See the NYU press release for more information. Congratulations, Yann!

Further information is available here

Congratulations, Yann!

Congratulations, Nader!

Our colleague Jerry Percus passed away on March 7 at the age of 94. Jerry came to the Courant Institute in 1958, after obtaining his doctorate at Columbia and working for several years at the Stevens Institute of Technology. Jerry was internationally recognized for his pioneering work in statistical mechanics and combinatorics, and made seminal contributions to our understanding of fluids and biomathematics.

In addition to the famous Percus-Yevick Equation for the radial distribution function of fluids, he alone or jointly with students and coworkers, made important advances in all aspects of statistical mechanics. He was the first (or among the very first) to study "consistency" of approximate one and two particle classical distributions and quantum density matrices. This led to the Percus-Yamada condition in the former. He derived and solved equations for the velocity correlation function of fluids. He was the acknowledged master of the statistical mechanics of non-uniform fluids. His analysis of non-isotropic fluids in terms of appropriately designed isotropic ones contributed much to this subject.

In recent decades Jerry's interests turned to pioneering studies in biomathematics, in particular genome analysis and developmental biology.  Many of his papers were in collaboration with his late wife, Ora. Jerry's unique and highly creative perspective on a wide range of problems in physics, mathematics, and biology will be greatly missed.

Andrew Joseph Majda passed away on March 12, 2021 at the age of 72.

Renowned for both his theoretical contributions to partial differential equations and his applied work in diverse areas such as asymptotic methods, numerical methods, scattering theory, shock waves, combustion, incompressible flow, vortex motion, turbulent diffusion, and atmosphere ocean science, Andy Majda made a number of seminal contributions in mathematics and physics. One of the most notable is the Beal-Kato-Majda theorem, which limits the possibility for singularities in inviscid, incompressible fluid flow. Andy’s primary research interests were in modern applied mathematics in the broadest possible sense merging asymptotic methods, numerical methods, physical reasoning, and rigorous mathematical analysis.

Andy was born on January 30, 1949 in East Chicago, Indiana. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics from Purdue University (1970) and his Ph.D. in Mathematics from Stanford (1973). His doctoral dissertation was entitled “Coercive Inequalities for Nonelliptic Symmetric Systems.” Andy first joined the NYU Courant Mathematics Department as a Courant Instructor in 1973 and was here for just two years before moving on to faculty appointments at UCLA, UC Berkeley, and Princeton. NYU was a special place for Andy, and he returned in 1994 as the Samuel F. B. Morse Professor of Arts and Sciences in the Mathematics Department at Courant and remained here since then. He retired on January 1, 2021 and became Professor Emeritus of Mathematics.

As a pioneering theoretical and applied mathematician, Andy consistently received scientific recognition throughout his career. One of his earliest honors was as plenary speaker at the first ever International Council of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) in Paris in 1987. Most recently, in 2016, Andy received the Leroy P. Steele Prize for seminal contribution to research, which is awarded by the American Mathematical Society (AMS). He received the Lagrange Prize of ICIAM, the Norbert Wiener Prize of the AMS and the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM), the National Academy of Sciences Prize in Applied Mathematics and Numerical Analysis, the John von Neumann Prize of SIAM, and the Gibbs Prize of the AMS. Andy was elected as a member of the National Academy of Sciences, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of both the AMS and SIAM. Twice he was awarded the Medal of the College de France, and he was elected as a Fellow of the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science. He received Honorary Doctorates from Fudan University, China Northwest University, and Purdue University, as well as The New York City Mayor's Award for Excellence in Mathematical, Physical, and Engineering Sciences.

In addition to his outstanding research, Andy was a devoted PhD advisor to thirty doctoral students, a mentor to over thirty postdoctoral researchers, and he inspired many collaborators and others in the mathematical sciences community. His published books include Compressible Fluid Flow and Systems of Conservation Laws in Several Space Variables (Springer-Verlag), Vorticity and Incompressible Flow with A. Bertozzi (Cambridge University Press), Lecture Notes for the Courant Lecture Note Series of the AMS. Other published works include the Introduction to PDE’s and Waves for the Atmosphere and Ocean, the CRM monograph series on Information Theory and Stochastics for Multiscale Nonlinear Systems, with M. Grote and R. Abramov, all published by the AMS, and Nonlinear Dynamics and Statistical Theories for Basic Geophysical Flows with Xiaoming Wang published by Cambridge University Press. His newest book with John Harlim, is entitled Filtering Complex Turbulent Systems and was published Cambridge University Press.

Andy made major contributions to NYU, locally here at the NYU New York campus and overseas. In his years at the Courant Institute, Andy created the Center for Atmosphere Ocean Science (CAOS) with eight multi-disciplinary faculty to promote cross-disciplinary research with modern applied mathematics in climate modeling and prediction. Later, he founded NYU Abu Dhabi’s Center for Prototype Climate Modeling and served as its head and Principal Investigator. More recently, Andy’s research interests included multi-scale multi-cloud modeling for the tropics, stochastic and statistical modeling for climate, and novel mathematical strategies for prediction and data assimilation in complex multi-scale systems.

Andy is survived by his wife of 46 years, Gerta Keller, who is a Professor of Paleontology and Geology in the Geosciences Department of Princeton University. Full of energy and ideas, Andy was greatly influential at the Courant Institute and in the math community and will be dearly missed by all of his colleagues and friends.

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has made a donation to Courant of a computer system and access to cloud based computing, with up to 2 petaflops of computing power, for use in COVID-related research.

For more detail, see this letter from Courant Director, Russel Caflisch.

