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him to work in other areas, such as incidence geometry and additive combinatorics. Jointly with Larry Guth, he solved (up to logarithmic factors) the Erdos distinct distances problem, in the process introducing polynomial partition-ing, which is now having an impact on Kakeya.

Elchanan Mossel of the Massachu-setts Institute of Technology works primarily in the fields of probability theory, combinatorics, theoretical computer science, and statistical in-ference. Mossel is broad and collab-orative in his research. Much of his work spans different areas of math-ematics or bridges between math-ematics and other sciences. With

collaborators, he made fundamental contributions to discrete Fourier analysis and its applications to computa-tional complexity and voting theory. In the area he named “combinatorial statistics,” his collaborative work includes important discoveries on tree broadcast models and asso-ciated reconstruction problems, detection of block models, the inference of evolutionary histories, and, more recently, deep inference.

Theoretical Computer Science

David Blei of Columbia University studies probabilistic machine learn-ing, including its theory, algorithms, and application. He has made con-tributions to unsupervised machine learning for text analysis, approxi-mate Bayesian inference with vari-ational methods, flexible modeling with Bayesian nonparametrics, and many applications to the sciences

and humanities. Blei tells the Notices: “Many years ago I played accordion in an indie rock band in San Francisco.”

Simons Foundation Investigators NamedThe Simons Foundation has named the Simons Founda-tion Investigators for 2019. Following are the investigators whose work involves the mathematical sciences.

Mathematics

Bhargav Bhatt of the University of Michigan works in arithmetic alge-braic geometry, with an emphasis on questions in positive and mixed characteristic. His research, which often draws on ideas derived from algebraic geometry, has also contrib-uted to the solution of long-standing problems in commutative algebra and algebraic topology.

Xiuxiong Chen of Stony Brook Uni-versity is a leading figure in com-plex geometry with fundamental contributions to the field. He and his collaborators have made major breakthroughs and finally settled several long-standing problems. With S. K. Donaldson and S. Sun, Chen proved the stability conjecture (which goes back to Yau) on Fano Kähler manifolds. With B. Wang,

Chen confirmed the Hamilton–Tian conjecture on the Kähler–Ricci flow on Fano manifolds. With J. R. Cheng, Chen found a groundbreaking a priori estimate for Kähler metrics, under assumptions on the scalar curvature, which involved a fourth-order differential equation and verified the fundamental Donaldson geodesic stability conjecture and the properness conjecture.

Nets Katz of the California Institute of Technology is a harmonic analyst. Much of his work has been focused on the Kakeya problem. Because that problem has such broad connections with different parts of mathematics, it has led

Bhargav Bhatt

Xiuxiong Chen

Elchanan Mossel

David Blei

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the energetic needs of small thermodynamic systems. He has also sought to understand how cells exploit the subtle physics near critical points to sense and respond to their environment.

Caroline Uhler of the Massachusetts Institute of Technol-ogy has made major contributions to the development of methods in statistics and machine learning for applications in genomics. Her work to date has broken new ground on providing a systematic approach to studying graphical models. In particular, she uncovered statistical and com-putational limitations for causal inference and developed a novel framework for causal structure discovery from a mix of observational and interventional data. This led to new models and algorithms for inferring gene regulatory networks and for disease diagnostics by integrating gene expression data with the 3-D organization of the genome.

The Simons Investigators Program provides a stable base of support for outstanding scientists, enabling them to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions.

—From a Simons Foundation announcement

Troyer Awarded Hamburg PrizeMatthias Troyer of Microsoft Quantum has been awarded the 2019 Hamburg Prize for Theoretical Physics for his contributions to the development of quantum Monte Carlo algorithms. According to the prize announcement, “Using ran-dom numbers, these algorithms can predict how tiny particles will interact within quantum mechanical many-body systems such as atoms and molecules. As a result, Troyer is playing a key role in basic research and the ongoing development of quantum computers and superconductive materials. He is one of just a handful of leading international researchers in this field.” Troyer received his PhD in 1994 from ETH Zurich. He was a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science at the University of Tokyo, then joined the faculty at ETH Zurich in 1998. He is currently principal researcher at Microsoft Quantum. He is a Fellow of the American Physical Society and a trustee of the Aspen Center for Physics. He was awarded the Aneesur Rahman Prize in 2016.

