The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) is a private, non-profit foundation dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge. Formerly based in Peterborough, New Hampshire, the corporate address is now in Denver, Colorado. CMI's scientific activities are managed from the President's office in Oxford, United Kingdom. It gives out various awards and sponsorships to promising mathematicians. The institute was founded in 1998 through the sponsorship of Boston businessman Landon T. Clay. Harvard mathematician Arthur Jaffe was the first president of CMI.
In the mathematical field of geometric topology, the Poincaré conjecture is a theorem about the characterization of the 3-sphere, which is the hypersphere that bounds the unit ball in four-dimensional space.
William Paul Thurston was an American mathematician. He was a pioneer in the field of low-dimensional topology and was awarded the Fields Medal in 1982 for his contributions to the study of 3-manifolds.
The International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) is a mathematical olympiad for pre-university students, and is the oldest of the International Science Olympiads. It is “the most prestigious” mathematical competition in the world. The first IMO was held in Romania in 1959. It has since been held annually, except in 1980. More than 100 countries participate. Each country sends a team of up to six students, plus one team leader, one deputy leader, and observers.
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman abruptly quit his research job at the Steklov Institute of Mathematics, and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, due to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. He lives in seclusion in Saint Petersburg, and has not accepted offers for interviews since 2006.
Soviet Student Olympiad was an annual set of contests for students in the USSR. There were two separate multi-round competitions every year: for higher education (universities) and general education. Both competitions had several rounds, and winners from lower rounds would go to the next round. Not only individual members, but teams were awarded too. The main difference between two Olympiads was that the school one had separate threads for every grade, while the university one was for all students.
Richard Streit Hamilton is an American mathematician who serves as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University. He is known for contributions to geometric analysis and partial differential equations. Hamilton is best known for foundational contributions to the theory of the Ricci flow and the development of a corresponding program of techniques and ideas for resolving the Poincaré conjecture and geometrization conjecture in the field of geometric topology. Grigori Perelman built upon Hamilton's results to prove the conjectures, and was awarded a Millennium Prize for his work. However, Perelman declined the award, regarding Hamilton's contribution as being equal to his own.
Terence Chi-Shen Tao is an Australian mathematician. He is a professor of mathematics at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where he holds the James and Carol Collins chair. Tao was awarded Fields Medal of 06. His research includes topics in harmonic analysis, partial differential equations, algebraic combinatorics, arithmetic combinatorics, geometric combinatorics, probability theory, compressed sensing and analytic number theory.
László Lovász is a Hungarian mathematician and professor emeritus at Eötvös Loránd University, best known for his work in combinatorics, for which he was awarded the 2021 Abel Prize jointly with Avi Wigderson. He was the president of the International Mathematical Union from 2007 to 2010 and the president of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences from 2014 to 2020.
The Worldwide Online Olympiad Training (WOOT) program was established in 2005 by Art of Problem Solving, with sponsorship from Google and quantitative hedge fund giant D. E. Shaw & Co., in order to meet the needs of the world's top high school math students. Sponsorship allowed free enrollment for students of the Mathematical Olympiad Program (MOP). D.E. Shaw continued to sponsor enrollment of those students for the 2006-2007 year of WOOT.
Maryam Mirzakhani was an Iranian mathematician and a professor of mathematics at Stanford University. Her research topics included Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, ergodic theory, and symplectic geometry. On 13 August 2014, Mirzakhani was honored with the Fields Medal, the most prestigious award in mathematics, becoming the first woman to win the prize, as well as the first Iranian. The award committee cited her work in "the dynamics and geometry of Riemann surfaces and their moduli spaces".
Akshay Venkatesh is an Australian mathematician and a professor at the School of Mathematics at the Institute for Advanced Study. His research interests are in the fields of counting, equidistribution problems in automorphic forms and number theory, in particular representation theory, locally symmetric spaces, ergodic theory, and algebraic topology.
"Manifold Destiny" is an article in The New Yorker written by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber and published in the 28 August 2006 issue of the magazine. It claims to give a detailed account of some of the circumstances surrounding the proof of the Poincaré conjecture, one of the most important accomplishments of 20th and 21st century mathematics, and traces the attempts by three teams of mathematicians to verify the proof given by Grigori Perelman.
Zhu Xiping is a Chinese mathematician. He is a professor of Mathematics at Sun Yat-sen University, China.
Huai-Dong Cao is a Chinese–American mathematician. He is the A. Everett Pitcher Professor of Mathematics at Lehigh University. He is known for his research contributions to the Ricci flow, a topic in the field of geometric analysis.
Ngô Bảo Châu is a Vietnamese-French mathematician at the University of Chicago, best known for proving the fundamental lemma for automorphic forms. He is the first Vietnamese national to have received the Fields Medal.
Artur Avila Cordeiro de Melo is a Brazilian and naturalized French mathematician working primarily in the fields of dynamical systems and spectral theory. He is one of the winners of the 2014 Fields Medal, being the first Latin American and lusophone to win such an award. He has been a researcher at both the IMPA and the CNRS. He has been a professor at the University of Zurich since September 2018.
The Millennium Prize Problems are seven well-known complex mathematical problems selected by the Clay Mathematics Institute in 2000. The Clay Institute has pledged a US$1 million prize for the first correct solution to each problem.
Lisa Sauermann is a mathematician from Germany known for her performance in the International Mathematical Olympiad, where in 2011 she had the single highest score. She won four gold medals (2008–2011) and one silver medal (2007) at the olympiad, representing Germany.
Jacob Tsimerman is a Canadian mathematician at the University of Toronto specialising in number theory and related areas. He was awarded the SASTRA Ramanujan Prize in the year 2015 in recognition for his work on the André–Oort conjecture and for his work in both analytic number theory and algebraic geometry.
