Professor Juncheng Wei to receive the 2020 CMS Jeffery-Williams Prize

OTTAWA, Ontario — The Canadian Mathematical Society (CMS) is pleased to announce that Juncheng Wei (UBC) has been named the recipient of the 2020 CMS Jeffery-Williams Prize for his exceptional contributions to the theoretical development and interdisciplinary applications of nonlinear partial differential equations. Dr. Wei will receive his award and present a prize lecture during the CMS Summer Meeting in Ottawa, Ontario, June 5-8, 2020.

Dr. Wei’s research is remarkable in its breadth, depth, originality and influence. It is broadly concerned with developing tools of mathematical analysis and applying them to shed light on phenomena in physics and biology, which are described by mathematical models.

Among Dr. Wei’s important works are his contributions to the geometrization program for elliptic equations which are too numerous to list. They range from counterexample to De Giorgi's Conjecture in dimensions 9 and higher, to non-radial bound states of magnetic Ginzburg-Landau equations, disproving a 1980 conjecture of Jaffe-Taubes.

In a surprising paper with C.S. Lin and D. Ye, Dr. Wei gave a complete classification of a class of Toda systems using purely PDE methods. This led to a wildly original theory of compactness and degree-counting for Toda systems on Riemann surfaces.

He has also made profound contributions to the mathematical theory of pattern formations in mathematical biology, in particular to spike dynamics and stability in reaction-diffusion systems. Nonlocal eigenvalue problems are ubiquitous in analyzing localized patterns in such diverse systems as seashells, urban crime, and voting and group behaviour in the social sciences. These unconventional eigenvalue problems are very complex and little was known about them until one of his groundbreaking papers in 1998 laid the foundation for their rigorous treatment.

Dr. Wei and his longtime collaborator, Dr. Ren have published more than 40 papers in which they systematically built a complete mathematical theory on pattern formations in the Ohta-Kawasaki model of diblock copolymers, which are powerful and widely used materials.

With an astonishing record of well over 400 publications, Dr. Wei has published in almost all the top journals in mathematics, pure and applied. Journals ranging from the Annals of Mathematics and Inventiones Mathematicae (top journals in pure mathematics), to the SIAM Review (a top journal in applied mathematics) exhibit him as a truly interdisciplinary mathematician. He has been cited over 15000 times, which ranks him among the top most cited mathematicians in Canada.

Juncheng Wei received his Ph.D. in mathematics from the University of Minnesota in 1994. He was postdoctoral fellow at SISSA in Italy before becoming professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where he worked from 1995 until 2012. Since 2012, he has been Canada Research Chair (Tier I) at UBC.