[cmath] (no subject)

[Graham Wright]

For release: IMMEDIATE (February 28, 2005)

THREE HONOURED FOR OUTSTANDING RESEARCH ACHIEVEMENTS

The Canadian Mathematical Society has selected Nassif Ghoussoub as the 
recipient of the 2007 Jeffery-Williams Prize, Pauline van den 
Driessche as the recipient of the 2007 Krieger-Nelson Prize and Jim 
Geelen as the winner of the 2006 Coxeter-James Prize.

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CMS 2007 Jeffery-Williams Prize: Dr. Nassif Ghoussoub (University of 
British Columbia)
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The Jeffery-Williams Prize recognizes mathematicians who have made 
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.
Dr. Nassif Ghoussoub is a leading expert in partial differential 
equations, variational problems, and geometric and nonlinear 
functional analysis.  He is a prolific researcher of depth and vision 
who has made a strong impact in each of these areas.

His seminal 1993 monograph "Duality and Perturbation Methods in 
Critical Point Theory" introduced many ideas and methods from his own 
then-recent work into the calculus of variations, including the 
far-reaching min-max principle involving duality and a Morse theory 
"up to epsilon" to deal with borderline variational problems.  The 
influence of this book in the field, and in particular on the recent 
advances in Hartree-Fock-Dirac theory by Esteban and Sere and related 
problems in quantum chemistry by Lewin, can hardly be overestimated.

Among the highlights of his one hundred papers is his resolution with 
Gui of De Giorgi's Conjecture, a long-standing open problem, first 
with a complete solution in dimension two, followed by major advances 
in dimensions up to five.  This work is described as a "magnificent 
breakthrough", involving original ideas with other applications to the 
study of elliptic partial differential equations.

Dr. Ghoussoub's work with Agueh and Kang on geometric inequalities is 
described as a "gem".  Using new ideas on the border between 
mathematical physics and partial differential equations, they have 
developed a unified framework for several important geometric 
inequalities based on a general comparison principle between different 
states of interacting gases, and discovered a remarkably encompassing 
energy-entropy duality formula.

Following his solution with Tzou of a 1976 conjecture of Brezis and 
Ekeland, in recent years Dr. Ghoussoub has developed an innovative 
approach to the calculus of variations.  His self-dual variational 
principles exploit algebraic symmetries of newly devised energy 
functionals to prove existence results for a wide range of partial 
differential equations not covered by standard Euler-Lagrange theory.

Dr. Ghoussoub received an undergraduate degree from the Lebanese 
University of Beirut in 1973 and a doctorat d'état from Université 
Pierre et Marie Curie in Paris in 1979.  He joined the University of 
British Columbia in 1977 and is now a Professor and a Distinguished 
University Scholar at UBC, and an Adjunct Professor at the University 
of Alberta.  He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities 
in Europe and the United States.  He received the CMS Coxeter-James 
Prize in 1990 and an honorary doctorate from Université Paris-Dauphine 
in 2004.  He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1994.


His service to the Canadian mathematical community has been nothing 
short of extraordinary.  He is the founding director of the Pacific 
Institute for the Mathematical Sciences, co-founder of the MITACS 
network, and a founder and current Scientific Director of the Banff 
International Research Station.  He has been a Vice-President of the 
CMS and served on the NSERC Grant Selection Committee and various 
editorial boards, including Editor-in-Chief for the Canadian Journal 
of Mathematics.

Dr. Nassif Ghoussoub will present the 2007 Jeffery-Williams Prize 
Lecture at the CMS Summer Meeting hosted by the University of Manitoba 
in June 2007.

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CMS 2007 Krieger-Nelson Prize: Dr. Pauline van den Driessche 
(University of Victoria)
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The Krieger-Nelson Prize recognizes outstanding research by a female 
mathematician.

Dr. Pauline van den Driessche is one of Canada's leading applied 
mathematicians, known for her work in mathematical biology and linear 
algebra.