July 23, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

It’s my great pleasure to announce a truly impressive gift-in-kind to the Courant Institute that will have a profound impact on COVID-19-related research both at Courant and throughout NYU. Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), one of the country’s leading manufacturers of computer processors, is donating a high-performance computer system and remote access to a second, cloudbased system, with both systems consisting of AMD CPUs and GPUs. The first system will be located at NYU’s new High Performance Computing Center and the cloud-based system will be located at Penguin Computing. Together, the computer systems will provide our researchers with up to two petaflops of computing power. We will be putting these resources to use in projects from a wide range of disciplines to address numerous aspects of the COVID-19 crisis and related applications. These include research aimed at developing drugs that can be used to treat both COVID-19 and future SARS virus mutations; retrieval of relevant research findings from the vast biomedical literature; analysis of medical imaging for screening of patients; and studying political attitudes and voting behavior in response to financial hardships stemming from the pandemic. COVID-19 has had a profound impact on higher education research, both in terms of its direction and the need for immediate results, so the timing of this donation is particularly fortuitous. We are tremendously grateful to AMD for their extraordinary gift.

Sincerely,

Russel Caflisch

Jeff is one of six distinguished scholars who will receive the honorary degree in 2021. Further information can be found here.

Daniele Panozzo has been awarded a Sloan Fellowship for his work in solving partial differential equations on complex geometrical domains. Congratulations!

Louis Nirenberg died in New York City on January 26, 2020 at the age of 94.

He was a leading mathematician, whose fundamental contributions in the field of partial differential equations were hugely influential. This area of mathematics provides the language we use to describe—and the techniques we use to analyze—diverse problems from many fields, including geometry, physics, and engineering. Louis' earliest work, in the 1950's, solved two longstanding problems from geometry by proving new estimates for fully-nonlinear elliptic equations. Over the course of his long and productive career his achievements included the solution of many other important problems, and—equally significant—the introduction of many new ideas and techniques.

Louis was born in 1925 in Hamilton, Ontario, but grew up in Montreal. He studied Mathematics and Physics at McGill University, graduating in 1945, then came to New York University as a Mathematics masters student. The postwar years were a remarkable time for mathematics at NYU—his fellow students included Eugene Isaacson, Peter Lax, Joseph Keller, Martin Kruskal, Cathleen Morawetz, Harold Grad, and Avron Douglis. Louis remained at NYU for his entire career: after completing his PhD in 1949 with guidance from James Stoker and Kurt Friedrichs, he held a two-year postdoctoral position then joined the faculty in 1951. His title was Professor of Mathematics from 1957 until 1999, when he retired and became Professor Emeritus. He was Director of the Courant Institute from 1970 to 1972.

Louis' impact was partly due to his exquisite taste in problems. One very successful mode was to recognize, through specific challenges, the need for new tools or estimates. His ability to identify such challenges—and to find the required tools or estimates—was a major driver of his impact. His early work on problems from geometry had this character; other examples include his papers in the 60's with Joseph Kohn on problems from complex differential geometry, and those in the 80's with Haim Brezis on nonlinear elliptic equations with critical exponents.

A different, equally successful mode was to identify tools that were clearly important, then systematically explore their power. His work on the regularity of solutions of linear elliptic equations and systems had this character; it was done in the 50's and 60's with Shmuel Agmon and Avron Douglis. Another example is his work on the symmetry of solutions of nonlinear partial differential equations using the “method of moving planes” and the “sliding method,” developed in the 80's and 90's with Basilis Gidas, Wei-Ming Ni, and Henry Berestycki.

Louis also loved challenges—particularly ones involving estimates or inequalities—and this was the motivation for many projects. One example is his work on solutions of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, which describe for example the flow of water. We still don't know whether its solutions are smooth or not, so it is natural to ask about the size of the set where they are not smooth. The estimates Louis proved in the 80's with Luis Caffarelli and Robert Kohn remain the state of the art.

A gifted teacher and mentor, Louis was advisor to 46 PhD students (starting with Walter Littman in 1956 and ending with Kanishka Perera in 1997), and he also had a formative influence on many postdocs and collaborators.

Lively and gregarious, Louis loved music, art, and film almost as much as he loved mathematics. He maintained close friendships with many colleagues around the world. He loved to travel, and to host visitors. He particularly enjoyed working with others; as a result, almost all his papers were coauthored.

Louis received many prestigious awards, including the Abel Prize (2015), the American Mathematical Society's Leroy P. Steele Prizes for Seminal Contribution to Research (2014) and Lifetime Achievement (1994), the International Mathematical Union's Chern Medal (2010), the National Medal of Science (1995), the Canadian Mathematical Society's Jeffery-Williams Prize (1987), the Crafoord Prize (1982), and the American Mathematical Society's Bôcher Prize (1959).

He became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965, a member of the National Academy of Sciences in 1969, and a Fellow of the American Mathematical Society in 2013. He was also a member of numerous honorary societies in other countries, including Accademia dei Lincei (1978), Accademia Mediterranea della Scienza (1982), Académie des Sciences (1989), Istituto Lombardo Accademia Scienze e Lettere (1991), Ukrainian Academy of Sciences (1994), and Norwegian Academy of Sciences and Letters (2015). He received honorary degrees from McGill University (1986), University of Pisa (1990), Université de Paris IX Paris-Dauphine (1990), McMaster University (2000), University of British Columbia (2010); and he was named Honorary Professor by Nankai University (1987), Zhejiang University (1988), and Peking University (2016).

Louis is survived by his son Marc, his daughter Lisa and her partner, Joseph Ganci, his grandchildren Jimmy and Alma, his sister Deborah, and his partner Nanette.

Additional information about Louis, including video, is available at the Simons Foundation's "Science Lives" website, via this link: https://www.simonsfoundation.org/2014/04/21/louis-nirenberg/

An autobiography is included in a recent book The Abel Prize 2013-2017 (H. Holden and R. Piene eds, Springer-Verlag, 2019, pp 379-389).

