Congratulations to Ivan Corwin , one of the winners of the 2014 Packard Fellowships in Science and Engineering Awards.

The Packard Foundation established the Fellowships program in 1988 to provide early-career scientists with flexible funding and the freedom to take risks and explore new frontiers in their fields. Each year, the Foundation invites 50 universities to nominate two faculty members for consideration. The Packard Fellowships Advisory Panel, a group of 12 internationally-recognized scientists and engineers, evaluates the nominations and recommends Fellows for approval by the Packard Foundation Board of Trustees.

Ivan Corwin is an Associate Professor  at the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University. Corwin works to unify algebraic structures within mathematics, build bridges between these structures and domains of physics, and discover universal phenomena within these domains. He has uncovered universal distributions (modern day parallels of the bell curve) in models of interface growth, traffic flow, mass transport, turbulence and shock-fronts.

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Congratulations to Clément Hongler , one of the winners of the 2014 Blavatnik Awards for Young Scientists.

Established in 2007, the Blavatnik Regional Awards honor the excellence of outstanding postdoctoral scientists who work in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Clément  Hongler was a Ritt Assistant Professor and a Minerva Fellow at the Department of Mathematics at Columbia University, supported by an NSF grant since 2011. Since Fall 2014 he is an Assistant Professor at EPFL, where he leads the Chair of Statistical Field Theory in the Mathematics Department.

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Columbia University will be hosting a festival celebrating the connections between mathematics and the arts on Saturday-Sunday, October 25-26, 2014, from 10 am to 5 pm each day. The festival will be held at Columbia Secondary School ( W 123rd St between Amsterdam & Morningside Ave.) and is free and open to the public.

The MoSAIC Festival includes a variety of hands-on workshops, lectures, a mathematical art exhibit, short films, and an area for informal exchange. It is designed to be easily accessible by audiences high school age and up.

For more information visit

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SAMUEL EILENBERG LECTURES 

SPRING SEMESTER 2015

Prof. Luis A. Caffarelli  (University of Texas)  _–

 “Future Directions in Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations”

 “The first three lectures will consists of a description of free boundary problems. Typical examples of free boundary problems  are a solid liquid interphase, the edge of a flame, the shape of a drop sitting on a surface, a discontinuous change if strategy in a game. Mathematically their structure consists of a domain where some phenomena takes place (cooling of a substance, value of a portfolio, wetting of a region) describe by some variable, like temperature, height of the drop, etc. and the behavior of the phenomena, changes discontinuously when this variable goes to some treshold value (solid to liquid, unburnt to burnt, the edge of the drop, etc.) Mathematically this means that the transition surface is part of the problem itself, and a range of issues arises like existence of solutions, regularity of the solution and of the transition surface etc. We will describe some of these problems, and how to attack these regularity issues. For the rest of the course , one possibility will be to study a family of non-linear parabolic equations of local and non-local nature that for their character are naturally treated by energy method , sort on the style of De Giorgi Nash Moser way. These include local and non-local equations like porous media, non-linear diffusion with memory, but I will be glad to discuss other topics.”

 FALL SEMESTER 2014

Simon Brendle (Stanford University)  

“Partial Differential Equations in Geometry”

“A central theme in geometry is the study of manifolds and their curvature. In this lecture series, we will discuss how techniques involving partial differential equations have shed light on several longstanding problems in global differential geometry. In the first part of the course, we will focus on the geometry of hypersurfaces, and discuss our proof of Lawson’s conjecture concerning minimal tori in S^3, as well as new results on mean curvature flow with surgery. In the second part, we will focus on the Ricci flow, including the Differentiable Sphere Theorem and Perelman’s question concerning the uniqueness of the Bryant soliton.”

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