The main goal of the EMALCA (Escuelas de Matemáticas de América Latina y el Caribe ) Ecuador 2017 was to serve as a stepping stone towards strengthening the topology community in the Latin American region and as a springboard for the community of Ecuadorian mathematicians working in the areas of algebra, topology and geometry. It was expected to promote the collaboration between the mathematicians in the Ecuadorian community and other countries in Latin America, specially neighbouring countries, to give access to students in Ecuador and neighbouring countries to specialized courses that are not regularly offered in their universities, to provide the undergraduate students with the relevant information concerning graduate studies possibilities and to produce academic material in the form of lecture notes which will be written in Spanish.

Academic material will be produced in the form of lecture notes of the three courses and will be written in Spanish. This material will be available freely on the website of USFQ.

To read the report go here.

This year's CIMPA Research School was focused on certain recent progress of mathematical analysis and numerical computations related to the partial differential equations, namely to material sciences for engineering science. It is very actual interest and concerns particularly the engineering faculties and students of the Mongolian Universities and overseas participants from Vietnam, Cambodia, South Korea, Pakistan, Austria and Philippines. The conference"s initial goal was to establish collaboration in the research as well as help to promote exchanges between mathematicians in Mongolia and experts from the research school participating countries and support women in Mathematics in Mongolia to develop their mathematical and research skills by precondition that women play an active part in higher education in Mongolia. For the report go here. The conference was partially supported by the Abel Board.

Iranian mathematics Professor Maryam Mirzakhani, the first and to-date only female winner of the Fields Medal since its inception in 1936, died Friday, July 14. Her receipt of the Fields Medal three years ago ended a long wait for women in the mathematics community for the prize, first established in 1936. Mirzakhani specialized in theoretical mathematics: moduli spaces, Teichmüller theory, hyperbolic geometry, Ergodic theory and symplectic geometry. The 2014 IMU press release about her work and for for winning in 2014 a Fields Medal can be found here.

Mirzakhani was born in Tehran, Iran, and – by her own estimation – was fortunate to come of age after the Iran-Iraq war when the political, social and economic environment had stabilized enough that she could focus on her studies. She dreamed of becoming a writer, but mathematics eventually swept her away. She attended an all-girls high school in Tehran, led by a principal unbowed by the fact that no girl had ever competed for Iran’s International Mathematical Olympiad team. Mirzakhani first gained international recognition during the 1994 and 1995 competitions. In 1994, she earned a gold medal. In 1995, she notched a perfect score and another gold medal. After graduating college at Sharif University in Tehran, she headed to graduate school at Harvard University, where she was guided by Curtis McMullen, a fellow Fields Medal winner.

McMullen described Mirzakhani as filled with “fearless ambition.” Her 2004 dissertation was a masterpiece. In it, she solved two longstanding problems. Either solution would have been newsworthy in its own right, according to Benson Farb, a mathematician at the University of Chicago, but then Mirzakhani connected the two into a thesis described as “truly spectacular.” It yielded papers in each of the top three mathematics journals.“The majority of mathematicians will never produce something as good,” Farb said at the time. “And that’s what she did in her thesis.” 

Iranian President Hassan Rouhani said the “unprecedented brilliance of this creative scientist and modest human being, who made Iran’s name resonate in the world’s scientific forums, was a turning point in showing the great will of Iranian women and young people on the path towards reaching the peaks of glory … in various international arenas,” according to Iranian state media.

“What’s so special about Maryam, the thing that really separates her, is the originality in how she puts together these disparate pieces,” said Steven Kerckhoff at the time of her Fields Medal award. Kerckhoff is a professor at Stanford who works in the same area of mathematics. “That was the case starting with her thesis work, which generated several papers in all the top journals. The novelty of her approach made it a real tour de force.”After earning her doctorate at Harvard, Mirzakhani accepted a position as assistant professor at Princeton University and as a research fellow at the Clay Mathematics Institute before joining the Stanford faculty.  

“Maryam was a wonderful colleague,” said Ralph L. Cohen, the Barbara Kimball Browning Professor of Mathematics at Stanford. “She  not only was a brilliant and fearless researcher, but she was also a great teacher and terrific PhD adviser.  Maryam embodied what being a mathematician or scientist is all about:  the attempt to solve a problem that hadn’t been solved before, or to understand something that hadn’t been understood before.  This is driven by a deep intellectual curiosity, and there is great joy and satisfaction with every bit of success. Maryam had one of the great intellects of our time, and she was a wonderful person.  She will be tremendously missed.” In recent years, she collaborated with Alex Eskin at the University of Chicago to answer a mathematical challenge that physicists have struggled with for a century: the trajectory of a billiard ball around a polygonal table. That investigation into this seemingly simple action led to a 200-page paper which, when it was published in 2013, was hailed as “the beginning of a new era” in mathematics and “a titanic work.”

“You’re torturing yourself along the way,” she would offer, “but life isn’t supposed to be easy.”

Deep condolences to the family, friends and colleagues of Maryam. A great loss.

Some short clips can be found here:

Video shown at the Fields Medalist Ceremony in 2014

Maryam Mirzakhani on "Dynamics on the Moduli Spaces of Curves", I

(Text above: summary from several sources, see here and here)

The winner of the 2017 Ramanujan Prize for Young Mathematicians from Developing Countries is Eduardo Teixeira of the Federal University of Ceará, Brazil. The prize is in recognition of Teixeira's outstanding work in Analysis and Partial Differential Equations.

Teixeira started working on free boundary problems during his PhD thesis, proving existence and regularity results, and obtaining qualitative properties of solutions, in the theory of nonlinear heat conduction. Subsequently, in collaboration with L. Zhang, he obtained Almgren's type frequency formulas in Riemannian manifolds. He then introduced an original approach to the regularity of degenerate elliptic equations, which consists in viewing the set of critical points of a solution as a free boundary. This interesting point of view led him to prove the continuity conjecture for elliptic equations with high order singular structures, and in solving, in collaboration with Araujo and Urbano, a long standing conjecture on the optimal regularity for the p-Laplacian in two-dimensions. Teixeira has contributed to many other aspects of the theory of nonlinear elliptic equations. A perfect example is his recent breakthrough, in collaboration with Y. Li and Z.-C. Han, on the asymptotic radial symmetry of solutions to the kth-order Yamabe equation in punctured domains, a deep and original contribution to the theory of conformally nonlinear elliptic PDEs.

The Prize is also in recognition of Professor Teixeira's determined pursuit of high-level research in his home institution in the northeast of Brazil, where over the last decade he has founded and directed one of the major research groups in nonlinear PDEs in Latin America. It is hoped that his example will inspire mathematicians working at the highest levels while based outside main established centres of research.

The selection committee consisted of Idris Assani, Rajendra Bhatia, Alicia Dickenstein, Stefano Luzzatto (chair), Van Vu. The nominations this year were extremely strong and the final decision was based on the current rules and guidelines of the prize and was carried unanimously.

The Ramanujan Prize for young mathematicians from developing countries, created in the name of Srinivasa Ramanujan, has been awarded annually since 2005. The Prize was originally instituted by the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP), the Niels Henrik Abel Memorial Fund, and the International Mathematical Union (IMU). The participation of the Abel Fund ended in 2012; the 2013 Prize was jointly funded and administered by the ICTP and the IMU. The Department of Science and Technology of the Government of India has agreed to fund the Prize for a 5 year period, starting with the 2014 Prize.

The Prize is awarded annually to a researcher from a developing country, who must be less than 45 years of age on 31 December of the year of the award, and who has conducted outstanding research in a developing country.