Yann LeCun has been named a Knight of the Legion of Honor. Congratulations!

Silver Professor Margaret Wright is the recipient of the John von Neumann Prize.

Congratulations, Margaret!

The John von Neumann Prize is the highest honor and flagship lecture of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM). Margaret is recognized for her pioneering contributions to the numerical solution of optimization problems and to the exposition of the subject.  Margaret will deliver the John von Neumann Prize Lecture "A Hungarian Feast of Applied Mathematics" at this year's ICIAM in Valencia, Spain on July 16.

For further information, please see the press release from SIAM.

Denis Zorin has received the 2019 Computer Graphics Achievement Award "in recognition of his fundamental contributions to computer graphics and geometric modeling."

Congratulations!

Joan Bruna and Leif Ristroph are recipients of National Science Foundation CAREER Awards!

Congratulations to Joan and to Leif!

Professors Sylvia Serfaty, Michael Shelley, and Ofer Zeitouni have been elected as members of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (AMACAD). For more information, please see the press release from the Academy. Congratulations!

Jalal Shatah and Denis Zorin have been named NYU Silver Professors. Congratulations!

Marsha Berger, Silver Professor of Computer Science and Mathematics, will be awarded the 2019 Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics.

The citation notes that Marsha is being recognized for her "fundamental contributions to adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) and to Cartesian mesh techniques for automating the simulation of compressible flows in complex geometry."

Presented jointly by the American Mathematical Society (AMS) and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (AMS), the Norbert Wiener Prize in Applied Mathematics is awarded every three years for an outstanding contribution to applied mathematics in the highest and broadest sense.

Marsha is a frequent visitor to NASA Ames, where she has spent every summer since 1990, and several sabbaticals. Her honors include membership in the National Academy of Sciences, the National Academy of Engineering, and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. She is a Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Berger was a recipient of the IEEE Fernbach award, and was part of the team that won the 2002 Software of the Year Award from NASA for its Cart3D software.

Congratulations, Marsha!

Silver Professor of Mathematics, Jeff Cheeger, has received the 2019 Steele Prize for Lifetime Achievement for his fundamental contributions to geometric analysis and their far-reaching influence on related areas of mathematics. Congratulations, Jeff!

Congratulations to Brandon Seward on receiving the 2018 Michael Brin Dynamical Systems Prize for Young Mathematicians. Seward was recognized "for his groundbreaking work on entropy theory for actions of countable groups, extending to this general setting fundamental results of the classical theory such as Sinai's Factor Theorem and Krieger's Finite Generators Theorem."

Percy Deift has been honored for his "seminal contributions to Schroedinger operators, inverse scattering theory, nonlinear waves, asymptotic analysis of Fredholm and Toeplitz determinants, universality in random matrix theory, and his deep analysis of integrable models." Congratulations, Percy!

For further information, please see the official Henri Poincaré Prize page.

Oded Regev has been awarded the 2018 Gödel Prize for his 2005 paper, "On lattices, learning with errors, random linear codes, and cryptography." The Gödel Prize is given annually by the European Association for Theoretical Computer Science (EATCS) and the ACM Special Interest Group on Algorithms and Computational Theory (SIGACT). It honors seminal work in theoretical computer science. The citation states, "Regev's work has ushered in a revolution in cryptography, in both theory and practice. On the theoretical side, LWE (Learning With Errors) has served as a simple and yet amazingly versatile foundation for nearly every kind of cryptographic object imaginable—along with many that were unimaginable until recently, and which still have no known constructions without LWE. Toward the practical end, LWE and its direct descendants are at the heart of several efficient real-world cryptosystems."

Paul Bourgade has been selected as one of two laureates of the Poincaré Chair for the academic year 2018/2019. Congratulations, Paul!

Congratulations to our 2018 Sloan Fellows: Miranda Holmes-Cerfon, Afonso Bandeira, and Joan Bruna!

For further information, see the Sloan Foundation website.

The mathematics department is happy to announce the successful creation of a new Research and Training Group (RTG) in Mathematical Modeling and Simulation, a five-year vertically-integrated research activity funded by the National Science Foundation (award DMS-1646339) since the Fall of 2017. This RTG is devoted to training through research of undergraduates, graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows in several salient aspects of modern applied mathematics, and will emphasize the connections among modeling, simulation and experimental observation.

Dennis Shasha and Sylvia Serfaty have been named Silver Professors. Congratulations!

Nader Masmoudi has been awarded the 2017 Fermat Prize by the Institut de Mathématiques de Toulouse for "his very deep and creative work in the field of nonlinear partial differential equations." Congratulations!

Patrick Cousot is the recipient of the IEEE John von Neumann medal, given "for outstanding achievements in computer-related science and technology". The medal citation states that he is being recognized "for introducing abstract interpretation, a powerful framework for automatically calculating program properties with broad application to verification and optimization." Congratulations!

Congratulations to Sylvain Cappell, recipient of the 2018 AMS Award for Distinguished Public Service! Sylvain will officially receive the award on January 11, 2018 at the Joint Mathematics Meeting in San Diego.

Courant's Computer Science Department is proud to announce the creation of an exciting new Master of Science program on Computing, Entrepreneurship and Innovation (MS-CEI) in collaboration with the NYU Stern School of Business.The MS-CEI program will train students to become the next generation entrepreneurs and innovation leaders by providing strong fundamentals in rigorous computer science applications, systems engineering and entrepreneurship. Professors Evan Korth and Lakshmi Subramanian are directing the new program.

For more information, see the press release from the Center for Data Science.

Cathleen Synge Morawetz died on August 8, 2017. She was 94 years old.

A celebration of her life and work will be held in room WWH 109 on November 17 at 1pm.

