Department News and Events: Archive

Robert P. Langlands has been named the winner of the Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics for 2006 by Northwestern University.
Robert Langlands is best known for the fundamental research program which bears his name. This program postulates a deep relationship between two different areas of mathematics, number theory and automorphic forms via a study of their symmetries. Since its initiation about 40 years ago the Langlands program has served as a unifying principle in mathematics and has guided research in number theory, automorphic forms, and representation theory. Recently, it has also entered mathematical physics. It remains a research program for the future in all these areas.
List and information about previous winners of Frederic Esser Nemmers Prize in Mathematics

NUMS, the NU Undergraduate Math Society, hosted a traveling math competition in early November 2006 with 26 participants from Northwestern, Wisconsin, UIUC, UIC, and Loyola. There was a welcoming talk on Friday evening, followed by a pizza dinner and game night. The Saturday competition consisted of six 30 minute rounds with 2-3 challenging questions in each round. Student feedback was very enthusiastic. Prizes were awarded for first place (Ben Holzer of Wisconsin) and second place (a tie between Yiwei She and Alex Jeffers of Northwestern).

Bryna Kra is one of the two recipients of the prestigious American Mathematics Society Centennial Fellowship for the 2006-07 academic year. In announcement of the award, her work on problems at the intersection of ergodic theory, additive combinatorics, and number theory were noted.

Martina Bode, Mona Mocanasu, and Mike Stein have all been selected for the Associated Student Government Faculty Honor Roll for the academic year 2005-06.

Bryna Kra was an invited speaker at the International Congress of Mathematicians held during August 2006 in Madrid Spain. Her talk was entitled "From combinatorics to ergodic theory and back again".

Marco Aldi, one of our graduate students, has been awarded a Weinberg Dissertation Research Fellowship for the year 2006-07.

Hillel Furstenberg, recent winner of the prestigious Wolf Prize, will visit the department during the week of February 5, and give talks on February 6 and 7.

Dmitry Tamarkin has been awarded an Alfred P Sloan Fellowship for the two years 2005-07.

As part of the emphasis year in noncommutative geometry, a conference is planned for May 18-24. Professor Dmitry Kaledin from Moscow is visiting during the winter quarter and Professor Bruno Vallette is visiting from Nice during the spring quarter.

Putnam Competition: In the 67th William Lowell Putnam Competition held on Saturday, December 2nd, 2006, the Northwestern team of undergraduates ranked 32nd out of the 508 participating institutions. That is very good. We had a number of individuals who did well. Congratulations to all who participated and to Frank Calegari and Miguel Lerma who helped prepare the team.

Matthew Salomone was received the Weinberg College Outstanding Graduate Student Teacher Award (2005).
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Yuri Manin has been elected (June 2005) to l'Academie des Sciences de l'Institut de France. There were only two non-French mathematicians elected to the Academy in 2005.

Eric Friedlander has been elected (in 2005) a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Eric Zaslow has been appointed a Clay Senior Scholar at the Fields Institute in Toronto Ontario for 2004-05.

Yuri Manin was awarded an Honorary Doctor of Science Degree from the University of Warwick (UK) in 2005.

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.