Department News (2004)

Michael Stein has been selected for the Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll for educational contribution for the year 2004-5.

Mikhail Gromov has been named the winner of the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in mathematics for 2004 by Northwestern University. He is professor of mathematics at the Institut des Hautes Etudes Scientifiques, Bures-sur-Yvette, France, and Jay Gould Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University.
Gromov's work is both tremendously elegant and immediately relevant to problems in applied mathematics and mathematical physics in a way that reflects his tremendous creativity and excellent taste. Gromov's work on symplectic manifolds has already played a central role in the development of one of the most promising unified field theories of theoretical physics, string theory. He is a true successor to great geometers of the past, such as Felix Klein, who lectured at Northwestern in 1893.
In awarding the prize to Gromov, the selection committee cited in particular his work in Riemannian geometry, which revolutionized this subject, his theory of pseudoholomorphic curves in symplectic manifolds, his solution of the problem of groups of polynomial growth, and his construction of the theory of hyperbolic groups.
More information.