FOUR HONOURED FOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

[Graham Wright]

For release: IMMEDIATE (March 3, 2004)


The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has selected Barbara Keyfitz
(Houston) as the recipient of the 2005 Krieger-Nelson Prize, Edward
Bierstone (Toronto) and Pierre Milman (Toronto) as the winners of the
2005 Jeffery-Williams Prize and Izabella Laba  (UBC) as the winner of
the 2004 Coxeter-James Prize.

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CMS 2005 Krieger-Nelson Prize:	Dr. Barbara Keyfitz (University of
Houston)
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The Krieger-Nelson Prize recognizes outstanding research by a female
mathematician.

Dr.  Barbara Keyfitz has made deep and original contributions in the
field of nonlinear partial differential equations, with particular
emphasis on hyperbolic systems of conservation laws and evolution
equations that change type.  Such systems arise in models for
multiphase flow in porous media, and in two-phase compressible and
incompressible flow.

Several times during her career, she had a pioneering role in tackling
the most challenging problems in the field, and she opened up a new
research direction when she developed a powerful new technique dealing
with free boundary problems to further the understanding of transonic
shocks.

Keyfitz studied also bifurcation problems in reaction-diffusion
equations, especially in the theory of shock waves.  She succeeded in
adapting techniques from vector field dynamics to the problem of the
admissibility of shock waves, a long-lasting question in applied
mathematics.

With Suncica Canic and Eun Heui Kim, she is currently working on the
analysis of self-similar solutions of systems of conservation laws in
two space dimensions.

Professor Keyfitz graduated from the University of Toronto in 1966 and
obtained her Ph.D. under Peter Lax at the Courant Institute in 1970.
She held positions at Columbia University, Princeton University, and
Arizona State University, and is currently the John and Rebecca Moores
Professor at the University of Houston.  She is a Fellow of the
American Association for the Advancement of Science and has been and
continues to be a member of the editorial boards of many mathematical
journals, including the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics.

Dr.  Keyfitz has been a thesis advisor, postdoctoral advisor, and
collaborator for a whole generation of mathematicians and continues to
play an important role in promoting mathematics and helping young
mathematicians worldwide.  She has remained involved in Canadian
mathematics, not only as a regular participant in conferences, but
also supporting Canadian  research as external reviewer for
departments, as a member of the Scientific Advisory Panel at the
Fields Institute, the NSERC Reallocations Committee, and the college
of reviewers for the Canada Research Chairs program.

Dr.  Barbara Keyfitz will present the 2005 Krieger-Nelson Prize
Lecture at Waterloo University in June 2005.

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CMS 2005 Jeffery-Williams Prize: 	Dr. Edward Bierstone and
					Dr. Pierre Milman (University of Toronto)
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The Jeffery-Williams Prize recognizes mathematicians who have made
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Edward Bierstone and Dr. Pierre Milman are honoured jointly for
their highly significant work in the study of analytic and geometric
properties of singular spaces.

Together, they found an amazingly short and ingenious proof of
Hironaka's theorem on resolution of singularities, transforming that
result from a monument to be admired to a tool to be used, bringing a
new dimension of understanding and accessibility to the resolution
process, at the same time extending it, and its applications, to a
considerably wider range of spaces.

Jointly with Wieslaw Pawlucki, they achieved as well important
progress on the classical open problem posed by Whitney about
differentiable extensions of functions from subsets to the ambient
space.

Dr.'s Bierstone and Milman have also made crucial contributions to the
geometry of sub- and semi-analytic sets, exploring their relationship
to differentiable functions. Their methods are expected to continue to
reveal new and significant features of singular spaces.

Dr. Edward Bierstone obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto
in 1969 and his Ph.D. from Brandeis University in 1973, under the
direction of Richard S. Palais.  He returned to the University of
Toronto as a faculty member in 1973 and has been a Professor there
since 1982.

Dr.  Bierstone has been a member of the Institut des Hautes Etudes
Scientifiques in Bures-sur-Yvette, France, a member of the Institute
of Advanced Study in Princeton, and a visiting professor in Brazil and
France.  In 1992, he was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of
Canada, in 1996 he won the Outstanding Teaching Award of the Faculty
of Arts & Science at the University of Toronto, and in 2002 he was
appointed a Fellow of the Fields Institute.  He has also served as
chair and member of an NSERC Grant Selection Committee and as chair of
the Nominations Committee for the NSERC Reallocations Steering
Committee for Mathematics.

Dr. Pierre Milman graduated with a B.A. from the University of Moscow
in1967 and obtained his Ph.D. from the University of Tel-Aviv in 1975,
after an interlude of several years as Researcher at the Institute of
Chemical Physics and then Solid State Physics in Moscow.

In 1975, he came to the University of Toronto as Lecturer and Research
Associate, and after holding a Visiting Assistant Professorship at
Purdue University from 1978 to 1980, he returned to the University of
Toronto, first as an NSERC University Research Fellow until 1985, then
as Associate Professor and, since 1986, as Professor.

In 1997, Dr. Milman was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada,
and in 2000 he was awarded a Killam Research Fellowship.

The 2005 Jeffery-Williams Prize Lecture will be given at the CMS
Summer Meeting, hosted by Waterloo University in June 2005.

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CMS 2004 Coxeter-James Prize:	 Dr.  Izabella Laba (University of
British Columbia)
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The Coxeter-James Prize recognizes young mathematicians who have made
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Izabella Laba is an outstanding young analyst with research
interests in Harmonic Analysis, Combinatorics and Mathematical
Physics. Her work spans a broad spectrum from pseudo-differential
calculus to Szemerédi's theorem, with major contributions to quantum
scattering theory and geometric combinatorics.

In her Ph.D. thesis, Laba made significant contributions to the theory
of N-particle scattering in a constant magnetic field, addressing the
issue of asymptotic completeness for various Hamiltonians and decaying
potentials in the nonlinear Schrödinger equation. She continued this
work jointly with Christian Gérard and they presented these results in
a monograph in 2002.

A second thread in Laba's work concerns the Kakeya conjecture on
Hausdorff and Minkowski dimension of Besicovitch sets.  Her joint work
with Nets Katz and Terence Tao is hailed as a breakthrough,
surmounting a natural barrier to improving earlier lower bounds by
Thomas Wolff and Jean Bourgain.

Her current research deals with questions in combinatorial number
theory and measure theory, constructing, with Michael T. Lacey,
"large" sets of integers without k-progression, and working, with
Mihail N. Kolountzakis, on periodic tilings and spectral domains in
Euclidean space.

Dr.  Izabella Laba obtained an M.Sc from Wroclaw University, Poland,
in 1986.  After three years as a Research Teaching Assistant at
Wroclaw University, she attended the University of Toronto and
obtained her Ph.D. under the direction of Israel Michael Sigal in
1994.  Her thesis dealt with "N-particle Scattering in Constant
Magnetic Fields".

She held a Hedrick Assistant Professorship at the University of
California at Los Angeles, UCLA, from 1994 to 1997 and an Assistant
Professorship at Princeton University from 1997 until 2000.  In July
2000, she joined the University of British Columbia as an Associate
Professor and was granted tenure there two years later.

Dr. Izabella Laba will present the 2004 Coxeter-James Prize Lecture at
the CMS Winter Meeting, hosted by McGill University, in December 2004.

For more information contact:

Dr. Christiane Rousseau, President 	or	Dr. Graham P.Wright, Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society 			Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: (514) 343-7729 				Tel: (613) 562-5702
Email:	president at cms.math.ca 			Email:	director at cms.math.ca