Alexander Engel – Page 18

AMS Special Session on the Mathematics of John Roe

There was a Special Session on Coarse Geometry, Index Theory, and Operator Algebras: Around the Mathematics of John Roe at the Spring Central and Western Joint Sectional Meeting of the AMS last weekend to which Christopher and I were invited to give talks. John Roe passed away last year. His personal webpage is still online … Continue reading

2019 Abel Prize

Karen Uhlenbeck (Wikipedia) is the 2019 Abel Prize Laureate (Wikipedia, Homepage) … for her pioneering achievements in geometric partial differential equations, gauge theory and integrable systems, and for the fundamental impact of her work on analysis, geometry and mathematical physics. There is a nice article about it over at Quanta Magazine (link). A mathematical introduction … Continue reading

2019 Christopher Heyde Medal

Three days ago the Australian Academy of Sciences announced the recipients of its 2019 Honorific Awards (Twitter, Webpage). Among them is Professor Geordie Williamson FAA FRS (Wikipedia), Mathematician at the University of Sydney (Homepage), who receives the Christopher Heyde Medal. The Australian Academy of Sciences states: Professor Williamson is a world leader in the field of … Continue reading

Global existence for non-linear wave equations

Non-linear wave equations (in 3+1 dimensions) are ubiquitous in physics, playing a vital role in many subfields of it. There are many methods available to show short-time existence of solutions for such equations, but global-in-time existence is a much more subtle problem. In the 1980s Klainermann introduced a so-called null condition on the nonlinearities of … Continue reading

Ten Years of Polymath

Ten years ago the first Polymath project was launched (link to the original proposal of Timothy Gowers). Polymath can be described as massively collaborative mathematics, i.e., a large groups of mathematicians works on a predefined problem and each member posts his or her (partial) ideas, so that the collective makes progress from each small step … Continue reading

Wolf Prize in Mathematics 2019

The Wolf Prize in one of the most prestigious prizes in mathematics (Wikipedia entry). This year’s laureates are Prof. Gregory Lawler (Wikipedia, Homepage) and Prof. Jean Francois le Gall (Wikipedia, Homepage). The corresponding press release of the EMS may be found here.

The Whitehead manifold and positive scalar curvature

Recall that the Whitehead manifold is a contractible 3-manifold which is not homeomorphic to Euclidean 3-space (Wikipedia entry). It was proven by Chang-Weinberger-Yu (link) that the Whitehead manifold can not admit a complete metric of uniformly positive scalar curvature. Last year their result was strengthened by Jian Wang in arXiv:1805.03544 to the statement that the Whitehead manifold can … Continue reading

Sir Michael Atiyah 1929 – 2019

Sir Michael Atiyah died three days ago on January 11th, 2019 (news of The Royal Society). A nice obituary (together with one for Jean Bourgain) may be found on this blog: link. Here is another obituary by the New York Times.