[cmath] THREE HONOURED FOR EXCEPTIONAL RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

[Graham Wright]

For release: IMMEDIATE (April 10, 2008)

THREE HONOURED FOR EXCEPTIONAL RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has selected Yael Karshon as the 
recipient of the 2009 Krieger-Nelson Prize,  Stephen Kudla as the recipient of 
the 2009 Jeffery-Williams Prize, and Ravi Vakil as the winner of the 2008 
Coxeter-James Prize.

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CMS 2009 Krieger-Nelson Prize: Dr. Yael Karshon (University of Toronto)
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The Krieger-Nelson Prize recognizes outstanding research by a female 
mathematician.

Dr. Yael Karshon is one of Canada's leading experts in symplectic geometry. 
Symplectic geometry is the geometry underlying classical mechanics, and has 
close relations with quantum mechanics and quantum field theory.  The tools of 
symplectic geometry appear in algebraic geometry and representation theory, and 
in connection with convex polytopes. Symplectic spaces arising in physics and 
mathematics often admit many symmetries.

Dr. Karshon's work has focused on symmetries of symplectic manifolds, 
formalized as Hamiltonian group actions. She has obtained deep results on the 
classification of such structures. One of her significant contributions is the 
idea of "abstract moment maps", which are maps between (not necessarily 
symplectic) manifolds with group actions, and which generalize moment maps on 
symplectic manifolds. She is the author (jointly with Guillemin and Ginzburg) 
of an authoritative monograph that provides new connections between moment 
maps, cobordisms and Hamiltonian group actions. Some of her recent work is in 
symplectic topology, involving symplectic capacities and symplectomorphism 
groups.

Dr. Karshon completed her Ph.D. in 1993 under the supervision of Shlomo 
Sternberg at Harvard, and then held a C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at MIT.  In 
1995 she moved to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, where she obtained 
tenure. She joined the University of Toronto Mississauga in 2002, and was 
promoted to Full Professor in 2006. In 2005 she received the University of 
Toronto's McLean Award, which is given each year to one faculty member in the 
mathematical or physical sciences or engineering, within 12 years of Ph.D. Dr. 
Karshon takes pride in the achievements of her Ph.D. students and postdoctoral 
fellows.

Dr. Karshon will present the 2009 Krieger-Nelson Prize Lecture at the CMS 
Summer Meeting in St. John's (June 2009).


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CMS 2009 Jeffery-Williams Prize: Dr. Stephen Kudla (University of Toronto)
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The Jeffery-Williams Prize recognizes mathematicians who have made outstanding 
contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Stephen Kudla has initiated a revolutionary program which reveals 
surprising, deep connections between two ostensibly disparate areas of 
mathematics: the theory of automorphic forms and the theory of algebraic cycles 
on Shimura varieties.  The impressive body of established results and 
far-reaching conjectures that has emerged from Kudla's work has come to be 
referred to as the "Kudla Program". Among the most exciting developments in 
number theory worldwide in the last decades, Kudla's program has been featured 
in many research seminars worldwide, including the Séminaire Bourbaki in Paris 
and the Current Developments in Mathematics series in Boston.  Stephen Kudla 
has been regularly invited to deliver distinguished lectures, such as the 
Coxeter Lectures at the Fields Institute, the Kuwait Foundation lecture at 
Cambridge University, the Schur Lecture at Tel Aviv University, and an invited 
address at the 2002 International Congress of Mathematicians in Beijing. He 
also received a Sloan Fellowship in 1981 and a Max Planck Research Prize in 
2000.

Dr. Kudla received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1971 and 
completed his doctoral degree at SUNY Stony Brook in 1975. After a period at 
the Institute for Advanced Study, he served on the Faculty of the University of 
Maryland from 1976 to 2006, before joining the University of Toronto where he 
currently holds the Canada Research Chair in Automorphic Forms and Arithmetic 
Geometry.  He has held numerous visiting positions at leading institutions 
including the University of Cologne, University of Paris VI, Cambridge 
University, and the Tata Institute for Fundamental Research.

Prior to coming to Toronto, Dr. Kudla served the Canadian mathematical 
community as an Associate Editor for the Canadian Journal of Mathematics and 
the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin.

Dr. Kudla will present the 2009 Jeffery-Williams Prize Lecture at the CMS 
Summer Meeting in St. John's (June 2009).

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CMS 2008 Coxeter-James Prize: Dr Ravi Vakil (Stanford University)
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The Coxeter-James Prize recognizes young mathematicians who have made 
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

In his short, dynamic career, Dr. Ravi Vakil has become one of the world's 
leading algebraic geometers. He has made fundamental and lasting contributions 
in intersection theory, Schubert calculus and in the study of the singularities 
of moduli spaces. In an early article, for which he was awarded the Society's 
G. de B. Robinson Prize, Dr. Vakil gave a rigorous derivation of the 
characteristic numbers for families of plane quartic curves, thereby completing 
a program in enumerative geometry going back to the first half of the 19th 
century, which was mentioned by Hilbert in his famous problem list. In two 
major papers which appeared in the Annals of Mathematics, Ravi Vakil used a 
clever deformation technique to solve several classical problems in Schubert 
Calculus. The most spectacular consequence of this is that any problem 
involving counting the points in an intersection of Schubert varieties in a 
(complex) Grassmannian is "totally real". That is, the problem can be solved by 
restricting to sufficiently general real subspaces of a real Grassmannian. This 
work also gave a natural geometric interpretation to the "puzzles" of Knutson 
and Tao. Dr. Vakil's results on the singularities of moduli spaces show that 
the singular loci of moduli spaces can be as bad as possible.

Dr. Ravi Vakil's outstanding contributions go well beyond his research. He is a 
model for promoting the overall dissemination of mathematics as well.  He has 
unselfishly contributed his time as an organizer of international meetings, 
such as the graduate student pre-meeting before the American Mathematical 
Society's Summer Symposium in algebraic geometry 2005, a Snowbird Conference in 
2006 and most recently, the MSRI jumbo program in algebraic geometry in 2009.

Dr. Vakil is unique in combining his talent for mathematical research with his 
desire to educate and infuse others with his passion for the subject. Few 
people combine his abilities and his dedication. Ravi Vakil has been extremely 
active in organizing workshops and math camps for high school students and 
undergraduates, and coordinates the William Lowell Putnam competition at 
Stanford. He is also the co-author of a book on the Putnam competition.

Dr. Vakil received his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1992 and his 
Ph.D. from Harvard in 1997. After receiving his degree, he was an instructor at 
Princeton and a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at MIT. He is now the David Huntington 
Faculty Scholar and a Professor in the Mathematics Department at Stanford 
University. In 2005, he won the Andre-Aisenstadt Prize from the CRM and also 
received the 2004-05 Dean's Award for Distinguished Teaching at Stanford. He 
recently completed an American Mathematical Society Centennial Fellowship, a 
Frederick E. Terman fellowship, and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship. He 
currently holds a National Science Foundation CAREER grant (2003-2008), and 
received the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers 
(PECASE) at the White House in 2004.

Dr. Ravi Vakil will present the 2008 Coxeter-James Prize Lecture at the CMS 
Winter Meeting hosted by Carleton University in December 2008.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Thomas S. Salisbury			Dr. Graham P. Wright
President				Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society 	or	Canadian Mathematical Society
416-736-2100 x33921			(613) 562-5702
president at cms.math.ca			director at cms.math.ca



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