2004 Clay Research Fellows Announced

FEBRUARY 25, 2004

February 25, 2004 (Cambridge, MA) - The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announced today the appointment of four Research Fellows: Ciprian Manolescu and Maryam Mirzakhani of Harvard University, and András Vasy and Akshay Venkatesh of MIT. These outstanding mathematicians were selected for their research achievements and their potential to make significant future contributions. The Institute will fully support the Fellows' research for a period of two to four years.

Ciprian Manolescu (b. 1978), a native of Romania, is currently completing his Ph.D. at Harvard University under the direction of Peter B. Kronheimer. In his undergraduate thesis he gave an elegant new construction of Seiberg-Witten Floer homology, and in his Ph.D. thesis he gave a remarkable gluing formula for the Bauer-Furuta invariants of four-manifolds. His research interests span the areas of Gauge theory, low-dimensional topology, symplectic geometry and algebraic topology.

Maryam Mirzakhani (b. 1977), a native of Iran, is currently completing her Ph.D. at Harvard under the direction of Curtis T. McMullen. In her thesis she showed how to compute the Weil-Petersson volume of the moduli space of bordered Riemann surfaces. Her research interests include Teichmuller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory and symplectic geometry. As a high school student, Mirzakhani entered and won the International Mathematical Olympiad on two occasions (in 1994 and 1995).

András Vasy (b. 1969), a native of Hungary, received his Ph.D. from MIT in June 1997 under the direction of Richard B. Melrose. Vasy is currently an associate professor at MIT. The focus of his research program is scattering theory, specifically the theory of N-body quantum Hamiltonians. Vasy has proved several deep results in this field concerning the structure of the scattering matrix and asymptotic behaviour of generalized eigenfunctions, and has more recently extended these techniques to study analysis on symmetric spaces. In 2002 he received the Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship.

Akshay Venkatesh (b. 1981) was born in New Delhi, India and raised in Austrailia where he attended the University of Western Australia in Perth. In 2002, he received his Ph.D. from Princeton University where he worked under the direction of Peter Sarnak. Since that time he has held an C.L.E. Moore Instructorship at MIT. Venkatesh has made major progress in counting and equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory. His research areas include representation theory, number theory, locally symmetric spaces, and ergodic theory.

The above mathematicians join the following current Clay Research Fellows (formerly called Clay Long-Term Prize Fellows): Manjul Bhargava, Daniel Biss, Alexei Borodin, Maria Chudnovsky, Dennis Gaitsgory, Sergei Gukov, Elon Lindenstrauss, Mircea Mustata, Igor Rodnianski, and Terence Tao.

About Clay Mathematics Institute

The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) is a private, non-profit foundation, dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge. Through its programs and initiatives, CMI aims to further the beauty, power and universality of mathematical thought. To learn more about CMI, please visit www.claymath.org. Contact: James Carlson or David Ellwood, (617) 995 2600, Email: carlson@claymath.org; ellwood@claymath.org.