Percy Deift Invested as a Member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters

October 24, 2024

Percy Deift, Silver Professor of Mathematics, has been invested as a Member of the American Academy of Sciences and Letters in recognition of intellectual excellence and courage. The investiture was conducted last night by Academy President Donald W. Landry of Columbia University and Board Chair Sanjeev R. Kulkarni of Princeton University in a ceremony at the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.

Percy Deift is a Silver Professor of Mathematics at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. He is a fellow of the American Mathematical Society, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences. He is a co-winner of the 2018 Henri Poincare Prize and the 1998 Pólya Prize, and was named a Guggenheim Fellow in 1999. He gave an invited address at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Berlin in 1998 and plenary addresses in 2006 at the International Congress of Mathematicians in Madrid, and at the International Congress on Mathematical Physics in Rio de Janeiro. He gave the Gibbs Lecture at the Joint Meeting of the American Mathematical Society in 2009. His interest is in integrable systems, including not only dynamical integrable systems, such as geodesic flow on an ellipsoid, the Toda lattice, the Korteweg de Vries equation, and the Nonlinear Schroedinger Equation, but also topics such as orthogonal polynomials and random matrix theory.

Jeffrey Eugenides, the author and Lewis and Loretta Glucksman Professor in English and American Letters, was New York University's other inductee. The American Academy of Sciences and Letters promotes scholarship and honors outstanding achievement in the arts, sciences, and learned professions. It supports learning by encouraging the exchange of ideas within academia and in society at large, and by sponsoring occasions for scholarly interaction and providing platforms for the presentation ad dissemination of scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, mathematics and engineering.