As of September 1, 2017 the Mathematics faculty at the Tandon School of Engineering will join the Department of Mathematics in the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The Courant math department will be the math department for both the College of Arts and Sciences and the Tandon School of Engineering. The department will be responsible for mathematics classes across the university.

We expect that this merger will foster many new academic collaborations between faculty in engineering and the mathematical sciences.

The department will now offer two undergraduate degrees -- a BA in Mathematics (offered to the students in the College of Arts and Sciences) and a BS in Mathematics (offered to students in the Tandon School of Engineering). The coursework for the BS degree will cover a wide range of mathematical topics and will require students to specify a component in one field of engineering. In addition, as a result of the merger, the Courant Mathematics Department is considering developing an MS degree in Engineering Mathematics as an addition to its rich array of graduate programs.

Joel Spencer has been named a Fellow of the Society of Industrial and Applied Mathematics for "contributions to discrete mathematics and theory of computing, particularly random graphs and networks, Ramsey theory, logic, and randomized algorithms." Congratulations!

Mike is Assistant professor of mathematics at the NYU Tandon School of Engineering and the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. He received the 2017 ONR Young Investigator award to pursue a new generation of simulation and design tools for computational electromagnetics using fast, high-order, analysis-based algorithms. Congratulations, Mike!

Robert Kohn, Michael Overton, and Joel Spencer have been named Silver Professors. Congratulations!

Yann LeCun has been elected to the National Academy of Engineering, "for developing convolutional neural networks and their applications in computer vision and other areas of artificial intelligence." Congratulations!

Daniele Panozzo has been awarded an NSF CAREER award supporting his research project "Coupling Geometric Acquisition and Digital Fabrication". The goal of this project is to develop algorithmic foundations to tightly integrate 3D scanning and digital fabrication, enabling new applications in life sciences and medicine. Congratulations!

A digital copy of the newsletter is available on the Courant Newsletters page.

Citation: "Subhash Khot is a theoretical computer scientist whose work is providing critical insight into unresolved problems in the field of computational complexity. ... As computers come to drive ever more aspects of our lives, greater understanding of the limitations of computing is increasingly important. Khot’s continued ingenuity and tenacity in exploring the potential of the UGC will drive this important and fruitful area of research for many years to come."

Congratulations!

Bud Mishra's work on the PiCnlc program, which predicts possible ways in which cancer may spread in a patient, is featured in an article on National Public Radio.

Deena Engel and her students collaborate with the Guggenheim museum on conserving computer art -- often more ephemeral than art in physical media.

Lakshmi Subramanian's work on predicting outbreaks of dengue fever by data mining calls to a hotline is featured in the Atlantic Magazine. Additonal information can be found in the press release from NYU News.

Professor of Computer Science Bud Mishra has been involved in several recent studies that cast light on diverse issues related to cancer research. 

Eyal Lubetzky 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 in the fields of statistics and probability.

Eyal's election will be celebrated in July at the IMS Presidential Address and Awards Ceremony, during the World Congress in Probability and Statistics in Toronto.

Leslie Greengard has been elected a member of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Warm congratulations to you, Leslie!

More information can be found in the NYU press release and the announcement from the American Academy.

The Spring 2016 hackNY Student Hackathon was held at the Courant Institue on April 2-3, 2016. Read about the event in the New York Business Journal, and learn more about HackNY on the organization's website.

Ken Perlin's work on combining virtual reality with motion capture is featured on Eyewitness News.

Please join us on March 31 and April 1 for the XXXIst Courant Lectures. Click here for further details.

Facebook selected Sana Odeh and her work on Arab women in computing as one of six featured stories in honor of International Women's Day.

An article on artificial intelligence in Rolling Stone magazine states that "in the world of AI, [Yann] LeCun is the closest thing there is to a rock star."

Warm congratulations to Raghu Varadhan on receiving an honorary degree from Duke University! See the announcement from Duke University for more information.

Professor Ken Perlin is interviewed about Virtual Reality in Nautilus Magazine.

Professor Leif Ristroph's research on candy dissolution in fluid flows is named one of the coolest science stories of 2015 by Gizmodo.com.

A digital copy of the newsletter is available on the Courant Newsletters page.

In 1970, student protesters stormed into a building at New York University and took control of a computer then considered “the most expensive thing on campus.”

The Mathematicians Who Ended the Kidnapping of an N.Y.U. Computer

Professor Yevgeniy Dodis is interviewed on NBC on the use of cryptography for privacy and for security.

Terrorists Using Gaming Technology to Communicate

Additional information can be found on the Gordon Bell Prize page on the ACM website and in the news release from New York University. 

Further information is available in the news release from the American Mathematical Society. 

Research on the rate of retreat of ice sheets in the Antarctic by Professor David Holland and former Courant Postdoc Natalya Gomez is highlighted in a press release from NYU News. Their paper appears in Nature Communications.

Scientists Point to Overlooked Forces that May Slow Predicted Antarctic Ice Retreat

Fedor Bogomolov and Subhash Khot have been named Silver Professors. Congratulations! For more information on Fedor, Subhash, and the other Silver Professors, please see here. 

Research on statistical patterns in cell protein distribution by Professors Daniel Stein and Charles Newman is featured in NYU News. Their findings appear in Physical Review E.

Researchers Find Universality in Protein Locality

Professor Oded Regev's research in cryptography is discussed in an article in Quanta Magazine.

A Tricky Path to Quantum-Safe Encryption

The Courant Institute is pleased to announce that Leif Ristroph (Mathematics and the Applied Math Lab) has won the George E. Valley, Jr. Prize of the American Physical Society, in recognition for outstanding scientific contributions being made in the early stages of his scientific career. The prize is awarded biennially. More information is available on the American Physical Society website. Our warm congratulations to Leif!

