The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) has selected Joel Feldman (UBC) as the winner of the 2004 Jeffery-Williams Prize and Jingyi Chen (UBC) as the winner of the 2003 Coxeter-James Prize.

The Jeffery-Williams Prize recognizes mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Joel Feldman obtained his B.Sc. from the University of Toronto in 1970, and his Ph.D. from Harvard University in 1974, under the direction of Arthur M. Jaffe. Prior to joining the University of British Columbia in 1977, he was a Moore Instructor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Feldman attained the rank of full professor in 1987. He was elected as a fellow of the Royal Society of Canada in 1990, and, in 1996, he received the John L. Synge Award from the Royal Society of Canada.

Dr. Joel Feldman has risen to a position of international prominence in the field of mathematical physics with a thirty year record of sustained output of the highest calibre. He has made important contributions to quantum field theory, many body theory, Schrödinger operator theory and the theory of infinite genus Riemann surfaces. Feldman's work is characterized by mathematical depth coupled with great technical power.

Dr. Feldman began his career in constructive quantum field theory, where the goal is to construct nontrivial examples of quantum field models satisfying the Wightman axioms. Feldman made many contributions to these areas in the 1970's and 1980's. The work of Feldman, together with Jacques Magnen, Vincent Rivasseau and Roland Sénéor, on a rigorous approach to renormalization group methods was very influential.

Feldman's most important work of the last decade is his work with Horst Knörrer and Eugene Trubowitz on many body theory. In December, 2001, the three released a series of ten preprints containing the first construction of an interacting Fermi liquid at temperature zero in two space dimensions. These results have been called the "best in mathematical physics in the last decade".

Dr. Joel Feldman will give the 2004 Jeffery-Williams Prize Lecture at the CMS Summer Meeting, hosted by Dalhousie University, in June 2004.

The Coxeter-James Prize recognizes young mathematicians who have made outstanding contributions to mathematical research.

Dr. Jingyi Chen obtained his B.S. from Peking University in 1986, and his Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1992, under the direction of Richard M. Schoen. Prior to joining the University of British Columbia in 1997, he held positions at the University of California (Irvine), Northwestern University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Dr. Chen received an Alfred P. Sloan Research Fellowship in 1999, and the André Aisenstadt Prize from the Centre de Recherches Mathématiques in 2001.

Dr. Jingyi Chen is an outstanding young geometric analyst with very broad research interests. He has made important contributions in the areas of harmonic maps and Yang-Mills connections. In recent work, he has produced a number of important results in the areas of global analysis and differential geometry.

In his PhD thesis, Chen studied the regularity theory of energy minimizing harmonic maps between simplicial complexes that are locally finite and connected, showing that such a map must be Hölder continuous. Later, he studied stable harmonic maps into complex projective spaces, and settled a conjecture of John Wood. Then, in well-known joint works with Gang Tian, Chen studied harmonic maps from stratified Riemann surfaces into a compact Riemannian manifold.

More recently, Chen was the first mathematician to systematically study quaternionic maps between hyperkähler manifolds. Together with Jiayu Li, Chen found a criterion to detect when a quaternionic map is holomorphic, and they also obtained a removable singularity theorem for quaternionic maps with Gang Tian. This has been called "fundamental work in a rapidly developing area".

Dr. Jingyi Chen will present the 2003 Coxeter-James Prize Lecture at the CMS Winter Meeting, hosted by Simon Fraser University, in December 2003.

For more information contact:

Dr. Christiane Rousseau, President
Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: (514) 343-7729
Email: president@cms.math.ca

or

Dr. Graham P. Wright, Executive Director
Canadian Mathematical Society
Tel: (613) 562-5702
Email: director@cms.math.ca