AMS Centennial Fellowships Awarded for 2001-2002

Providence, RI: The AMS has awarded four Centennial Fellowships for 2001-2002. The recipients are Ivan Dimitrov, Ravi Vakil, Jiahong Wu, and Meijun Zhu. The amount of fellowship is US$40,000, with an additional expense allowance of US$1,600.

Ivan Dimitrov received his Ph.D. in 1998 from the University of California at Riverside under the supervision of Ivan Penkov. Since then Dimitrov has been a Hedrick Assistant Professor at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also visited the Max-Planck-Institut fur Mathematik in Bonn (Summer 1999). During the 2001-2002 academic year he will spend a semester at Yale University and a semester at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley.

Dimitrov's research area is representation theory of Lie algebras and Lie superalgebras. Among the problems he has worked on are the algebraic and geometric aspects of representations of direct limit Lie algebras and classification of weight representations of Lie superalgebras. His current research projects are centered on various extensions of the theory of Harish-Chandra modules to complex Lie algebras and real Lie superalgebras. He plans to use part of the Centennial Fellowship to visit Yale University.

Ravi Vakil received his Ph.D. in 1997 from Harvard University under the direction of Joe Harris. He was an Instructor at Princeton University (1997-98) and is currently a C.L.E. Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (1998-2001).

Vakil's research is in the field of algebraic geometry. His main work to date has been on the geometry of algebraic curves and maps of algebraic curves, as well as the intersection theory of moduli spaces, especially of curves and stable maps. His current interests involve the interactions of algebraic geometry with nearby fields, including enumerative geometry, mathematical physics, number theory, and combinatorics. He plans to use the Centennial Fellowship to visit the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, as well as Stanford University, where he will take up an assistant professorship.

Jiahong Wu received his Ph.D. in 1996 from the University of Chicago under the supervision of Peter Constantin. After a year at the Institute for Advanced Study, he spent three years at the University of Texas at Austin as an instructor. In the fall of 2000, he moved to Oklahoma State University, where he is currently an assistant professor.

Wu's research has been in nonlinear partial differential equations, especially those arising in the study of fluid mechanics. His work includes the study of zero-dissipation limits for various equations arising in the description of physical systems and analytical results related to magneto-hydrodynamic turbulence (e.g., turbulence in the outer layers of the sun). His recent work is on the global existence of smooth solutions for the 2D quasi-geostrophic equation, an evolution equation that describes the large-scale motion of the atmosphere and ocean in certain regimes, the zero viscosity limit of the classical Navier-Stokes equations in bounded domains, and several initial-boundary-value problems for model equations in nonlinear, dispersive media. He plans to use the Centennial Fellowship for longer visits to the University of Chicago and the University of Texas at Austin.

Meijun Zhu received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1996 under the direction of Yan Yan Li. Zhu was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of British Columbia and at the Pacific Institute for the Mathematical Sciences (1996-1998), and a postdoctoral fellow at McMaster University (1998-1999). Since 1999, he has been an assistant professor at the University of Oklahoma.

Zhu's research area is partial differential equations. He has worked mainly on elliptic equations involving critical Sobolev exponents, curvature equations, and geometric inequalities. Recently he has been working on sharp Sobolev inequalities and various isoperimetric inequalities on Riemannian manifolds. He plans to use the Centennial Fellowship to visit Princeton University.

The AMS Centennial Research Fellowship Program makes awards annually to outstanding mathematicians to help further their careers in research.