Her major impact in mathematical biology has been the application of 
new mathematical methods to the study of dynamics of epidemics.  The 
referees cite her work on epidemic models with variable population 
size, the role of immigration on disease dynamics, the possibility of 
multiple steady states, and reproduction numbers and sub-threshold 
endemic equilibria for compartmental models of disease transmission. 
The mathematical tools she has developed have been applied by her and 
others to multi-city disease dynamics, HIV-AIDS control, and, more 
recently, West Nile virus outbreak predictions.

Her work in linear algebra includes a famous paper with Jeffries and 
Klee in the Canadian Journal of Mathematics in which they characterize 
sign-stable matrices, as well as a series of papers in factorization 
theory.  Many of the deep questions in matrix theory she has worked on 
have arisen from problems in biological modeling.

Dr. van den Driessche has played a major leadership role in the 
Canadian applied mathematics community and served as a mentor to a 
growing number of young mathematicians.  A look at her impressive list 
of about 150 publications reveals an unusually large number of 
collaborators, many of them students and junior colleagues.  The 
referees comment on her "tremendous productivity and vision" and 
describe her as an example and inspiration for new generations of 
mathematical researchers, women and men alike.

Dr. van den Driessche received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1961 
and a Master of Science degree in 1963, both at Imperial College, and 
a Ph.D. in 1964 from University College of Wales, Aberystwyth.  She 
joined the University of Victoria in 1965 and has been a Professor in 
the Department of Mathematics and Statistics there since 1983.  She is 
currently cross-appointed in the Department of Computer Science.

She has organized numerous conferences, served on NSERC's Grant 
Selection Committee from 1992 to 1995, and served on the CMS Board of 
Directors and the Council of the Canadian Applied Mathematics Society 
(now CAIMS).  She is an editor of the Canadian Applied Mathematics 
Quarterly and the SIAM Journal of Applied Mathematics.

Dr. Pauline van den Driessche will present the 2007 Krieger-Nelson 
Prize Lecture at the CMS Summer Meeting hosted by the University of 
Manitoba in June 2007.

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CMS 2006 Coxeter-James Prize: Dr. Jim Geelen (University of Waterloo)
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The Coxeter-James Prize recognizes young mathematicians who have made 
outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Jim Geelen is already a world leader in the areas of combinatorial 
optimization and matroid theory.  The referees describe him as an 
"outstanding talent" and a "very creative and original researcher" 
with a "huge international reputation".


The following are among the highlights of his 30-odd papers.  With 
Gerards and Kapoor, he characterized the matroids representable over 
the finite field GF(4), which had been considered an impossibly hard 
problem.  Their paper is described as a "huge breakthrough".  With 
Whittle, he has proved that among the set of excluded minors 
preventing representability of a matroid over a given finite field, 
there is only a finite number of matroids of a given branch-width. 
This is remarkably strong evidence in support of the Rota Conjecture.

Dr. Geelen has made important contributions to extending results of 
the Graph Minors Project from graphs to matroids.  This is currently 
the main focus of matroid theory.  A major step in this direction is 
his result with Gerards and Whittle that binary matroids with large 
branch-width contain big grids as minors.  One of his contributions to 
combinatorial optimization is a deterministic algorithm for the 
maximum matching problem, simple to use but theoretically deep.

Dr. Geelen received a Bachelor of Science degree in 1992 from Curtin 
University in Australia, and a Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of 
Waterloo under the supervision of Professor William H. Cunningham. 
After postdoctoral fellowships in the Netherlands, Germany, and Japan, 
he returned to the University of Waterloo in 1997 and is now an 
Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair.

He won the Doctoral Prize of the CMS in 1996 and the Fulkerson Prize 
of the American Mathematical Society and the Mathematical Programming 
Society in 2003.  He received a Premier's Research Excellence Award 
from the Province of Ontario in 2000 and a Sloan Fellowship in 2002.

Dr. Jim Geelen will present the 2006 Coxeter-James Prize Lecture at 
the CMS Summer Meeting hosted by the University of Calgary in June 
2006.

For more information, contact:


Dr. H.E.A. (Eddy) Campbell
President
Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: 709-737-8246
president at cms.math.ca


Dr. Graham P. Wright
Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: (613) 562-5702   Cel: (613) 290-3046
director at cms.math.ca