News & Announcements

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) has elected James Demmel as one of AAAS Fellows for 2015, in recognition of their contributions to innovation, education, and scientific leadership.

The Breakthrough Foundation Symposium will take place at Berkeley this year on Nov 9, with participation of the 2016 Breakthrough Prize winner and of our colleagues from Berkeley and Stanford.

As faculty of the UC Berkeley Mathematics Department, we are committed to taking an active role in maintaining a safe and inclusive workplace, free of sexual harassment. We feel that the University procedures currently in place fail to protect our students from sexual harassment, and allow perpetrators to remain in positions of authority and trust on campus, with minimal sanctions. The recent case of Prof. Geoff Marcy serves to illustrate this failure. The ineffectiveness of the current system has had devastating consequences for students and other vulnerable community members. We ask the UC administration to work with faculty and students to develop a transparent process in which cases of harassment and assault can be reported and dealt with in an effective manner, with meaningful sanctions when warranted.

For more information, please visit New DOE Office of Science support for CAMERA to develop computational mathematics for experimental facilities research, Berkeley Lab Computing Science News.

On 26 August 2015, John Steel and Ronald Jensen were awarded the Hausdorff Medal of the European Set Theory Society at the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences in Cambridge for their construction of the core model without the use of a measurable cardinal.

The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) selects James Demmel as the winner of 2014 the Paris Kanellakis Theory and Practice Award for his work on numerical linear algebra libraries, including LAPACK (Linear Algebra Package), a standard software library that forms part of the standard mathematical libraries for many vendors. The award will be presented at the ACM Awards Banquet on June 20, 2015 in San Francisco.

The AWM-Microsoft Research Prize serves to highlight to the community outstanding contributions by women in the field and to advance the careers of the prize recipients. The prize will be presented at the AWM Reception and Prize Ceremony at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle, WA, in January 2016.

Joseph A. Wolf was elected to Academia Nacional de Ciencias (National Academy of Science) in 2014. The investiture will take place in Cordoba, Argentina on April 17, 2015.

Three of our faculty members, Vivek Shende, Richard Bamler, and Lin Lin, have been selected as the 2015 Sloan Research Fellows by Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. The fellowships goes to US and Canadian researchers whose, according to the foundation, achievements and potential identify them as rising stars and the next generation of scientific leaders.

On Friday, October 3, UC Berkeley Mathematics Professor Emeriti Alexander Chorin and the late David Blackwell were selected as recipients of the National Medal of Science for their outstanding contributions to knowledge in their fields.