Yann LeCun's research on deep learning is featured in an article in the MIT Technology Review.

Teaching Machines to Understand Us

Subhash Khot has been named a Simons Investigator in Theoretical Computer Science by the Simons Foundation. Congratulations!

Professor Joel Spencer's research regarding explosive percolation is mentioned in an article in Quanta Magazine.

The New Laws of Explosive Networks

Professor Leif Ristroph's research on object dissolution in fluid flows is highlighted in a piece on Science Friday. Building on earlier studies of eroding clay surfaces, this new work from the Applied Math Lab uses candy objects immersed in water currents to show how flows speed up dissolving. The researchers discovered that the same final ‘sculpture’ is unveiled regardless of the initial shape and imposed flow speed, and these observations led to a mathematical law for the rate of dissolving. Much more than a curiosity, understanding how materials dissolve can help make sense of geological features and can be put to use in chemical and pharmaceutical applications. On a lighter note, the team also recalled the famous childhood question – How many licks does it take to reach the center of a lollipop? – and used their theory to provide an estimate of 1000.

The Lollipop Hypothesis

Professor David Holland and Denise Holland's research on glaciers in Greenland is mentioned in an article in the New York Times.

Greenland’s Iceberg Factory – Where the Empire State Building is Too Short a Yardstick

Professor Emeritus Robert Dewar has died at the age of 70. Robert was a faculty member in the Computer Science department from 1975 until his retirement in 2005 and was chair of the department from 1978 to 1980. Robert was a leading figure in programming languages, particularly in the development of Ada; an inspiring and admired teacher; a raconteur, singer, and actor; and a well-loved colleague and friend. Our sympathies to his family and friends.

Professor Sana Odeh's research on the involvement of women in the Arab world in computer science is discussed in an article in Forbes Magazine.

U.S. Lags the World When it Comes to Women and Tech

A digital copy of the newsletter is available on the Courant Newsletters page.

Richard Bonneau has received the 2015 Iakobachvili Faculty Science Award from the NYU School of Arts and Science. Congratulations!

Peter Lax received an Honorary Doctor of Science degree from NYU, a well deserved honor for Peter's contributions to Mathematics and the university. An alumnus and Professor Emeritus at the Courant Institute, Peter is also the recipient of the Abel prize in 2005, and recently went to Washington to receive the Lomonosov Gold Medal, the highest award given by the Russian Academy of Sciences, which he was awarded in 2013.

Click here for further information.

Warm Congratulations to you, Gérard! Click here for the full NYU press release and here for the AAAS announcement.

Book signing April 23 at 4 pm in the 13th floor faculty lounge

Louis Nirenberg and John Nash have been awarded the 2015 Abel Prize "for striking and seminal contributions to the theory of nonlinear partial differential equations and its applications to geometric analysis." The award -- widely considered the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Mathematics -- will be presented by King Harald of Norway in Oslo on May 19, 2015.

For more information and the official press release, click here.

Yuri Tschinkel has been elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Warm congratulations, Yuri! Please see the AAAS news release for more information.

Warm congratulations to John Rinzel for winning the 2015 Arthur T. Winfree Prize from the Society for Mathematical Biology!

For more, visit the Society for Mathematical Biology website.

The International Congress on Industrial and Applied Mathematics (ICIAM) awards the Lagrange Prize to Andy in recognition of his ground-breaking, original, fundamental and pioneering contributions to applied mathematics and, in particular, to wave front propagation and combustion, scattering theory, fluid dynamics and atmosphere climate science.

Click here for the ICIAM press release.

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Andrew K Lee
Katharina Plajer
Melissa Amber Schiff
Regina Zbarskaya

David McLaughlin and Patrick Cousot are the 2014 Silver Professors! Warm congratulations to Dave and to Patrick!!

For more information on Dave, Patrick and the other Silver Professors, please click here.

David Sontag and Thomas Wies have each received an NSF CAREER award for their projects "Exact Algorithms for Learning Latent Structures" (Sontag) and "Abstracting Programs for Automated Debugging" (Wies).

Congratulations to David and to Thomas!!

Yann LeCun's work on back-propagation neural networks and deep learning are the subject of an in-depth profile in Wired.

The 2014 Recipient of the SIAM Richard C. DiPrima Prize is Tom Trogdon! Congratulations Tom!!

For further details, please visit the SIAM website.

Please see the news release for further information. Also read "What It Takes to Win the World's Highest Computer Science Honor" in Wired.

For further information, please click here: http://www.siam.org/meetings/an14/prizes.php

At the 2014 ACM-ICPC International Collegiate Programming Contest, held in Ekaterinburg, Russia, the NYU team placed 13th overall, and 1st among North American teams, beating out teams from such schools as MIT, Stanford, CMU, and Berkeley. Congratulations to the team Bowen Yu, Fabian Gundlach, and Danilo Neves Ribeiro and their coaches Brett Bernstein, Evan Korth, and Sean McIntyre! 

For further info, please click here: http://icpc.baylor.edu/scoreboard/

Miranda Holmes Cerfon has been selected for the Department of Energy Early Career Research Award!

Congratulations, Miranda!  For further details, please see the DOE  website. See the full list of selectees.

Congratulations Antoine! Please see the DOE  website and the complete list of selectees for further details.

Congratulations Selin on receiving this year's Golden Dozen Award!!

The IEEE Computer Society has awarded the Harlan D. Mills 2014 Award to Patrick Cousot and Radhia Cousot for the invention of abstract interpretation, development of tool support, and its practical application. Congratulations! Link

Please see the NYU webpage for more information.

Dennis Shasha has been named a Fellow of the ACM. Congratulations! Please visit the ACM website for more information.

Tuesday, December 3, 2013  Please visit the AMS website for more information.

