Sir Simon Kirwan Donaldson is an English mathematician known for his work on the topology of smooth (differentiable) four-dimensional manifolds, Donaldson–Thomas theory, and his contributions to Kähler geometry. He is currently a permanent member of the Simons Center for Geometry and Physics at Stony Brook University in New York, and a Professor in Pure Mathematics at Imperial College London.
Sir Vaughan Frederick Randal Jones was a New Zealand mathematician known for his work on von Neumann algebras and knot polynomials. He was awarded a Fields Medal in 1990.
In mathematics, planar algebras first appeared in the work of Vaughan Jones on the standard invariant of a II1 subfactor. They also provide an appropriate algebraic framework for many knot invariants (in particular the Jones polynomial), and have been used in describing the properties of Khovanov homology with respect to tangle composition. Any subfactor planar algebra provides a family of unitary representations of Thompson groups. Any finite group (and quantum generalization) can be encoded as a planar algebra.
In the theory of von Neumann algebras, a subfactor of a factor is a subalgebra that is a factor and contains . The theory of subfactors led to the discovery of the Jones polynomial in knot theory.
Herbert Blaine Lawson, Jr. is a mathematician best known for his work in minimal surfaces, calibrated geometry, and algebraic cycles. He is currently a Distinguished Professor of Mathematics at Stony Brook University. He received his PhD from Stanford University in 1969 for work carried out under the supervision of Robert Osserman.
János Kollár is a Hungarian mathematician, specializing in algebraic geometry.
Gilles I. Pisier is a professor of mathematics at the Pierre and Marie Curie University and a distinguished professor and A.G. and M.E. Owen Chair of Mathematics at the Texas A&M University. He is known for his contributions to several fields of mathematics, including functional analysis, probability theory, harmonic analysis, and operator theory. He has also made fundamental contributions to the theory of C*-algebras. Gilles is the younger brother of French actress Marie-France Pisier.
Huzihiro Araki was a Japanese mathematical physicist and mathematician who worked on the foundations of quantum field theory, on quantum statistical mechanics, and on the theory of operator algebras.
Helmut Hermann W. Hofer is a German-American mathematician, one of the founders of the area of symplectic topology.
Adrian Ioana is a Romanian mathematician. He is currently a professor at the University of California, San Diego.
Narutaka Ozawa is a Japanese mathematician, known for his work in operator algebras and discrete groups. He has been a professor at Kyoto University since 2013. He earned a bachelor's degree in mathematics in 1997 from the University of Tokyo and a Ph.D. in mathematics in 2000 from the same institution. One year later he received a Ph.D. in mathematics from Texas A&M University. He was selected for one of the prestigious Sloan Research Fellowships in 2005 and was an invited speaker at the 2006 ICM in Madrid where he gave a talk on "Amenable actions and Applications". He has won numerous prizes including the Mathematical Society of Japan (MSJ) Spring Prize and the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS) Prize. Before becoming a full professor at Kyoto University in 2013, he was an associate professor at the University of Tokyo and at University of California, Los Angeles.
Søren Galatius is a Danish mathematician who works as a professor of mathematics at the University of Copenhagen. He works in algebraic topology, where one of his most important results concerns the homology of the automorphisms of free groups. He is also known for his joint work with Oscar Randal-Williams on moduli spaces of manifolds, comprising several papers.
Uffe Valentin Haagerup was a mathematician from Denmark.
Haruzo Hida is a Japanese mathematician, known for his research in number theory, algebraic geometry, and modular forms.
Mark Lee Green is an American mathematician, who does research in commutative algebra, algebraic geometry, Hodge theory, differential geometry, and the theory of several complex variables. He is known for Green's Conjecture on syzygies of canonical curves.
Stefaan Vaes is a Belgian mathematician.
Mihnea Popa is a Romanian-American mathematician at Harvard University, specializing in algebraic geometry. He is known for his work on complex birational geometry, Hodge theory, abelian varieties, and vector bundles.
Roberto Longo is an Italian mathematician, specializing in operator algebras and quantum field theory.
Edward George Effros was an American mathematician, specializing in operator algebras and representation theory. His research included "C*-algebras theory and operator algebras, descriptive set theory, Banach space theory, and quantum information."
Leonid Iosifovich Vainerman is a Ukrainian and French mathematician, professor emeritus at University of Caen Normandy. Vainerman's research results are in functional analysis, ordinary differential equations, operator theory, topological groups, Lie groups, and abstract harmonic analysis. In the 1970s, he co-developed Pontryagin-style dualities for non-commutative topological groups, a set of results that served as a precursor for the modern theory of quantum groups.
