Education

Three Princeton Faculty Claim Some Of World’s Most Prestigious Awards For Mathematics


Three Princeton University faculty members have received highly prestigious awards for their accomplishments in mathematics. The announcements of this year’s Fields Medal, Gauss Prize, Abacus Medal and Chern Medal Award were made today by the International Mathematical Union (IMU), which was meeting in Helsinki, Finland.

The Fields Medal

Princeton mathematician June Huh was one of four scholars to be awarded the 2022 Fields Medal, considered to be one of the most prestigious awards in mathematics. The Fields Medal, sometimes referred to as the Nobel Prize for mathematics, is presented every four years to researchers under the age of 40 based on the influence of their existing work and on their promise of future achievement.

The IMU citation for Huh stated that “using methods of Hodge theory, tropical geometry and singularity theory, June Huh, with his collaborators, has transformed the field of geometric combinatorics.”

According to Princeton’s news release, “Huh said he learned of the Fields honor in an after-hours phone call from the IMU president. Huh said he was excited but wasn’t sure if he should awaken his wife. After waiting 10 minutes, he did. ‘I told her the news and then she said, ‘Oh, I knew it — it will happen,’ and then fell back to sleep,’ he said.”

The other three Fields Medal awardees were Hugo Duminil-Copin of the Université de Genève and Institut des Hautes Études Scientifiques (IHÉS), James Maynard of Oxford University and Maryna Viazovska of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL).

The Gauss Prize

This year’s Gauss Prize was awarded to Elliott Lieb, the Eugene Higgins Professor of Physics, Emeritus, and Professor of Mathematical Physics, Emeritus at Princeton.

The Gauss prize is named for the German mathematician and physicist, Carl Friedrich Gauss. It’s awarded jointly by the IMU and the German Mathematical Union (DMV) for outstanding mathematical contributions that have found significant applications outside the field.

Lieb was recognized for contributions to physics, chemistry and pure mathematics. His citation read, “Reminiscent of Gauss and other 18th and 19th century giants, Elliott H. Lieb, driven by problems in and applications to physics, has unraveled elegant and fundamental mathematical structures, vastly transcending the original motivations. In doing so, Lieb has introduced concepts which have shaped whole fields of research in mathematics even beyond his original area, while having a transformative impact on physics and chemistry.”

Igor Rodnianski, Chair of Princeton’s Department of Mathematics, said of his colleague, “Elliott Lieb is a leading figure in mathematical physics of the last 70 years. His profound and lasting influence has changed and in some cases redefined multiple branches of mathematical physics, including quantum mechanics, statistical physics, computational chemistry and others.”

The Abacus Medal

Mark Braverman, Professor of Computer Science at Princeton was awarded the Abacus Medal, which is scheduled to be made every four years for outstanding contributions in Mathematical Aspects of Information Sciences. The Abacus Medal is being awarded for the first time this year; it’s a successor to the Rolf Nevanlinna Prize that was awarded from 1982 to 2018.

As the first winner of the Abacus Medal, Braverman was recognized for “his path-breaking research developing the theory of information complexity, a framework for using information theory to reason about communication protocols.”

“Mark Braverman led the development of the theory of information complexity, the interactive analog of Shannon’s information theory,” his citation continued. “In addition to his work on information complexity, Braverman has made contributions to diverse areas at the interface of theoretical computer science and mathematical sciences.”

Jennifer Rexford, chair of Princeton’s Department of Computer Science, called Braverman’s achievements “astonishing,” and said, “Our modern networked lives rely on communication protocols that allow multiple computers to work together to compute answers to important questions. Mark’s ingenious research lays foundations for understanding how multiple parties can cooperate efficiently — minimizing the amount of information they need to share to complete their task.”

The Chern Medal Award

Another American mathematician – Barry Mazur, the Gerhard Gabe University Professor of Mathematics at Harvard University – was named the winner of the 2022 Chern Medal Award, which is given to an individual whose accomplishments warrant the highest level of recognition for outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics. All living persons, regardless of age or vocation, are eligible for the Chern Medal, which is jointly given by IMU and the Chern Medal Foundation and carries a cash prize of $250,000.

Mazur’s citation read in part, “Barry Mazur has shaped the modern landscape in arithmetic, by way of tackling the most difficult problems in the area, pioneering exciting new directions, and guiding generations of mathematicians to fertile new terrain. His numerous fundamental contributions place him squarely within the ranks of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century.”



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