<p>The American Mathematical Society has just announced its 2009 awards. Princeton was recognized with awards for one faculty member, one graduate alumnus and two undergraduate students. This is the second year in a row that a Princeton undergraduate has been honored. Last year it was Nathan Kaplan 07 who is now a student at the University of Cambridge. This year it is Aaron Pixton 08, who, ironically is also now a student at Cambridge. Also, ironically, the runner-up for Pixtons prize was Andrei Negut 08, another Princeton graduate, who received an Honorable Mention.</p>
<p>Columbia University and Harvard each had two honorees. Yale had one. No other Ivy League school was represented though MIT had one honoree. </p>
<p>Princetons honorees for 2009 are as follows:</p>
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<p>Maryam Mirzakhani Receives 2009 Blumenthal Award</p>
<p>Blumenthal</a> Award</p>
<p>Providence, RI---Maryam Mirzakhani of Princeton University is receiving the 2009 Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Award for the Advancement of Research in Pure Mathematics. Presented every four years by the Leonard M. and Eleanor B. Blumenthal Trust for the Advancement of Mathematics, the award recognizes an individual who has written an outstanding PhD thesis and thereby shows the potential for future distinguished research in mathematics. The award will be given on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, DC.</p>
<p>According to the award citation, Mirzakhani is honored "for her exceptionally creative, highly original thesis. This work combines tools as diverse as hyperbolic geometry, `classical methods' of automorphic forms, and symplectic reduction to obtain results on three different important questions. These results include a recursive formula for Weil-Petersson volumes of moduli spaces of Riemann surfaces, a determination of the asymptotics of the number of simple closed geodesics on a hyperbolic surface in terms of length, and a new proof of Witten's Conjecture (originally established by Kontsevich) establishing the KdV recursion for the intersection numbers on moduli space."
Aaron Pixton Receives 2009 AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize
[Morgan Prize](http://www.ams.org/ams/press/morgan-2009.html)
Providence, RI---Aaron Pixton, an undergraduate student at Princeton University who is currently at the University of Cambridge doing Part III of the Mathematical Tripos, is receiving the 2008 AMS-MAA-SIAM Frank and Brennie Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research in Mathematics by an Undergraduate Student. The Morgan Prize is presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Mathematical Association of America, and the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics. The prize will be given on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, DC.
According to the prize citation, Pixton is honored for five impressive papers he has written, in addition to his Princeton senior thesis. One of his papers has already appeared in the Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society, two others have been accepted by Forum Mathematicum and the International Journal of Number Theory, and two others have been submitted. "In addition to being creative, Pixton's work spans a remarkable range of topics," the prize citation states. Pixton participated in Research Experience for Undergraduates programs at Cornell University, the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and the University of Minnesota Duluth, and he wrote interesting papers in all three programs. One of his mentors described Pixton's "ability to digest current research papers, to formulate interesting questions ..., and within a week's time, to start solving [them]" as "simply astonishing" and considers Pixton's work as "probably stronger than many Ph.D. dissertations."
Pixton was also a Churchill Scholar last year and was named a Putnam Fellow in 2004, 2005 and 2007. The Putnam Competition is a major national mathematics competition. More information can be found about it here:
[William Lowell Putnam Mathematical Competition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Lowell_Putnam_Mathematical_Competition)
Citation for Honorable Mention, Morgan PrizeAndrei Negut 08
The Morgan Prize Committee is pleased to award Honorable Mention for the 2009 Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research by an Undergraduate Student to Andrei Negut. The award recognizes his excellent Princeton senior thesis on Laumon spaces and many-body systems, which establishes a large part of a conjecture of Braverman made at the 2006 International Congress of Mathematicians. In addi¬tion to this work, Negut has made important contributions to problems in very diverse fields: algebraic cobordism theory and dynamical systems. His recom¬menders consider Negut to be off to a spectacular start and look forward to future great achievements.
Richard Hamilton (Princeton PhD) Receives 2009 AMS Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research
[Steele Prize](http://www.ams.org/ams/press/steele-seminal-2009.html)
Providence, RI---Richard Hamilton of Columbia University is receiving the 2009 AMS Leroy P. Steele Prize for a Seminal Contribution to Research. Presented annually by the American Mathematical Society, the Steele Prize is one of the highest distinctions in mathematics. The prize will be awarded on Tuesday, January 6, 2009, at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Washington, DC.
Hamilton is honored for his paper "Three-manifolds with positive Ricci curvature," J. Differential Geom. 17 (1982), 255-306. "The cited paper of Richard Hamilton introduced a profoundly original approach to the construction of natural metrics on manifolds," the prize citation states. "This approach is the Ricci flow, which is an evolution equation in the space of Riemannian metrics on a manifold." Hamilton's paper laid the basis for his further work on understanding the Ricci flow and how it could be used to solve two of the outstanding problems in mathematics in the twentieth century, the Poincare Conjecture and Thurston's Geometrization Conjecture. Hamilton's work paved the way for Grigory Perelman's brilliant solution to these two conjectures, which brought worldwide acclaim to both mathematicians. The prize citation also notes that Hamilton's work has had a wide range of applications beyond these two conjectures. The citation concludes, "The cited paper truly fits the definition of a seminal contribution; that is, `containing or contributing the seeds of later development.'"</p>
<p>Hamilton graduated from Yale and Princeton and is now a professor at Columbia.</p>
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<p>More about Princetons Math Department can be found here:</p>
<p>Mathematics</a> Department - Princeton University - Undergraduate Homepage</p>
<p>Information for applicants interested in majoring in math can be found here:</p>