Leslie Greengard joins the Simons Foundation as the director of the Simons Center for Data Analysis (SCDA), while continuing to serve as a member of the Courant Institute faculty. As Director of the SCDA, Greengard "will build and lead a team of scientists committed to analyzing large-scale, rich data sets and to developing innovative mathematical methods to examine such data." A detailed announcement can be found at the Simons Foundation website.

Yann LeCun has been awarded the 2014 IEEE Computational Intelligence Society Neural Networks Pioneer Award, recognizing "significant contributions to early concepts and sustained  development in the field of neural networks."

David Sontag is leading a research group including collaborators from NYU/NYU Langone as well as Independence Blue Cross to apply machine learning techniques to IBC's medical and pharmacy claims data to detect patients at risk for undiagnosed diabetes or pre-diabetes. The full article is available from the Wall Street Journal.

Jeffrey Cheeger has been awarded a 2013 Simons Fellowships by the Simons Foundation, along with 39 other fellows in Mathematics. The announcement is available from the Simons Foundation.

Edith Windsor (MS in Math, 1957) "who has bravely waged the fight against the Defense of Marriage Act" will receive the NYU Presidential Medal at this year's commencement ceremony. The full press release is available from NYU News.

Zvi Kedem has received the Outstanding Contribution to ACM award for his leadership in rebuilding the ACM Computing Classification System (CCS) as a modern cognitive map of the computing field for the worldwide computing community.  As editor-in-chief, Kedem managed the effort to revise and automate the key component that underlies the ACM Digital Library’s search index infrastructure. The full press release is available from the ACM.

John Rinzel was named a Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics Fellow for "contributions to mathematical neuroscience and physiology," along with 32 other new fellows this year. Among Rinzel’s research were co-authored studies, with Pablo Jercog, a former graduate student at NYU’s Department of Physics and Center for Neural Science, identifying mechanisms the brain uses to help process sound localization cues. Their findings, which appeared in the journals PLoS Biology and Nature Neuroscience, focused on how the brain computes the different arrival times of sound into each ear to estimate the location of its source. The full press release is available from NYU News.s

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 here (PDF).

The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation has awarded funding for the NYU Courant Girls Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics Summer Program (G-Stem). With Matthew Leingang as Principal investigator, G-Stem will recruit its first cohort to attend the six week Summer 2013 program, which will provide high school girls who have high aptitude in STEM subjects the opportunity to receive mentoring from STEM professionals, as well as participate in activities such as classes, lectures, and field trips.

The Entrupy system, developed by Lakshmi Subramanian and Ashlesh Sharma, for labelling works of art against counterfeiting, is featured in Forbes magazine as one of "Four Disruptive Technologies to Watch in 2013".

Recent articles and radio interviews on Deep Learning, featuring/citing Yann LeCun, appear from NPR, the New York Times, and the New Yorker.

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."

A research team headed by Chris Bregler followed olympic athletes during their training in pools across the U.S. this spring, and developed ground-breaking techniques to capture their movement above and below the water's surface. The full article is available from NYU Today.

Yann LeCun and collaborators at five universities teach self-piloted drones to improvise when encountering unexpected obstacles, as featured in Popular Science.

As reported in the New York Times, A team of scientists at Google, including Marc'Aurelio Ranzato (Ph.D. NYU Computer Science, 2009), implemented a distributed neural network with 1 billion connection over a network with 16,000 processors (1000 machines). Applying "deep learning" to a dataset of 10,000,000 unlabelled images, the network achieved an accuracy of 15.8% in identifying 20,000 different categories, an improvement of 70% over the state of the art. The article also quotes Yann LeCun on the application of deep learning techniques to speech recognition.

Chris Bregler's Motion Capture Lab has been working with Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, in applying motion capture technique to the gestures and motions of an orchestral conductor. The full story is available from the New York Times. Link.

Researchers in Applied Math Lab used pyramid-shaped paper "bugs" to determine that in flight, top-heavy structures are more likely to maintain balance than the standard structure that bears a lower center of gravity. The results of the NSF and DOE-funded study may contribute to an alternative approach to aircraft design. The full Press Release is available from NYU Today.

Evan Korth and Computer Science major Tal Safran are interviewed by CNN about the growing job opportunities offered to Computer Science majors. The full video is available online from CNN Money.

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.

Mike Shelley, Jun Zhang, and researchers from the Applied Math Lab find that obstacles in an organism's path could help it move quicker rather than slower. The NSF and DOE-supported study bases its findings off of both live microscopic worms (the nematode C. elegans) and a computer model. This comparative study between experiment and simulation enahances the understanding of biological locomotion strategies of such organisms in complex geometries. Moreover, the simulated dynamics reproduces life-like behaviours that had been interpreted as coming from sensing and response of the worm to its local environment. The full Press Release is available from NYU Today.

The first International Hackathon for the Social Good in the Arab World was held October 28-30 at NYU Abu Dhabi. The event brought together 50 student participants, from colleges in the Middle East and the US, and more than 20 experts acting as speakers, mentors, and judges, for three-days of intensive programming. NYU-NY undergraduates Max Stoller and Tengchao Zhou, teaming with Monir Abu Hilal from PSUT (Jordan) won second prize for their application "OpenMena," a web-based resource designed to provide government data in an accessible format for computer programmers.
The full press release is available from NYUAD.Read More

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!

In the New York Times, Chris Bregler discusses the performance-based animation technologies which are used to make convincing chimpanzees in "Rise of the Planet of the Apes."

The Risk Economics Lab for Decision Metrics has been established at Courant with a $1 million leadership pledge from the David K. A. Mordecai and Samantha Kappagoda Charitable Trust.  The RiskEcon Lab, housed within the newly created Center for Computational Economics and Algorithmic Data Analytics, will apply a range of computational methods to researching geopolitical and socioeconomic issues, such as aging and health trends, immigration, and consumer behavior.  The full press release is available from NYU Today.