The Hamburg Prize is awarded by the Joachim Herz Stiftung in partnership with the Wolfgang Pauli Centre of the University of Hamburg, the German Electron Synchrotron DESY, and the Cluster Excellence “CUI: Advanced Imaging of Matter” at the University of Hamburg. The prize carries a cash award of 137,036 euros (approximately US$154,000).

—From a Joachim Herz Stiftung announcement

Oded Regev of New York University works on mathematical and compu-tational aspects of point lattices. A main focus of his research is in the area of lattice-based cryptography, where he introduced the Learning with Errors (LWE) problem. This problem is used as the basis for a wide variety of cryptographic proto-cols, including some of the leading candidates for postquantum secure

cryptographic standards. He is also interested in quantum computation, theoretical computer science, and, more recently, molecular biology.

Brent Waters of the University of Texas at Austin is a leader in the field of cryptography. His pioneer-ing work introduced the concepts of attribute-based encryption and func-tional encryption. He is known for developing novel proof techniques, including lossy trapdoor functions, dual system encryption, and punc-tured programming analysis in cryp-tographic code obfuscation. Waters

tells the Notices: “I grew up in Thousand Oaks, California, and did many Southern California things growing up, like going to Dodger games or boogie boarding at the beach. Over the summer that I turned sixteen I had my first job at an Orange Julius/Dairy Queen store in the mall. On break we were allowed free food, and I would manage to gulp down a chili cheese dog, churro, julius drink, and blizzard over a twenty-minute break. The following summer my parents wanted me to get a similar job (to the Orange Julius one). However, I instead chose to attend a C programming course at a local community college. This ended up being a good decision for the long term. I try to keep active by playing basketball once a week. I have also done waterski-ing and took a hang gliding training class. About ten years ago I broke my wrist kind of badly playing basketball. I still play, but have cut back on the risk taking since then.”

Mathematical Modeling of Living Systems

Benjamin Machta of Yale University examines how phys-ical laws constrain the design principles of biological systems. His research uses statistical physics, information theory, and Riemannian geometry to understand how the need to coordinate and process information constrains function. He has worked to understand how simple mod-els emerge from complex molecular details and to bound

Oded Regev

Brent Waters

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Pavel Pevzner of the University of California, San Diego, has been named the 2018 ACM Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award recipient for pioneering contributions to the theory, design, and implementation of algorithms for string reconstruction and to their applications in the assembly of genomes. The prize carries a cash award of US$10,000.

—From an ACM announcement

Prizes of the London Mathematical SocietyThe London Mathematical Society (LMS) has awarded a number of prizes for 2019.

Sir Andrew Wiles, FRS, of the University of Oxford was awarded a De Morgan Medal for his seminal contributions to number theory and for his resolution of Fermat’s Last Theorem in particular, as well as for his numerous activities promoting mathematics in general.

Ben Green, FRS, of the University of Oxford was awarded a Senior Whitehead Prize for his groundbreaking results in additive combinatorics, analytic number theory, and group theory.

Nicholas Higham, FRS, of the University of Manches-ter was awarded a Naylor Prize and Lectureship for his leadership in numerical linear algebra, numerical stability analysis, and communication of mathematics.

Clark Barwick of the University of Edinburgh was awarded a Berwick Prize for his paper “On the Algebraic K-Theory of Higher Categories,” published in the Journal of Topology in 2016, which proves that Waldhausen’s algebraic K-theory is the universal homology theory for ∞-categories and uses this universality to re-prove the major fundamen-tal theorems of the subject in this new context.

Eva-Maria Graefe of Imperial College London was awarded an Anne Bennett Prize in recognition of her out-standing research in quantum theory and the inspirational role she has played among female students and early-career researchers in mathematics and physics.

