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  • One of the winners of the Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prizes for Excellence in Teaching for the academic year 2011-2012 is Robin Walters, profiled here.— May 25, 2012
  • The full list of students who are graduating with Honors in Mathematics in the academic year 2011-12 can be found here (PDF, 1 page).— May 24, 2012
  • Jay Shah, an undergraduate mathematics major at the University of Chicago who graduates this year, has been awarded the National Science Foundation Graduate Fellowship.— May 24, 2012
  • The winners of the 2012 Paul R. Cohen Memorial Prize, awarded to the graduating seniors in the field of Mathematics who have achieved the highest record in mathematics, are Donald Laackman, Jonathan Libgober, Jay Shah, Daping Weng, and Alexander Zorn.— May 24, 2012
  • The winners of the 2012 Lawrence and Josephine Graves Prize, awarded to the Lecturers in Mathematics who by the Spring Quarter of the second year of their lectureship have accumulated the best record in effective and responsible teaching are Blair Davey, Kun Gao, and Nguyen Nguyen.— May 22, 2012
  • Karin Melnick of the University of Maryland, who completed a Ph.D. in Mathematics at the University of Chicago in 2006, has been awarded the prestigious AMS Centennial Fellowship for the 2012-2013 academic year. The fellowship is presented annually to outstanding mathematicians who have held the doctoral degree for between three and twelve years. More here. — May 4, 2012
  • One of the winners of the 2012 PSCD Prize for Excellence in Teaching is Markus Kliegl. More here. — April 23, 2012
  • A video interview of Paul Sally is available on the Simons Foundation website. Paul Sally is the Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Mathematics Department.— April 2012
  • Bao Châu Ngô, the Francis and Rose Yuen Distinguished Service Professor of Mathematics was elected to the 2012 class of fellows of the American Academy of Arts of Sciences. More here.— April 2012
  • Long time visiting professor David Kazhdan will receive the 2012 Israel Prize for Mathematics. He received the award at a ceremony this April. More here.— January 2012

  • Marco Antonio Raupp (Ph.D. University of Chicago, 1971) has been appointed Science and Technology Minister in the federal government of Brazil. More here.— January 2012

  • Alex Eskin and Kazuya Kato were elected Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Details here. — April 2011

  • Jim Douglas Jr., Professor Emeritus of Mathematics, the University of Chicago, was named Fellow of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Details here. — March 2011

  • Maryanthe Malliaris won the Kurt Gödel Research Prize Fellowship in the post-doc category. Details here.

  • Prerna Nadathur, mathematics major, was named 2010-2011 Rhodes Scholar. Details here. — November 2010

  • Ngô celebration, October 15, 2010. — October 2010

  • Bao Châu Ngô was awarded the Fields Medal. Details here and here.— October 2010

  • Antonio Montalbán received the 2010 David and Lucille Packard Foundation Fellowship. Details here. — October 2010

  • Tom Church was awarded the William Rainey Harper Dissertation Fellowship for the 2010/2011 academic year. The Harper Fellowship is the highest honor the University of Chicago confers to graduate students.

  • Congratulations to the undergraduates who earned honors this year. A list can be found here. — May 2010

  • The winners of the 2010 Cohen Prize are: Elan Bechor, Christopher Henderson, Adam Kaye, William Leeb, Tengren Zhang. — May 2010

  • Mathematics majors William Abram and Melissa Yeung received NSF Graduate Fellowships. — May 2010

  • Congratulations to Anna Marie Bohmann, Francis Chung, Tom Church, Spencer Dowdall, and John Lind, winners of the Lawrence and Josephine Graves Prize for effective and responsible undergraduate teaching by a Lecturer in is or her second year of Lectureship. Congratulations also to Daniele Rosso, for winning one of the Wayne Booth Teaching Awards in the College. — May 2010

  • Peter Constantin and Robert Kottwitz were named Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Details here and here— April 2010

  • Peter Constantin was named Fellow of Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. Details here.— April 2010

  • Richard K. Lashof, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics died on February 4, 2010. Below please find an obituary note from Melvin G. Rothenberg, Professor Emeritus of Mathematics: — February 2010

    In Memoriam-Dick Lashof †Feb 4, 2010

    Dick Lashof died today in his home Alameda California

    Richard Lashof received his PH.D in mathematics from Columbia University in 1954. Over the next 40 years he made fundamental contributions in geometric and differential topology and was an important force in transforming this area into a center of mathematical progress in the second half of the twentieth century.

    He joined the mathematics faculty at the University of Chicago in the fall of 1954, where he remained over thirty years. He served as chairman from 1967-70. He was the key figure in sustaining the Chicago Mathematics Department as an international center for research and the training of topologists, many dozens of whom were to go on pursue successful research careers at other leading universities.

    Lashof was also an outstanding and inspiring teacher and collaborator. He had many outstanding Ph. D students. Early in his career he collaborated with some of the greatest mathematicians of the latter half of the twentieth century, specifically S.S. Chern and Stephan Smale. Subsequently he had long and fruitful collaborations with a number of other topologists. He certainly was my major mathematical influence, and the most exciting and fruitful period of my mathematics research were the years we spent working together.

    Mel Rothenberg

  • Photos from the 2010 Joint AMS-MAA-SIAM meeting in San Francisco can now be found here.— January 2010

  • Congratulations to Ariel Barton who was awarded the 2010 Kowalsky Fellowship. Ariel, a student of Carlos Kenig, studies elliptic PDE. The Kowalsky Fellowship provides support for a graduate student, preferably a woman, during the year when she is expected to complete a dissertation. The award is established through a bequest from Walter and Yvonne Kowalsky in memory of their daughter Nadine Kowalsky, who died of leukemia in 1996. Nadine graduated from the University of Chicago in 1994 with a dissertation directed by Robert Zimmer.

