A Flurry of Prizes in Maths

It is prize time in the mathematical world. The Wolf Foundation has announced that Harry Furstenberg (Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Stephen Smale (University of California, Berkeley) will share the US$100,000 2006-7 Wolf Prize in Mathematics.

The AMS has instead awarded its prizes for 2007. Once more the AMS-MAA-SIAM Morgan Prize for Outstanding Research by an Undergraduate Student went to an MIT student, Daniel Kane. It is humbling experience to see that this BSc student has already about 16 papers under his belt :-(

The February 2007 issue of the Notices is out. It features an interview with Lennart Carleson coauthored by my former Aalborg colleague Martin Raussen, and a beautiful book review Symmetry and the Monster: One of the Greatest Quests of Mathematics--A Book Review by Robert Griess. I liked it so much that I could not resist buying the book today. I might report on the book when I read it.