Sergio Da Silva with his award winning poster

Undergraduate student Sergio DaSilva’s poster entitled “Oda’s Strong Factorization Conjecture and its Implications in Toric Geometry” has won the “Most Outstanding Poster” prize at this years Rising Stars Conference.  The poster was featured in the computational science section which covers areas such as math and computer science.  The poster was marked by four judges on aspects of the poster itself, the student’s presentation and the research covered.

Sergio’s subject area is algebraic geometry and deals more specifically with birational geometry. His poster was based on work that he did last summer at UBC with Dr.Kalle Karu through an NSERC USRA. The original results will be published in the Tohoku Mathematical Journal.

When asked about what he thought about the conference in general Sergio had the following to say: “I thought RSR 2010 was a great experience, and I would highly recommend it to students who are thinking about applying in the future. Posters are not a conventional means for math presentations, and it was challenging and new to explain my research to people from other fields. Professors often travel to other locations to discuss their research, and this competition provides a similar platform for undergraduates to present their work.”

More information on the Rising Stars Competition can be found here: http://www.risingstars.ubc.ca/

Congratulations go to Sergio!

Congratulations go to Professor Marco Gualtieri.  He, along with Xiang Tang, an assistant professor at Washington University in Saint Louis, were awarded this year’s prestigious André Lichnerowicz prize.  The prize was awarded at a ceremony on July 26, 2010 at the IMPA in Rio de Janeiro.

From the ceremony:  ”the André Lichnerowicz prize was established in 2008 to be awarded for notable contributions to Poisson geometry. The prize is to be awarded every two years at the “International Conference on Poisson Geometry in Mathematics and Physics” to researchers who had completed their doctorates at most eight years before the year of the Conference.

The prize was named in memory of André Lichnerowicz (1915-1998) whose work was fundamental in establishing Poisson geometry as a branch of mathematics. In 2010, it was awarded by a jury composed of the members of the scientific and advisory committees of the biennial Poisson Conference.

Professor Marco Gualtieri received his doctorate at Oxford University in 2004 under the direction of Nigel Hitchin. After holding post-doctoral positions at MSRI, Berkeley, at the Fields Institute in Toronto and at MIT, he joined the Department of Mathematics at the University of Toronto, where he is an assistant professor. His pioneering work on generalized geometry has been the source of inspiration for many related studies. Already in his Ph. D. thesis he developed the basic structure theory of generalized complex geometry as well as of generalized Kahler geometry. Since then he has been studying generalized geometry and its applications to physics independently and in collaboration with Gil Cavalcanti, Henrique Bursztyn and Vestislav Apostolov. More recently, he has studied D-branes in generalized complex manifolds and their relation to noncommutative geometry, as well as further generalizations of classical geometries.”

Our sincere congratulations go to Professor Gualtieri on this well deserved achievement!

Professor Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz (photo courtesy of Ken Jones)

Professor Ragnar-Olaf Buchweitz was recently awarded the prestigious Humboldt Research Award from Germany.

From their website: “The award is granted in recognition of a researcher’s entire achievements to date to academics whose fundamental discoveries, new theories, or insights have had a significant impact on their own discipline and who are expected to continue producing cutting-edge achievements in the future.”

In a recent article for the University of Toronto’s ‘the Bulletin’ Professor Buchweitz was quoted as saying “I was delighted that I was awarded this prize.  I am also humbled by this wonderful recognition by the German scientific and academic community.”  The full article can be found at the bottom of the second page of ‘the Bulletin’ found here.

Professor Buchweitz was also featured in an article for the UTSC news that talks about his research and how it is currently being used.  That article can be found here.

We are proud to recognize this great achievement by Professor Buchweitz and wish him the best in his continued research!