  • Congratulations to Hannah Alpert who was selected to receive the 2010 Alice T. Schafer prize. The Alice T. Schafer prize for excellence in mathematics by an undergraduate woman was established in 1990 by the AWM. More details here and here.

  • It is with regret that we report the passing of Alice T Schafer, MS `40, PhD'42, who died September 27, 2009, at the age of 94.

    Schafer was one of the founding members and the second president of the Association for Women in Mathematics (AWM), which later named in her honor its annual award for the outstanding undergraduate woman majoring in mathematics. Known as a champion of women in mathematics, she received the Mathematical Association of America's 1998 award for distinguished service to mathematics. In 1985 she was elected a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

    Schafer came to Chicago in 1939, studied projective differential geometry under E.P. Lane, and completed her dissertation on Singularities of Space Curves. After her marriage to fellow graduate student Richard D. Schafer, PhD '42, and the conferral of her doctorate, Schafer taught at Connecticut College, The Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory, the University of Michigan, Douglass College, Swarthmore College, Drexel Institute of Technology, and the University of Connecticut. In 1962, Schafer was appointed to Wellesley College, where she became Head of Mathematics. Following her 1980 retirement from Wellesley, she continued to teach at Simmons College and Marymount University until she was eighty-one years old.

    Schafer is survived by her husband Richard, professor emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

    Read more about the life of Alice T. Schafer at the Boston Globe (link) and at the Wellesley College website (link).— September 2009

  • The American Academy of Arts and Sciences elected Spencer Bloch, Robert Maynard Hutchins Distinguished Service Professor and Robert A. Fefferman, Max Mason Distinguished Service Professor and Dean of the Physical Sciences Division as Fellows.

  • Congratulations to Wilhelm Schlag, who was awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship this year. — 2009

  • David Vogan, MIT, will give two lectures in the Undergraduate Lecture Series in Mathematics. The first lecture - the Cohen Prize Lecture - on "Inflatable Mathematics: Schubert varieties and combinatorics" will be on May 21 at 7:30 pm in the Barn (Ry 352). The second lecture - the Departmental Colloquium - on "Calculating signatures of invariant Hermitian forms" will be on May 22 at 4pm in E 206. For more information, please see here. — May 2009

  • Congratulations to Hannah Alpert, who was awarded a Barry M. Goldwater Scholarship. Over the past fifteen years, eight mathematics majors in the College have won Goldwaters; Hannah is the first woman to have won over that time period.— 2009

  • Congratulations to Antonio Montalban, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, for being awarded the American Mathematical Society Centennial Research Fellowship.


  • Congratulations to Luis Silvestre, Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, for being awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship.


    • Among the total 20 recipients of Sloan Research Fellowships in Mathematics nation-wide this year, we note with satisfaction two recent alumni, Dan Margalit (Ph.D 2003) and Justin Holmer (Ph.D 2004) and one former Assistant Professor in the Department of Mathematics, Julien Dubedat.

    We also extend our congratulations to our colleague Mathias Drton, Assistant Professor in the Department of Statistics, who was awarded the Sloan Research Fellowship in Mathematics as well.

  • The 2009 Highbridge prize for the best preprint by a graduate student was awarded to Swarnendu Datta. Damir Dzhafarov was the runner up. The 2009 Kowalsky Fellowships were awarded to Elizabeth Townsend Beazley and to Rachel Epstein. Congratulations to all!

  • Congratulations to Tom Church, winner of the 2008 Wayne C. Booth Graduate Student Prize for Excellence in Teaching. Please see this link

  • Congratulations to Travis Schedler, recipient of the five-year AIM fellowship. Please see here

  • Mark Kisin, Professor of Mathematics, was selected Fellow of the Royal Society, the national academy of science of the UK and the Commonwealth. Please read the announcement on the RS page.

  • John Griggs Thompson and Jacques Tits received the 2008 Abel Prize. Thompson received his PhD from the Department of Mathematics of The University of Chicago for a thesis supervised by Saunders Mac Lane. Thompson was Professor of Mathematics at the University of Chicago between 1962 and 1970.

  • The winners of the 2008 Paul R Cohen prize are: Padraic Bartlett, David Coley, Ilya Grigoriev, Ryan Johnson, Junehyuk Jung, Jenya Sapir.

  • Alexander Beilinson, the David and Mary Winton Green University Professor and Vladimir Drinfeld, the Harry Pratt Judson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Mathematics of the University of Chicago have been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Please see the AAAS announcement and the list of members. Please read here excerpts from an article in the Chronicle by Steven Koppes.

  • Elizabeth Beazley is the winner of the 2008 PSCD teaching prize.
    Hannah Bennett, Ian Biringer, Chris Conidis and Niles Johnson are the 2008 recipients of the Lawrence and Josephine Graves Prize.

  • Congratulations to Qendrim Gashi, Irene Peng and Travis Schedler who won Clay Liftoff Fellowships.

  • Andrej Zlatoš, Assistant Professor in Mathematics has been selected to receive a 2008 research fellowship by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Zlatoš works in nonlinear partial differential equations and mathematical physics, with emphasis on transport phenomena in reaction-diffusion equations. For more about the 2008 Sloan fellowships awarded to Chicago faculty, see this link.

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