SPOTLIGHT
TOBIAS COLDING
COXETER LECTURE SERIES
SPEAKER MESSOUD EFENDIYEV
DEAN'S DISTINGUISHED
VISITING PROFESSOR JEREMY QUASTEL
2018 CRM-FIELDS-PIMS
PRIZE WINNER
Professor Colding (MIT) is a
distinguished mathematician
who has won major awards
for his research contributions,
notably the Veblen Prize of the
American Mathematical Society,
the Cecil and Ida B. Green
Distinguished Professorship of
Mathematics, and the Carlsberg
Foundation Research Prize
for ground‑breaking research
in differential geometry and
geometric analysis. He has also
twice been a Clay Senior Scholar
and a Simons investigator. His
three lectures covered: geometric
heat equations, level set method
for motion by mean curvature,
and optimal regularity for
geometric flows. All lectures were
very well-attended and highly
informative. Each year, a leading international
researcher in the mathematical
sciences is invited to give a
full term graduate course.
This year Professor Messoud
Efendiyev (Helmholtz Zentrum
München) served as the Dean's
Distinguished Visiting Professor
from January to June. His course
was titled Infinite Dimensional
Dynamical Systems and their
Applications in Mathematical
Biology. Evolution equations
arising in the modelling of life
science problems is a fascinating
subject area. It is at the heart of
understanding many important
problems arising in biology,
medicine, ecology, physics and
mechanics. The goal of this course
was to convince and show the
audience the important role of
applying mathematics to real
world situations and explain
experimental findings. The winner of this year's
CRM‑Fields-PIMS Prize is
Professor Jeremy Quastel
(University of Toronto). Jeremy
Quastel is generally regarded
as one of the best probabilists
in the world because of the
major breakthroughs he has
made in hydrodynamic theory,
the theory of stochastic partial
differential equations and the
probabilistic aspects of integrable
systems. He proved a 25-year‑old
conjecture from physics about
the scaling exponents for the KPZ
equation, and also computed an
exact formula for its one-point
distribution. Jeremy Quastel
obtained his PhD from the
Courant Institute in 1990. After
six years at the University of
California, Davis, he became a
professor at the University of
Toronto in 1998.
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