Department News (2008)
John Alongi and Jared Wunsch were elected to the ASG Faculty Honor Roll for 2007-8.
2008 graduating senior Jonah Leshin has won a UK Fulbright Fellowship.
Scott Bailey, one of our graduate students, is the recipient of the "WCAS Outstanding Graduate Student Teaching Award" for 2007-8.
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.
Peter Sarnak, professor at the Institute for Advanced Study and Princeton University, visited the department January 22-24 and gave a Distinguished Lecture Series.
Yuri Manin received the "Great Cross of Merit with Star" from the German Federal Republic on October 6, 2008.
John Franks has been named the Henry S. Noyes Professor in Mathematics.
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.
Northwestern
news release
List and information about previous winners of
Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize 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
On Tuesday, October 21, 2008 Simon Donaldson, Professor of Mathematics at Imperial College and winner of the 2008 Nemmers Prize, gave the first of 5 lectures on Differential Geometry of Toric Manifolds. The lecture series will continue on October 22, 27, 28 and 29, 2008.
Congratulations to undergraduate majors Jennifer Hoffman and Jeff Martell who were named Oliver Marcy Scholars by Weinberg College for outstanding achievement in their junior year.
Kevin Costello has been awarded an Alfred P Sloan Fellowship for 2008-10.
The department's distinguished lecture series begun so successfully in 2007-08 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.
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.
More News - 2007
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