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.

THE CENTER FOR MATHEMATICAL TALENT at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, NYU is pleased to announce a partnership with the NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES to offer an After School STEM Mentoring program in mathematics for July and August 2011.

1. Summer Fellows will attend 10 hours of training in lessons and activities in mathematics from which they can choose what they would like to teach.
2. Summer Fellows will be offered $1000 per course instructed plus a small travel stipend Space is limited. Each "course" will consist of a 3-week module that meet twice a week for two hours each (four hours each week; 12 hours total).

Read more...

Chris Bregler, Rob Fergus, Postdoc Graham Taylor, and PhD student Ian Spiro use an innovative data collection method -- a collaborative music video project by a Dutch progressive-electro band -- in order to develop computer vision technology.  The full article is available from NYU Today.

In the new book Stored Clocked Programs Inside DNA: A Simplifying Framework for Nanocomputing, Dennis Shasha and recent Courant Alumna Jessie Chang "have outlined a method for storing programs inside DNA that simplifies nanocomputing."  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.

Yann LeCun and researchers from Carnegie Mellon University, Harvard, MIT, and Wageningen University have received a $4.5 million 5-year grant to develop a "bird-sized, self-flying plane that can navigate through both forests and urban environments."  The full article 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.

In an episode of "Innovation Nation," the Science/Discovery channel features Chris Bregler's "Motion Capture."

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.

As reported in The Economist, Yann LeCun has developed vision systems for mobile robots based on convolutional neural networks, which learn from examples how to interpret what they see. He is also collaborating with researchers at Yale on the ``NeuFlow'' chip, which may soon be guiding self-driving cars. The NeuFlow chip can process a stream of megapixel images in real time. The full article is available from the International Business Times.

More than 200 students from 33 universities gathered Saturday, October 9, 2010 to attend HackNY's fall Hackathon at New York University's Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences. The Hackathon, which concluded NYU's Startup Week, hosted fourteen companies, including Meetup, Aviary and Drop.io.  The companies demoed their APIs before students, who then developed their own products and demos. The full article is available from Tech Crunch. Evan Korth and the other co-founders of HackNY are on the Business Insider's list of 100 coolest NY Tech People.

Diaspora, an Open Facebook alternative founded by NYU students, released its source code on Sept. 15th, as reported by the New York Times.

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.

"Natural Computing" by Professor Dennis Shasha and his coauthor Cathy Lazere explores technology on the edge of the possible (robots in space, high speed financial trading, safety engineering, computing with viruses) and shows that a surprising fusion is occurring between biology and computation. The Wall Street Journal reviews the book in "The Lessons of Living Things."

Spencer Greenberg, Courant PhD student and co-founder of Rebellion Research, speaks with the Wall Street Journal in "Letting the Machines Decide" about using machine learning to make investment decisions.

The Courant Institute "has received a $708,468 grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to create a Center for Mathematical Talent that will discover and support high-school and middle-school students with exceptional potential in the New York City area." The full article is available from NYU Today.

Using computer vision technology, NYU’s Movement Laboratory "has reconstructed Yankee closer Mariano Rivera’s pitching motion to offer an animated three-dimensional look at how he appears before hitters." The video is part of a New York Times magazine online feature, “Mariano Rivera, King of Closers.” The full release is available from NYU Today.

Jihun Yu, Computer Science doctoral student, was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for an internship with Lucasfilm's Industrial Light and Magic -- Hollywood's leading Visual Effects Company behind movies like Star Wars, Jurassic Park, Iron Man, and Avatar.  Yu has been conducting groundbreaking research in graphics simulation of physical systems, and, in particular, how to make fluids and flames appear more realistic.  More details are available from Oscars.org and from NYU Today.

In "Steering Grads to Start-ups," The Wall Street Journal writes about HackNY's programs and internships which aim to "steer more graduates in computer science, math and related fields to New York City technology start-ups instead of the well-worn path to Wall Street."  HackNY is organized jointly by NYU's & Columbia's ACM chapters, ADI at Columbia, and NYU's Tech@NYU.

Yann LeCun and Rob Fergus's "Deep Learning" program, sponsored by DARPA, seeks to "develop code that can teach itself to spot objects in a picture, actions in a video, or voices in a crowd" on the first try and without supervision.  The full story is available from Wired.

An international team of researchers led by Eric Vanden-Eijnden used novel computational methods in combination with molecular dynamics simulations to identify the pathways of diffusion of a carbon monoxide  molecule inside myoglobin, a protein involved in oxygen transport and storage in various animal species including humans.  These results shed light on the important mechanism of ligand-protein binding and indicate how dynamical aspects of protein function are related to its structure. The full article was published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society and can be found at 
http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/ja905671x

Prof. Cameron F Abrams (Drexel University) and Eric Vanden-Eijnden used a new molecular dynamics simulation method to investigate the conformational variability of large proteins, a problem of interest e.g. in drug design.  The method was applied to two complex proteins, a subunit of GroEL, a protein that catalyzes folding of substrate proteins, and the HIV-1 envelope gp120, a protein responsible for the fusion of the virus with a target cell.  In this second example, the method generates plausible all-atom models of the unliganded conformation of HIV-1 gp120, which was  uncharacterized  so far and may prove useful in the development of inhibitors and immunogens. The full article was published in the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science and can be found at http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/02/22/0914540107.abstract.

Local developers, marketers, designers, and aspiring entrepreneurs will gather in Warren Weaver Hall this June 11-13 to pitch ideas, form teams and launch new business ventures.  Full details are available at nyc.startupweekend.org.

