Global Distinguished Professor Sylvia Serfaty was awarded a Henri Poincaré Prize at the 2012 International Congress on Mathematical Physics, along with Freeman Dyson, Barry Simon, and Nalini Anantharaman. Serfaty won the prize "for her outstanding work on the theory of Ginzburg-Landau equations, including remarkable progress towards the rigorous proof of the onset of the Abrikosov lattice in the theory of superconductivity. "

Courant alumnus Ivan Corwin received an International Union of Pure and Applied Physics Young Scientist Prize along with two other recipients at the 2012 International Congress on Mathematical Physics, for his "outstanding contributions to the probabilistic analysis of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation modelling stochastic growth process."

Pierre Germain has received a Sloan Research Fellowship along with 125 other young scholars. The Fellowship recognizes early-career scientists who demonstrate "unique potential to make substantial contributions to their field". Germain studies nonlinear dispersive equations, which describe a wealth of physical phenomena, from quantum mechanics to general relativity to fluid mechanics. Germain's recent work has focused on waves at the surface of the ocean. His research provides tools to understand their behaviour over long periods of time, which aids in our understanding of tsunamis, among other phenomena. The full press release is available from NYU Today.

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!

Olof Widlund has been named a 2010 SIAM Fellow, "for contributions to the theory of domain decomposition methods."   SIAM Fellowships recognize distinguished members who are "leading thinkers and ambassadors of applied mathematics and computational science."  Congratulations to Olof!

Sourav Chatterjee has received the 2010 Rollo Davidson Prize, along with co-winner Gady Kozma of the Weizmann Institute.  This major international prize is awarded annually by the University of Cambridge to recognize young probabilists. Chatterjee was chosen “for [his] work on Stein's method, spin glasses and concentration of measure.”

Congratulations, Sourav!

We are delighted to announce that Subhash Khot has received the extremely prestigious Alan T. Waterman Award.  This award is given annually by NSF to an outstanding young researcher in any field of science and engineering supported by NSF.  Subhash joins a very distinguished recipient list; few mathematicians or computer scientists have won this award in the past.

Jeannette Wing, Assistant Director for Computer & Information Science and Engineering (CISE) at NSF, has written: "We in CISE are thrilled to have Subhash named the Waterman winner. Subhash is a brilliant theoretical computer scientist and is most well known for his Unique Games Conjecture.  He has made many unexpected and original contributions to computational complexity and his work draws connections between optimization, computer science, mathematics."

Congratulations to Subhash!

Marco Avellaneda has been chosen as Risk Magazine's 2010 Quant of the Year. He was cited for "his groundbreaking work on the effect of short-selling restrictions on price dynamics. His paper, 'A dynamic model for hard to borrow stocks,' co-authored with Mike Lipkin of Katama Trading, was published in Risk [in June 2009], and has quickly become a classic of market microstructure literature."

The Courant Institute welcomes Katepalli R. Sreenivasan (Sreeni), Senior Vice Provost for NYU, to the Institute as a Professor of Physics and Mathematics.  Before coming to NYU, Sreeni was the Director of the International Center for Theoretical Physics (Trieste, Italy).  He was also previously a Distinguished University Professor and the Director of the Institute for Physical Science and Technology at the University of Maryland.  Sreeni is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and the National Academy of Engineering, and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

The National Academy of Sciences has awarded its 2010 Award for Initiatives in Research to Mark Tygert, “for his development of fast algorithms in mathematical physics, operator compression, and linear algebra, using deep, innovative ideas based on randomization and harmonic analysis.”

We are devastated by the passing of Professor Sam Roweis on January 12, 2010. Our condolences go out to his family, as well as to his many friends in the broader community, especially at the University of Toronto and Google Research, where he worked before joining the Courant Institute in September 2009. He was a brilliant scientist with tremendous warmth and enthusiasm and a dear friend to many of us.  His full memorial biography may be viewed here.

