2009 Clay Research Awards Announced
March 10, 2009
The Clay Mathematics Institute announces the 2009 Clay Research Awards, which will be presented at the Clay Research Conference, to be held May 4-5 at Harvard University.
For his work in p-adic harmonic analysis, particularly his contributions to the transfer conjecture and the fundamental lemma. This work, combined with that of others, makes it possible to finally resolve important, long-standing parts of the Langlands program.
Ian Agol, Danny Calegari and David Gabai
For their solutions of the Marden Tameness Conjecture, and, by implication through the work of Thurston and Canary, of the Ahlfors Measure Conjecture.
The Langlands program is a collection of conjectures and theorems that unify the theory of automorphic forms, relating it intimately to the main stream of number theory, with close relations to harmonic analysis on algebraic groups as well as arithmetic algebraic geometry. Since its origins in the winter of 1966-67, when it was laid out in a letter from Langlands to André Weil, it has served as the basis of much deep work, including applications to many famous problems in number theory, e.g., Artin's conjectures on L-functions, Fermat's Last Theorem, and the behaviour of Hasse-Weil zeta functions.
The tameness conjecture asserts that a hyperbolic 3-manifold with finitely-generated fundamental group is homeomorphic to the interior of a compact 3-manifold (possibly with boundary). The Ahlfors conjecture asserts that the limit set of a finitely generated Kleinian group (i.e. the minimal invariant set on the Riemann sphere, which is the boundary at infinity of hyperbolic 3-space) has either full or zero measure, and in the former case the action of the group on it is ergodic.
Recipients of the Clay Research Award are named as Clay Research Scholars, and receive flexible research support for a period of one year. They also receive the bronze sculpture "Figureight Knot Complement VII/CMI" by Helaman Ferguson.
Previous recipients of the award are Cliff Taubes, Claire Voisin (2008), Alex Eskin, Christopher Hacon and James McKernan, Michael Harris and Richard Taylor (2007), Manjul Bhargava and Nils Dencker (2005), Ben Green and Gérard Laumon and Bao-Châu Ngô, Richard Hamilton and Terence Tao (2003), Oded Schramm and Manindra Agrawal (2002), Edward Witten (2001), Alain Connes and Laurent Lafforgue (2000), Andrew Wiles (1999).
Return to top