The White House announced in a Sept. 27, 2011 Press Release that S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan was named a recipient of the National Medal of Science, "for his work in probability theory, especially his work on large deviations from expected random behavior, which has revolutionized this field of study during the second half of the twentieth century and become a cornerstone of both pure and applied probability.  The mathematical insights he developed have been applied in diverse fields including quantum field theory, population dynamics, finance, econometrics, and traffic engineering."  President Obama presented the award to recipients on October 21st, 2011. A full Press Release is available from NYU Today.  Congratulations, Raghu!

Mikhael Gromov has been elected a Foreign Member of The Royal Society, UK, along with 44 Fellows and 7 other Foreign Members.  As stated in their citation: "Gromov ranks among the most deeply original mathematicians of our time, with contributions ranging from group theory, Riemannian and symplectic geometry, and the topology of partial differential relations, to his recent interest in the mathematics of biomolecular systems. His remarkable insight and unorthodox viewpoints have redefined whole areas of mathematics, most notably the subject of geometric group theory."  The full article is available from NYU Today.

Marsha Berger has been elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in a class of 212 new members and 16 foreign Honorary Members. As stated in the NYU press release, "AAAS has elected as fellows and foreign honorary members the finest minds and most influential leaders from each generation." She will be inducted at a special ceremony on October 1.The full release is available from NYU Today.

Gerard Ben Arous has been elected a Fellow of the Institute of Mathematical Statistics.  Fellowships are awarded to IMS members in honor of their "outstanding research and professional contributions."  His election will be celebrated at the IMS Presidential Address and Awards Ceremony on August 1.

NYU President John Sexton and Provost Dave McLaughlin announced the appointment of Gerard Ben Arous as the new Director of the Courant Institute on April 26, 2011.  A specialist of probability theory and its applications, Gerard arrived to NYU's Courant Institute in 2002.  John Sexton said, "The Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences has a history of scholarship, discovery, and recognitions that is justly admired throughout higher education.  In selecting a director, we sought someone who would be prepared not just to maintain Courant's stature but to advance it.  I am very pleased that within our own ranks we have found just such a person."  In addition to being named Director of the Courant Institute, Gerard has been appointed Vice Provost for Science and Engineering Development.  His Directorship becomes effective September 1, 2011.  The full press release is available from NYU Today.

Jinyang Li and Rob Fergus have been awarded fellowships from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Sloan Foundation Fellowships are given to early-career scientists and scholars in recognition of achievement and the potential to contribute substantially to their fields. The full press release is available from NYU Today.

Richard Cole, Chuck Newman, and Olof Widlund have been named Silver Professors. Funded by an endowment to the University from alumnus Julius Silver, Silver Chairs are awarded in recognition of outstanding scholarly contributions. The three Courant Institute faculty members will be awarded the distinction along with other FAS faculty at a ceremony in the Fall.

Eric Vanden-Eijnden has received the 2011 SIAM J. D. Crawford Prize for his "transformative work in stochastic dynamical systems, [which] stimulat[es] new ideas in applied and computational mathematics while also impacting applications."  Eric will be awarded the prize at a SIAM ceremony in May.

Bud Mishra has been elected a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. The AAAS selected Mishra for his "distinguished contributions to the field of computational and systems approaches to the fields of robotics, hardware verification, and computational biology." The full press release is available from NYU Today.

The Bôcher Prize, awarded by the American Mathematical Society, recognizes "the most notable paper in analysis published during the preceding six years." The AMS awarded the prize to Naor "for introducing new invariants of metric spaces and for applying his new understanding of the distortion between various metric structures to theoretical computer science." The full press release is available from NYU Today.

The 2010 ACM Gordon Bell prize for outstanding achievement in high-performance computing has been awarded to a team from Georgia Tech, NYU and Oak Ridge National Laboratory. The NYU members of the team are Shravan Veerapaneni and Denis Zorin. The team was led by George Biros who was a postdoc at NYU in 2000-2003. They created a blood-flow simulation of 260 million deformable red blood cells flowing in plasma, topping the previous largest blood-flow simulation (of 14,000 cells) by four orders of magnitude. It ran at 700 teraflops (trillion floating point operations per second) on the Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge.The code is based on the kernel-independent version of the fast multipole method developed at NYU by Lexing Ying (PhD, Computer Science, 2004), George Biros and Denis Zorin. The full press release is available from NYU Today.

Louis Nirenberg has been selected by the International Congress of Mathematicians as the first recipient of the Chern Medal "for his role in the formulation of the modern theory of non-linear elliptic partial differential equations and for mentoring numerous students and post-docs in this area.” The Chern Medal, named after Shiing-Shen Chern, recognizes individuals “whose lifelong outstanding achievements in the field of mathematics warrant the highest level of recognition.”  The Institute will host a special reception in honor of Louis in Fall 2010. The ICM annoucement, as well as laudations and a work profile, are available from the ICM.

Congratulations, Louis!

The National Science Foundation has given a $2.85 million grant to NYU-Poly to launch "an innovative graduate education program to educate scientists and engineers to address the increasingly complex issues surrounding information security and privacy."  The program will enlist faculty from across NYU departments, including the Courant Institute, and includes funding for graduate students.  The full release is available from NYU Today.

It is with great sadness that we report the passing of our dear friend and colleague Paul Garabedian.

Paul was one of the outstanding mathematicians of his time. As a pure mathematician, he made fundamental contributions to the theory of partial differential equations and to the theory of functions of a complex variable. As an applied mathematician his astonishing calculation of shockless airfoils has had a major impact on modern aircraft design, and his studies of plasma stability are central to the problem of designing fusion reactors... [more]

Andrew Majda and Jalal Shatah have been elected to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in a class of 211 fellows and 19 Foreign Honorary Members.  Academy Chair Louis W. Cabot said, “The men and women we elect today are true pathbreakers who have made unique contributions to their fields, and to the world.”

Andy & Jalal will be inducted at a ceremony on October 9th.  Congratulations, Andy & Jalal!