Whitehead Prizes were awarded to the following indi-viduals:

Alexandr Buryak of the University of Leeds in recog-nition of his outstanding contributions to the study of moduli of curves and integrable systems.

David Conlon of the University of Oxford in recognition of his many contributions to combinatorics, particularly Ramsey theory.

Toby Cubitt of University College London in recog-nition of his outstanding contributions to mathemati-cal physics, in particular the interconnections between quantum information, computational complexity, and many-body physics.

Wright Awarded von Neumann PrizeMargaret H. Wright of the Courant Institute of Mathemat-ical Sciences, New York University, has been awarded the John von Neumann Prize of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). She was honored for her “pioneering contributions to the numerical solution of optimization problems and to the exposition of the sub-ject.” She delivered the Prize Lecture, titled “A Hungarian Feast of Applied Mathematics,” at the ICIAM in Valencia, Spain, in July 2019. Wright received her PhD in computer science from Stanford University. Her work has been highly influential in the theory and practice of optimization and includes coauthorship of the books Practical Optimization and Numerical Linear Algebra and Optimization, both with Philip E. Gill and Walter Murray. She is the fifth woman to receive the von Neumann Prize. She is a Fellow of the AMS, as well as of SIAM, the Simons Foundation Society of Fellows, and the Institute for Operations Research and Management Science (INFORMS) and is a member of the National Academy of Engineering, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and the National Academy of Sciences.

—From a SIAM announcement

ACM Awards GivenThe Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has awarded prizes to several researchers whose work involves the mathematical sciences.

Yoshua Bengio of the University of Montreal, Geoffrey Hinton of Google and the University of Toronto, and Yann LeCun of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, have been named the recipients of the 2018 A. M. Turing Award of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). They were honored for “conceptual and engineering breakthroughs that have made deep neural networks a critical component of computing.” The award carries a cash prize of US$1 million. It is named for Alan M. Turing, the British mathematician who articulated the mathematical foundation and limits of computing.

Constantinos Daskalakis of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Michael J. Freedman of Princeton Uni-versity were honored with the 2018 Grace Murray Hopper Award. Daskalakis was recognized for his seminal contribu-tions to the theory of computation and economics, partic-ularly the complexity of Nash equilibrium. Freedman was selected for the design and deployment of self-organizing geodistributed systems. The Hopper Award carries a cash prize of US$35,000.

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Anders Hansen of the University of Cambridge for his contributions to computational mathematics, especially his development of the solvability complexity index and its corresponding classification hierarchy.

William Parnell of the University of Manchester for highly novel and extensive research contributions in the fields of acoustic and elastodynamic metamaterials and theoretical solid mechanics, as well as excellence in the promotion of mathematics in industry.

Nick Sheridan of the University of Edinburgh for his groundbreaking contributions to homological mirror sym-metry and the structure of Fukaya categories.

—From an LMS announcement

European Girls’ Mathematical OlympiadThe team from the United States placed first at the Eu-ropean Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad (EGMO) held in Kyiv, Ukraine, in April 2019. The contestants were Emma Qin, Ishika Shah, Catherine Wu, and Janabel Xia. Rachel Zhang was deputy leader, Meghan Gupta was leader, and Oleksandra Khomyshyn was guide. Qin, Shah, and Wu re-ceived gold medals; Xia was awarded a silver medal. A team from Ukraine finished second, and the team from Bulgaria was third. Students from fifty countries participated in the competition for female high school students. Nineteen students were awarded gold medals, thirty-seven received silver medals, and fifty-six received bronze medals. The US team is organized by the Mathematical Association of America (MAA) as part of the MAA American Mathematics Competitions.

—From an MAA announcement

CreditsPhoto of Bhargav Bhatt is courtesy of Wei Ho.Photo of Xiuxiong Chen is courtesy of Holly Chen.Photo of Elchanan Mossel is courtesy of Allegra Boverman. Photo of David Blei is courtesy of Denise Applewhite.Photo of Oded Regev is courtesy of Erica Kempe Veltman.Photo of Brent Waters is courtesy of Sasha Haagensen.

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