[cmath] CANADIAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY'S 2008 G. DE B. ROBINSON AWARD

[Graham Wright]

CANADIAN MATHEMATICAL SOCIETY'S 2008 G. DE B. ROBINSON AWARD

Ottawa (Ontario) - The Canadian Mathematical Society is pleased to 
announce that Dr. Dmitry Jakobson of McGill University, Dr. Nikolai 
Nadirashvili of CNRS (Marseille) and Dr. Iosif Polterovich of the 
Université de Montréal are the winners of the 2008 G. de B. Robinson 
Award. The winners will receive the award at the Society's 2008 Winter 
Meeting in Ottawa, Ontario.

The G. de B. Robinson Award was inaugurated to recognize the 
publication of excellent papers in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics 
and the Canadian Mathematical Bulletin and to encourage the submission 
of the highest quality papers to these journals.

This year’s winning article is concerned with the study of extremal 
metrics which has been and remains one of the important themes of 
research in Riemannian geometry.  Given a compact manifold, one seeks 
a Riemannian metric for which the first eigenvalue of the 
Laplace-Beltrami operator, suitably scaled by the volume of the 
manifold, is extremal.  This problem has been solved in 1970 by Hersch 
for the 2-sphere, by Li-Yau in 1982 for the real projective plane, and 
by El Soufi and Ilias in 2000 for the two-torus.  The paper by Dmitry 
Jakobson, Nikolai Nadirashvili and Iosif Polterovich, "Extremal metric 
for the first eigenvalue on a Klein bottle", Canadian Journal of 
Mathematics (2006) / Vol. 58 / No. 2 / 381-400, considers the problem 
in the more difficult case of the Klein bottle.  By ingeniously 
reducing the problem to the study of a system of non-linear second 
order ordinary differential equations, which they analyze in detail, 
the authors construct explicitly an extremal metric on the Klein 
bottle, which they conjecture to be the unique extremal metric. 
Since the appearance of their paper, this conjecture has been proved 
by El Soufi, Giacomini and Jazar, in a paper to appear in the Duke 
Mathematical Journal.

Dmitry Jakobson received his Ph.D. from Princeton University in 1995 
under the supervision of P. Sarnak.  He held an Assistant Professor 
position at the University of Chicago in 1999-2000.  He has worked at 
McGill University since 2000 where he was promoted to Full Professor 
in 2008.  His research interests are in analysis and spectral 
geometry, with connections to partial differential equations, 
dynamical systems, mathematical physics, number theory and graph 
theory.

Nikolai Nadirashvili received his Ph.D. (1981) from Moscow State 
University.  From 1997 to 1998 he held an Assistant Professor position 
at MIT, and from 1998 to 2004 he was a full professor at the 
University of Chicago. Since 2004 he has been working at CNRS 
(Marseille) in a DR1 position.

Iosif Polterovich received his Ph.D. (2000) from the Weizmann 
Institute of Science.  In 2002, he joined the Department of 
Mathematics and Statistics at the Université de Montréal, where he is 
currently an Associate Professor.  In 2006, he was awarded the 
André-Aisenstadt prize by the Centre de recherches mathématiques for 
contributions to geometric spectral theory.

For more information, contact:

Dr. Graham P. Wright
Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society
(613) 562-5702
director at cms.math.ca

or

Dr. Matthias Neufang
Chair of Publications Committee
School of Mathematics and Statistics
Carleton University
520-2600 ext 2161
chair-pubc at cms.math.ca