The New York Times reports on Diaspora, the decentralized Facebook alternative being developed by Computer Science Students Ilya Zhitomirskiy, Dan Grippi, Max Salzberg, and Raphael Sofaer.

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!

The inaugural, 24-hour "Hackathon" will take place in Warren Weaver Hall this April 2-3. The 24-hour event hosted by hackNY will bring more than 100 students from 20 different New York-area universities to work with datasets and technologies from the hottest NYC startups—including Foursquare, 10gen, Aviary, Chartbeat, and Hot Potato—at NYU's Courant Institute. Startups will introduce and demo their technologies; students will then have 24 hours to develop their own products and demos. The full press release is available from NYU Today.

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!

Mark Tygert has been chosen as a 2010 Sloan Research Fellow, joining 22 current Courant Faculty members who have previously received Sloan Fellowships. The Fellowships “support the work of exceptional young researchers early in their academic careers,” and Tygert’s research “explores a range of computations, including randomized algorithms and statistics, in order to improve electrical engineering, data mining, machine learning, and weather prediction. Research in this field seeks to enhance the design of microchips, antennas, and stealth aircraft and also to boost the functionality of search engines.” More information is available from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation and NYU Public Affairs.

Dilip Krishnan and Adriana Lopez, graduate students in Computer Science, have received a Microsoft Research PhD Fellowship and a Microsoft Research Graduate Women's Scholarship, respectively.  The awards are given to outstanding students in the areas of Computer Science, Electrical Engineering, or Mathematics.  More information on the awards is available from Microsoft.

Nektarios Paisios, Computer Science doctoral student, has received a 2010-2011 Google Lime Scholarship for Students with Disabilities.  In addition to the scholarship, recipients of the award, which is based on academics, innovation, and leadership, are invited to attend an all-expenses-paid networking retreat at the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA.  More information is available from Lime Connect.

Giuseppe Narzisi and Daniel Wichs, Computer Science doctoral students, have received IBM Ph.D. Fellowship Awards.  The Fellowship Awards Program "is an intensely competitive worldwide program, which honors exceptional Ph.D. students who have an interest in solving problems that are important to IBM and fundamental to innovation in many academic disciplines and areas of study. "  More information on the Awards can be found from IBM.

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 New York Academy of Sciences presented Ameet Talwalkar with the Best Student Paper Award at its Annual Machine Learning Symposium, for his paper "Ensemble Nystrom Method". The full symposium details can be found from the National Academy of Sciences.

Leslie Greengard is one of 11 university faculty selected to conduct next-generation research projects by the Defense Department as part of its National Security Science and Engineering Faculty Fellowship (NSSEFF) program.  The awards are for "promising university faculty performing unclassified, basic research that holds the promise to enhance long-term U.S. strategic interests."  The Full News Release is available from the Department of Defense.

Through a series of forecast experiments using a general circulation model, Ed Gerber et. al. find that the stratosphere does influence the troposphere.  As stated in the Geophysical Research Letters highlight and in Science Daily, "The results indicate that improved resolution in stratospheric simulations would probably lead to better weather forecasts."

As a part of its Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (INCITE) program, the U.S. Department of Energy awarded 50 million hours of supercomputing time to C. S. Chang and co-investigators Scott Parker (U. of Colorado), Scott Klasky (Oak Ridge National Laboratory) and Linda Sugiyama (MIT) for their project “High-Fidelity Tokamak Edge Simulation for Efficient Confinement of Fusion Plasma." More information can be found from the DOE.

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.

Ken Perlin, Computer Science student Ilya Rosenberg, and Media Research Lab collaborators "hope to bring a new kind of multitouch to everything from new e-readers to musical instruments, with their new company, Touchco."  The full blog is available from the New York Times.

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.

"The Abel Prize: 2003-2007" features the first 6 Abel prize winners, including Courant Professors Peter Lax and S. R. Srinivasa Varadhan, with autobiographies, interviews, and research descriptions. The book was published December 1st, 2009 by Springer.

A new ocean swimming model by Courant Professor Steve Childress and Jean-Luc Thiffeault of the University of Wisconsin test the idea that "by some estimates, ocean mixing caused by swimming creatures is comparable to the mixing by the wind and tides."  The full article is available from the Technology Review.

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".

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.

Rob Fergus and student Dilip Krishnan are developing a "dark camera," which emits light over a broader range of frequencies, to take sharp images without the standard intrusive flash. The full article can be found at the New Scientist.

A team of researchers led by Bud Mishra is currently working to create computer-based models charting the growth of pancreatic cancer. The full article can be found at Washington Square News.

Mathematicians from North America, Europe, Australia, and South America have resolved the first one trillion cases of an ancient mathematics problem by a clever technique for multiplying large numbers. The numbers involved are so enormous that if their digits were written out by hand they would stretch to the moon and back.  The team of three includes David Harvey (Courant Institute).  Please follow link for full article.

The National Science Foundation awarded CIMS a $10 million grant "to study the impact of global warming on the Antarctic ice sheet and its potential influence on rising sea levels." David Holland, the principal researcher of the project, will lead the NYU team in their first trip to the continent in January 2011.

As reported in NYU Today, Chris Bregler and colleagues received a $1.47 Million grant from the U.S. Office of Naval Research to further work on enhancing motion capture tools.

Science Nation reports new findings on snake movement from studies conducted by Courant Professor Mike Shelley, former post-doctoral researcher David Hu and undergraduate researchers Jasmine Nirody and Terri Scott.

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.

In April 2009, David Holland presented his research findings at a special conference celebrating the International Polar Year (IPY) Fieldwork, "a two-year deployment of scientists from more than 60 nations into the polar regions."  Video of the presenation, as well as a Press Release regarding the conference, are available from the NSF (links above).

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.

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