Mathematics Is Focus of Four of This Year's Guggenheim Fellowships

April 16, 2009

Four of this year's Guggenheim Fellowships, announced by the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, in New York, deal with mathematics. In all, 180 new Fellowships to artists, scientists, and scholars, culled from more than 3,000 applicants, were awarded.

Guggenheim Fellowships, which had their origin in the Roaring '20s, are individual grants of more than $40,000 for up to a year's research. One hundred and twenty-four Fellows from this year's group hold university positions. Those concentrating on mathematical research are the following:

Sally Blower, a biomathematician and evolutionary biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, will take aim at mathematical modeling of infectious diseases. Prof. Blower was featured in "Modeling a Nasty Bacterial Outbreak" (Sept. 13, 2007).

Wilhelm Schlag (University of Chicago) intends to examine blowup and longtime existence for nonlinear hyperbolic equations. From 1996 to 1997, Schlag was a visiting member of the Institute for Advanced Study. A member of the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute, in Berkeley, in fall 1997, Schlag has served as editor of Geometric and Functional Analysis since 2001.

Shou-Wu Zhang (Columbia University) will look at topics in arithmetical algebraic geometry. Zhang's contributions to number theory and arithmetical algebraic geometry include his theory of positive line bundles in Arakelov theory, which he used to prove the Bogomolov conjecture; and the generalization of the Gross-Zagier theorem from elliptic curves to abelian varieties of GL(2) type over totally real fields.

Athanassios Fokas, an applied mathematician at the University of Cambridge, intends to tackle boundary value problems, integrability, and medical imaging. Fokas, who had taught mathematics at Clarkson University (Potsdam, N.Y.), was the winner of the 2000 Naylor Prize for contributions to the theory of integrable systems and to the theory of other important linear and nonlinear equations, including boundary-value problems.

One theme of Fokas' work has been that of integrable systems of partial differential equations, and the role of inverse scattering and other methods for solving such equations. Fokas has shown how the inverse-scattering approach could be exploited to solve other linear and nonlinear problems with nontrivial boundary and initial conditions.

Source: Guggenheim Foundation, April 8, 2009