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.
The Pulitzer Prizes are two dozen annual awards given by Columbia University in New York for achievements in the United States in "journalism, arts and letters." They were established in 1917 by the will of Joseph Pulitzer, who had made his fortune as a newspaper publisher.
John Forbes Nash, Jr., known and published as John Nash, was an American mathematician who made fundamental contributions to game theory, real algebraic geometry, differential geometry, and partial differential equations. Nash and fellow game theorists John Harsanyi and Reinhard Selten were awarded the 1994 Nobel Prize in Economics. In 2015, he and Louis Nirenberg were awarded the Abel Prize for their contributions to the field of partial differential equations.
The Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) is an independent center for theoretical research and intellectual inquiry located in Princeton, New Jersey. It has served as the academic home of internationally preeminent scholars, including Albert Einstein, J. Robert Oppenheimer, Hermann Weyl, John von Neumann, and Kurt Gödel, many of whom had emigrated from Europe to the United States.
Grigori Yakovlevich Perelman is a Russian mathematician and geometer who is known for his contributions to the fields of geometric analysis, Riemannian geometry, and geometric topology. In 2005, Perelman resigned from his research post in Steklov Institute of Mathematics and in 2006 stated that he had quit professional mathematics, owing to feeling disappointed over the ethical standards in the field. He lives in seclusion in Saint Petersburg and has declined requests for interviews since 2006.
Richard Streit Hamilton was an American mathematician who served as the Davies Professor of Mathematics at Columbia University.
Harold William Kuhn was an American mathematician who studied game theory. He won the 1980 John von Neumann Theory Prize jointly with David Gale and Albert W. Tucker. A former Professor Emeritus of Mathematics at Princeton University, he is known for the Karush–Kuhn–Tucker conditions, for Kuhn's theorem, and for developing Kuhn poker. He described the Hungarian method for the assignment problem, but a paper by Carl Gustav Jacobi, published posthumously in 1890 in Latin, was later discovered that had described the Hungarian method a century before Kuhn.
Michael Massing is an American writer based in New York City. He is a former executive editor of the Columbia Journalism Review. He received a bachelor's degree from Harvard College and a master's degree from the London School of Economics. He often writes for the New York Review of Books on the media, politics, and foreign affairs. He has also written for The American Prospect, The New York Times, The Nation, The New Yorker, The Guardian, Politico, and The Atlantic. His book The Fix offers a critique of the U.S. war on drugs. Now They Tell Us: The American Press and Iraq is a collection of articles which first appeared in The New York Review of Books and analyzes the press coverage of the Iraq war. A later book, Fatal Discord: Erasmus, Luther, and the Fight for the Western Mind, concerns the rivalry between those two men and the movements they represented—Christian humanism and evangelical Christianity; The New York Times named it a Notable Book of 2018. Massing is co-founder of the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) and currently sits on its board. He is also a board member of the Alicia Patterson Foundation. In 1992, he was named a MacArthur Fellow, and in 2011 he was a fellow at the Leon Levy Biography Center at the City University of New York Graduate Center.
A Beautiful Mind is a 2001 American biographical drama film about the mathematician John Nash, a Nobel Laureate in Economics, played by Russell Crowe. The film is directed by Ron Howard based on a screenplay by Akiva Goldsman, who adapted the 1998 biography by Sylvia Nasar. In addition to Crowe, the film's cast features Ed Harris, Jennifer Connelly, Paul Bettany, Adam Goldberg, Judd Hirsch, Josh Lucas, Anthony Rapp, and Christopher Plummer in supporting roles. The story begins in Nash's days as a brilliant but asocial mathematics graduate student at Princeton University. After Nash accepts secretive work in cryptography, he becomes liable to a larger conspiracy, through which he begins to question his reality.
A Beautiful Mind (1998) is an unauthorized biography of Nobel Prize-winning economist and mathematician John Nash by Sylvia Nasar, professor of journalism at Columbia University.
Stacy Madeleine Schiff is an American essayist. Her biography of Véra Nabokov won the 2000 Pulitzer Prize in biography. Schiff has also written biographies of French aviator and author of The Little Prince, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, colonial American-era polymath and prime mover of America's founding, Benjamin Franklin, Franklin's fellow Founding Father Samuel Adams, ancient Egyptian queen Cleopatra, and the important figures and events of the Salem Witch Trials of 1692–93 in colonial Massachusetts.
"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.
Arthur Paul Mattuck was an emeritus professor of mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He may be best known for his 1998 book, Introduction to Analysis (ISBN 013-0-81-1327) and his differential equations video lectures featured on MIT's OpenCourseWare.
Donald Joseph Newman was an American mathematician. He gave simple proofs of the prime number theorem and the Hardy–Ramanujan partition formula. He excelled on multiple occasions at the annual Putnam competition while studying at City College of New York and New York University, and later received his PhD from Harvard University in 1953.
Isabel Wilkerson is an African-American journalist and the author of The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration (2010) and Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents (2020). She is the first woman of African-American heritage to win the Pulitzer Prize in journalism.
Katherine "Kate" J. Boo is an American investigative journalist who has documented the lives of people in poverty. She has received the MacArthur Fellowship (2002), the National Book Award for Nonfiction (2012), and her work earned the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for The Washington Post. She has been a staff writer for The New Yorker magazine since 2003. Her book Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity won nonfiction prizes from PEN, the Los Angeles Times Book Awards, the New York Public Library, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters, in addition to the National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Jill Lepore is an American historian and journalist. She is the David Woods Kemper '41 Professor of American History at Harvard University and a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she has contributed since 2005. She writes about American history, law, literature, and politics.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences, officially the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel, is an economics award funded by Sveriges Riksbank and administered by the Nobel Foundation.
Kate Zernike is an American journalist who is national correspondent for The New York Times, where she has been since April 2000, covering education, criminal justice, Congress, and national elections, and where she covered Hurricane Katrina. She was previously a reporter at The Boston Globe (1995–2000), where she was responsible for covering education and special projects. She is the author of Boiling Mad: Inside Tea Party America (2010), on the Tea Party movement. Marjorie Kehe of The Christian Science Monitor remarked in 2010 that it was likely that "no other journalist in the United States has devoted as much time to covering the tea party movement".
Alicia Esther Nash was a Salvadoran-American physicist. The wife of mathematician John Forbes Nash Jr., she was a mental-health care advocate, who gave up her professional aspirations to support her husband and son, who were both diagnosed with schizophrenia.
