IUPAP Commission C18 (Mathematical Physics) calls for nominations for the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Mathematical Physics.
The prize recognizes exceptional achievements in mathematical physics by scientists at relatively early stages of their careers. It is awarded triennially to at most three young scientists satisfying the following criteria:
A nomination should include a brief description of the achievements of the candidate that support the nomination, a CV, and a list of publications (or current links to that information online).
The deadline for nominations is September 30, 2020.
Wei-Kuo Chen earned his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Math from Taiwan. In 2009, he received his Ph.D. degree in math at the University of California, Irvine. From 2012 to 2015, he was a L.E. Dickson instructor in the department of mathematics at the University of Chicago. Since then, he has been serving as an assistant professor in the school of mathematics at the university of Minnesota.
Vadim Gorin was born in Moscow, Russia. He became a candidate of sciences in mathematics at Moscow State University in 2011, and at the same year he earned his PhD in mathematics from the Utrecht University. Vadim spent the Spring of 2012 at Mathematical Sciences Research Institute at Berkeley and then joined the mathematics department of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He has been working at MIT since that time: first as a CLE Moore Instructor and currently as an assistant professor.
Vadim Gorin works on asymptotic representation theory, studying various properties of representations of groups linked into series (such as unitary groups, orthogonal groups, or symmetric groups) as the rank tends to infinity. In a related work on mathematical statistical mechanics, Gorin focuses on 2-D lattice models, random matrices, and interacting particle systems.
The central tool of his research is the use of symmetric functions of representation-theoretic origin for the delicate asymptotic analysis of large stochastic systems of particles. Among the main results is the analysis of the macroscopic fluctuations for a class of discrete random stepped surface models leading to the Gaussian Free Field. In another direction, Vadim (with several collaborators) discovered a surprising appearance of random matrix distributions in the local limits of statistical mechanics systems such as the six-vertex model and random sorting networks.
Phan Thanh Nam
Phan Thanh Nam was born in 1985 in Phu Yen, Vietnam. He graduated from Vietnam National University at Ho Chi Minh City in 2007 and obtained his PhD in Mathematics from University of Copenhagen in 2011. Afterwards, he was a Post-doc at CNRS and University of Cergy-Pontoise until 2013, a Post-doc at IST Austria until 2016, and an Assistant Professor at Masaryk University until 2017. Currently, he is a Professor of Mathematics at LMU Munich.
Nam’s work concerns the mathematical treatment of large quantum systems from first principles. His PhD thesis contains an original result on the maximum negative ionization of atoms. Further important contributions include a full solution to the ionization problem in Thomas-Fermi-Dirac-von Weizsäcker theory (joint with Rupert Frank and Hanne Van Den Bosch), a novel approach to the mean-field approximation of Bose gases (joint with Mathieu Lewin and Nicolas Rougerie), and a rigorous justification of Bogoliubov excitation spectrum (joint with Mathieu Lewin, Sylvia Serfaty and Jan Philip Solovej). He also works on many-body quantum dynamics, semiclassical approximation, and Lieb-Thirring type inequalities.
Young Scientist Award (2015 – 2017)
The three IUPAP Young Scientist Awards for the Commission on Mathematical Physics (C18) for the period 2015-2017 were awarded on July 27, 2015, at the opening ceremony of the International Congress on Mathematical Physics, Santiago de Chile, to Roland Bauerschmidt, Joseph Ben Geloun, and Nicolas Rougerie.
Roland Bauerschmidt has been awarded the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Mathematical Physics 2015-2017 for his work on self-avoiding random walks in 4 dimensions and the development of supersymmetric renormalization group techniques for their study.
Born in Hannover, Germany, Roland Bauerschmidt studied in Bonn, Germany, and Zurich, Switzerland, and received his B.Sc. and M.Sc. in Physics from ETH Zurich. His Ph.D. in Mathematics (2013) is from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. He spent the year 2013-2014 at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, before moving to Harvard University, where he is currently a Postdoctoral Researcher. In 2016, he will return to the University of British Columbia as Assistant Professor of Mathematics.
Bauerschmidt has mastered, developed and extended a renormalization group program initiated by David Brydges and Gordon Slade, and made important contributions to this area. In a strikingly original paper, he provided a simple new way to understand the finite range decompositions of Gaussian fields that underpin the renormalization group approach.
His work on the structural stability of non-hyperbolic dynamical systems is an essential ingredient in the application of the renormalization group method.
Bauerschmidt’s work sheds new light on fundamental aspects of statistical physics, such as the behaviour of the self-avoiding random walk in four dimensions, quantum friction, and random matrix theory.
Joseph Ben Geloun was born 1976 in St. Louis, Sénégal. After graduating from Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar, Sénégal, he received his PhD in 2007 from Université Nationale du Bénin.
After visitor’s and postdoctoral positions at Université Paris-Sud, France, and University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, he held a post-doctoral position at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Canada, from 2010 to 2013.
After his PhD, Ben Geloun entered research on quantum gravity. In just a few years he became a major expert in the field. His most striking results concern a new class of non-local renormalizable quantum field theories, called tensor field theories, whose perturbative expansion sums over random geometries weighted by a discretized Einstein-Hilbert action. In his classification of these models, he discovered an unexpected property, namely their generic ultraviolet asymptotic freedom.
He has also started to direct the research work of younger scientists such as Dine Ousmane Samary and Remy Avohou. Now a Humboldt Fellow at the Albert Einstein Institute in Golm, Germany, Ben Geloun is becoming a role model for the next generation of young African scientists.
Nicolas Rougerie has been awarded the IUPAP Young Scientist Prize in Mathematical Physics 2015-2017 for his exceptional contributions to the theory of cold quantum gases, in particular the proof of the appearance of a giant vortex and vortex circles in rapidly rotating Bose gases.
Nicolas Rougerie was born in 1985 in Versailles, France, and received his PhD in Mathematics from Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris, in 2010. He subsequently became a postdoctoral associate at Université de Cergy-Pontoise. In 2011 he was awarded a permanent CNRS researcher position in mathematics, at Laboratoire de Physique et Modélisation des Milieux Condensés, Grenoble (the only CNRS position in mathematical physics awarded in all of France in that year).
Already the PhD thesis of Nicolas contains seminal results on giant vortices and vortex circles, and he published two important papers on these topics in 2011. This work was pushed further in a series of papers together with Michele Correggi, Florian Pinsker and Jakob Yngvason, which appeared 2011-2013. Further important contributions concern the quantum Hall regime of rapidly rotating Bose gases (joint with Sylvia Serfaty and Jakob Yngvason), a new approach to the mean-field limit in quantum many-body physics, based on a quantum version of de Finetti’s theorem (joint with Mathieu Lewin and Phan-Tanh Nam). He has furthermore published work on polarons in quantum crystals, on higher dimensional Coulomb gases and on the average field approximation for extended anyons.