2005 Clay Research Fellows Announced

March 16, 2005 (Cambridge, MA) - The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) announced today the appointment of Research Fellows Bo'az Klartag and David Speyer. These outstanding young mathematicians were selected for their research achievements and their potential to make significant future contributions.

Bo'az Klartag (b. 1978) is a native of Israel and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. He received his Ph.D. degree in 2004 from Tel Aviv University under the direction of Vitali Milman. In his thesis Klartag showed that a small number of Minkowski and Steiner symmetrizations suffice to bring a convex body in n-space close to a Euclidean ball. His current research interests include geometric problems in high dimension, in particular asymptotic convex geometry.

David Speyer (b. 1980) will receive his Ph.D. in June 2005 from the University of California, Berkeley under the direction of Bernd Sturmfels. Much of his research is in the emerging area of tropical geometry, to which he has contributed both fundamental results and applications, e.g., a new proof of Horn's conjecture on eigenvalues of hermitian matrices and (with Lior Pachter) the reconstruction of phylogentic trees from subtree weights. His current research interests include continuing work in tropical geometry, cluster algebras and the geometry of grassmannians and flag varieties.

Klartag and Speyer join current Clay Research Fellows Manjul Bhargava, Daniel Biss, Alexei Borodin, Maria Chudnovsky, Sergei Gukov, Elon Lindenstrauss, Ciprian Manolescu, Maryam Mirzakhani, Igor Rodnianski, Andras Vasy, and Akshay Venkatesh. Ben Green, recipient of the 2005 Clay Research Award, was also named a Clay Research Fellow and will begin his appointment in July 2005. For more information, see www.claymath.org/research_fellows.

About the 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.