OTTAWA — The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) is pleased to announce that Vincent X. Genest (MIT) is the recipient of the 2016 Doctoral Prize. Dr. Genest will receive his award and present a lecture at the CMS Winter Meeting to be held in Niagara Falls, Ontario, December 2-5, 2016.

The CMS annually awards the Doctoral Prize to a doctoral student from a Canadian university who has demonstrated exceptional performance in mathematical research. The Doctoral Prize recipients are selected primarily based on the impact of their results and the creativity of their dissertations; other activities and accomplishments in the area of mathematics are also taken into consideration.

Dr. Genest’s doctoral thesis, Algebraic structures, superintegrable systems and orthogonal polynomials, is comprised of twenty-three research papers and five conference proceedings written in collaboration with other mathematicians and physicists, most of which have been published in top-tier journals including four in Communications in Mathematical Physics, two in Letters in Mathematical Physics, and one in Proceedings of the American Mathematical Society.

“The theme of Vincent’s research concerns the rich interplay between exactly solvable quantum mechanical problems, symmetries, orthogonal polynomials and the algebraic structures that underlie the links between these themes,” said Niky Kamran (McGill University) in his nomination letter for Dr. Genest. “This amazing thesis reflects his deep commitment to research and the boundless energy that he brings to his work, but what is equally remarkable is the diversity of techniques and perspectives that appear in his research.”

According to Nicolai Reshetikhin (UC Berkeley), who acted as the External Examiner for the thesis defense, “The dissertation is a ‘tour de force’ in the area of integrability and special functions. This is certainly one of the best dissertations that I have ever seen in my academic career. The thesis demonstrates the richness of the interface of integrable and superintegrable systems with representation theory.”

As a result of his outstanding achievements, Dr. Genest has received a wide range of fellowships and prizes, which include the Rolland Brossard Prize (2011), the Carl Herz Prize (2014), the Thesis Prize from the Canadian Association of Physicists’ Division of Theoretical Physics and the Winnipeg Institute for Theoretical Physics (2016), as well as the Governor General’s Academic Gold Medal (2016).

Vincent Genest graduated from Université Laval with a BSc in Physics in 2010. He obtained his MSc in Mathematical Physics in 2011 at Université de Montréal under the supervision of Yvan Saint-Aubin. He completed his PhD in Mathematical Physics at the Centre de recherches mathématiques (CRM) in 2015 under the supervision of Luc Vinet.

As a direct result of his thesis work, Vincent ranked first in the 2015 NSERC postdoctoral fellowship competition, and he is currently Instructor in Pure Mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Boston.

About the Doctoral Prize

The CMS Doctoral Prize recognizes outstanding performance by a doctoral student who graduated from a Canadian university in the preceding year (January 1 to December 31). The first award was presented in 1997.

About the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS)

Founded in 1945, the Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) promotes the advancement, discovery, learning and application of mathematics. The CMS promotes mathematics through a rich array of activities including: scientific meetings; publications; awards; prizes; grants; camps and competitions. As the national math association, the CMS represents Canada internationally to other societies as well as organizations such as the International Mathematical Union (IMU).

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