Georgia Benkart, President of The Association for Women in Mathematics, presented the award at the Prize Session of the 2011 Joint Mathematics Meetings in New Orleans.
Gong has excelled in research on cyclotomic polynomials; on computing the dimension of the space of characters of the Lie algebra of Hamiltonian vector fields on a symplectic vector space; and on congruence conditions characterizing primes and periodic cyclic cohomology of group algebras of torsion-free groups.
In 2010 Gong helped coach the U.S. team that competed in the China Girls’ Mathematical Olympiad. She was described as “a young lady with a great heart, thoughtful and gentle,” who pushed the team with “acute mathematical insights and inspiring personality.” Five team members earned gold medals in the contest.
A medal winner herself at the 2007 International Mathematical Olympiad, Gong has taken Harvard’s famous problem solving class, earning a score above 100. Since her sophomore year, she has taken graduate-level mathematics courses.
Established in 1990, the Schafer Prize is named for former AWM president and founding member Alice T. Schafer (1915-2009).