[cmath] THREE HONOURED FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENTS

[Graham Wright]

For release: IMMEDIATE (August 29, 2006)

THREE HONOURED FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENTS

OTTAWA, Ontario -- The recipient of the Canadian Mathematical 
Society's Adrien Pouliot Award for 2006 is Dr. Peter Taylor (Queen's 
University).  Dr. Michael Newman (University of Waterloo) is the 
winner of the 2006 Doctoral Prize and Dr. Malcolm Harper (Champlain 
College, St Lambert) is the winner of the 2006 G. de B. Robinson 
Prize.


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2006 CMS Adrien Pouliot Award - Dr. Peter Taylor (Queen's University)
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The Adrien Pouliot Award is for individuals, or teams of individuals,
who have made significant and sustained contributions to mathematics
education in Canada.

The 2006 Adrien Pouliot Award is awarded to Peter D. Taylor (Queen's) 
for his outstanding contributions to the teaching and learning of 
mathematics in Canada. Peter's work is grounded in an innovative and 
evolving curriculum philosophy and an approach to mathematics which is 
fundamentally aesthetic. His passion for revealing the aesthetics in 
mathematics is perhaps best illustrated by the course Mathematics and 
Poetry that he teaches jointly with a colleague in the English 
Department at Queen's. In this course Peter immerses students in 
beautiful problems to reveal qualities shared by mathematics and 
poetry.


Peter Taylor is a professor in the Department of Mathematics and 
Statistics at Queen's University, cross-appointed to the Department of 
Biology and the Faculty of Education.  During his career Peter has 
taught and published in all three areas including two semesters in 
high school to prepare for the extensive curriculum writing work he 
continues to do with the Ontario Ministry of Education.  A central 
thrust of his curriculum work involves the construction of problems 
which are investigative in nature but at the same time deliver the key 
ideas and techniques of the standard curriculum, particularly calculus 
and linear algebra.  He has produced a number of books of 
investigative problems which are in wide circulation in the school 
system.  He was a founding member of the Canadian Math Education Study 
Group (CMESG), served as chair of the CMS Education Committee from 
1983 to 1987, and is a regular participant in the activities of the 
Fields Institute Mathematics Education Forum.

Peter has presented his innovative approach to mathematics education 
at many meetings of educators. These include a plenary lecture at a 
CMESG meeting, a plenary talk at the PIMS Changing the Culture 
Conference and education sessions at CMS meetings.  Of particular note 
is a joint lecture, "Reinventing the Teacher", with one of his 
graduate students, Nathalie Sinclair, at the 2000 ICME conference in 
Tokyo -- one of two lectures singled out on the front page of the 
final conference newsletter. His reputation as a teacher has been 
recognized by the Queens Arts and Science Teaching Award (1986), a MAA 
Distinguished Teaching Award (1992), and a 3-M Teaching Fellowship 
(1994).

Dr Taylor will receive the 2006 Adrien Pouliot Award at the CMS Winter 
Meeting in Toronto (December 2006).


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2006 CMS Doctoral Prize - Dr. Michael Newman (University of Waterloo)
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The CMS Doctoral Prize recognizes outstanding performance by a 
doctoral student who graduated from a Canadian university.

As a graduate student of Professor Christopher Godsil, University of
Waterloo, Michael Newman wrote an outstanding dissertation which
presents extensions and applications of the Delsarte-Hoffman bound on
the size of independent sets in graphs.  The thesis interweaves the
solutions of three intriguing yet ostensibly unrelated problems into a
unified tapestry by virtue of their common methodological treatment.
The results obtained are important and the exposition first-rate.

Michael Newman received his B.Math. from the University of Waterloo in
1992 and his M.Sc. from the University of Manitoba in 2000.  He
completed his Ph.D. in 2005 and, since then he has held an NSERC
postdoctoral fellowship at Queen Mary College in London, England.

Dr. Newman will present the 2006 Doctoral Prize Lecture at the CMS
Winter Meeting, hosted by the University of Toronto in December 2006.


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2006 CMS G. de B. Robinson Prize - Dr. Malcolm Harper (Champlain 
College, St. Lambert)
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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.

The 2006 G. de B. Robinson Award is presented to Dr. Malcolm Harper
for his paper entitled Z[\sqrt{14}] is Euclidean" published in the
Canadian Journal of Mathematics, Volume 56 (2004), no. 1, pp. 55-70.

This paper resolves a long-standing question initially posed by Pierre 
Samuel.  In a fundamental paper written in 1971, Samuel raised 
numerous questions about Euclidean rings, the most celebrated one 
being whether Z[\sqrt{14}] is Euclidean.  It is well-known that this 
ring is not Euclidean for the norm map, so Samuel's question is if 
another map exists making the ring Euclidean.  Shortly after Samuel's 
paper, Weinberger showed that if we assume the generalized Riemann 
hypothesis (GRH), then the ring is Euclidean, albeit for some strange 
Euclidean function.  In a series of papers written in the 1980's, 
Rajiv Gupta, Kumar Murty and Ram Murty devised new techniques to study 
Euclidean rings in an attempt to remove the use of the GRH from 
Weinberger's work.  Their work ultimately led David Clark and Ram 
Murty to show that Z[\sqrt{14}, 1/p] is Euclidean for the prime 
p=3D1298852237, without the use of GRH.  In his doctoral thesis, 
Harper showed that the result of Clark and Ram Murty holds for any 
prime p. Later, by an ingenious use of the large sieve method, he 
removed the use of the auxiliary prime and established Samuel's 
conjecture.

Malcolm Harper completed his bachelor's degree (with distinction) in
physics and his master's degree in mathematics at the University of
Regina in 1994.  He then moved to McGill University and obtained his
Ph.D. under the direction of M. Ram Murty in 2000. The paper for which
Harper is given the Robinson award was based on his doctoral thesis.



For more information, contact:


Dr. Graham P. Wright              Dr. Thomas Salisbury

Executive Director                President
Canadian Mathematical Society     Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: (613) 562-5702               Tel: 416-736-2100 ext 33921
director at cms.math.ca              president at cms.math.ca