, faculty and staff."
The department of mathematics has received a five-year $1.3 million Research Training Grant (RTG) from the National Science Foundation in the field of geometry and mathematical physics, an area in which the department has been growing in recent years. This grant will support one postdoctoral fellow and five graduate students each year, as well as an annual graduate student workshop and conference, between one and two weeks in length. For undergraduate students, there will be expanded research opportunities, the creation of new undergraduate courses in geometry and physics and a seminar series. The department will also make use of the grant to strengthen its high school outreach program.
Outstanding achievement awards are awarded each year as recognition of the high quality of these undergraduates in mathematics.
For information and papers that resulted from the The Geometric Langlands Program that was supported by grants from DARPA and the National Science Foundation that are administered through Northwestern, see Geometric Langlands Program webpage