In November 2009 the American Mathematical Society announced that Sylvain Cappell will serve as its Vice President for a term of three years.  The election results can be viewed at the AMS website.

We are deeply saddened to announce the passing of our distinguished colleague and friend, Professor Amir Pnueli, on November 2, 2009.  For more information, please read the Computer Science Department's tribute to Amir.

SIAM has awarded its 2009 Dahlquist Prize to Eric Vanden-Eijnden. Vanden-Eijnden was chosen for the prize "for his research contributions to the development and analysis of numerical methods in stochastic dynamics, with applications to the study of multi-scale problems, rare events and free energy calculations." The Prize is awarded every two years to a young scientist "for original contributions to fields associated with Germund Dahlquist."  More information can be found at the SIAM website.

Bingjie Li received an award from the Mathematical Association of America for receiving the highest score in the Metro NY area on the 2008 Putnam Exam.  Her achievement was recognized at the MAA Sectional Meeting on May 3rd, 2009.

The National Academy of Sciences announced its election of Percy Deift on the morning of April 28th, together with 71 other new members, and 18 foreign associates from 15 countries.  Prof. Deift joins an active N.A.S. membership of 2,150 members and 404 foreign associates, all "dedicated to the furtherance of science and its use for the general welfare."  More details can be found at the National Academy of Science's webpage.

For his revolutionary contributions to geometry,” Courant Professor Mikhael Gromov has received the Abel Prize. According to the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters, “Mikhail Gromov has led some of the most important developments, producing profoundly original general ideas which have resulted in new perspectives on geometry and other areas of mathematics.  Gromov’s name is forever attached to deep results and important concepts with Riemannian geometry, symplectic geometry, string theory and group theory.”  More information can be found at http://www.abelprisen.no/en/prisvinnere/2009/. King Harald of Norway presented the award to Gromov in Oslo on May 19, 2009. An article regarding the Institute's three recipients of the Abel Prize appeared in the New York Times on May 31st.

Jack Schwartz passed away in his sleep early morning on Monday, March 2nd. Jack was the founding chair of the computer science department and the central player in setting the computer science research agenda at Courant in the decades before and after the department's founding; this included seminal work in compilers, programming languages, parallel computing, robotics, bioinformatics, and multimedia. Indeed, most of the large-scale research efforts of the last forty years in the computer science department owe their initial impulse to his vision, his tireless energy, and his omnivorous scientific curiosity. The obituary from the New York Times can be seen at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/04/science/04schwartz.html.  Details on a special memorial to be held at the Courant Institute can be found at http://cims.nyu.edu/Jack_Celebration.pdf.

Matthew Leingang has been awarded a grant from the Educational Advancement Foundation (http://www.educationaladvancementfoundation.org/) to develop Inquiry-Based Learning (IBL) materials for undergraduate instructors.  Inquiry-Based Learning moves away from uni-directional techniques, such as lecturing, towards styles which actively engage students in their learning.

Eero Simoncelli has been named a Fellow of the IEEE, for "contributions to statistical models of visual images." The grade of Fellow "recognizes unusual distinction in the profession."

Assaf Naor has been awarded the 2008 Salem Prize for his "contribution to the structural theory of metric spaces and its applications to computer science."  The prize is awarded each year to a young mathematician.

Dan Stein has been elected Fellow of the AAAS for his leadership in the theoretical condensed matter physics.  According to the AAAS, "Stein's scholarship has contributed to topics as diverse as protein biophysics, biological evolution, amorphous semiconductors and superfluids, liquid crystals, neutron stars, and the interface between particle physics and cosmology." He and other new Fellows will be recognized at the Association's annual meeting in Chicago on February 14, 2009. More information is available at: http://www.aaas.org/news/releases/2008/1218fellows.shtml

Bud Mishra has been named an Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers Fellow, IEEE's "highest grade of membership". This honor "recognizes unusual distinction in the profession" and, according to the IEEE citation, Mishra was chosen for "contribution to the mathematical modeling of robotic grasping".