Two Princeton seniors also honored
Zoltán Szabó, a professor of mathematics at Princeton, has been
awarded the 2007 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry. The prize, one of the
highest distinctions for work in geometry or topology, is presented
every three years by the American Mathematical Society.
Szabó and his collaborator, Columbia University's Peter Ozsváth, will
share the $5,000 prize with another collaborative team, Peter
Kronheimer of Harvard University and Tomasz Mrowka of the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology.
According to the prize citation, Szabó and Ozsváth, who earned his
Ph.D. from Princeton in 1994, were honored for "the contributions they
have made to three- and four-dimensional topology through their
Heegaard Floer homology theory." The theory was developed in a highly
influential series of more than 20 papers in the last five years.
Szabó first joined the Department of Mathematics as an instructor in
1994 after obtaining his Ph.D. at Rutgers University. He spent a year
at the University of Michigan before returning to Princeton in 2000. He
is a 1990 graduate of Hungary's Eötvös Loránd University.
The prize was presented Jan. 6 at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in New
Orleans, where two Princeton seniors also were honored. Ana Caraiani
received the Alice T. Schafer Prize for Excellence in Mathematics by an
Undergraduate Woman from the Association for Women in Mathematics.
According to the award citation, she is "already conducting
professional-level mathematical research." Her classmate, Tamara
Broderick, was honored as a runner-up for the award.
The American Mathematical Society, with more than 30,000 members,
offers programs and services that promote mathematical research and its
uses, strengthen mathematical education and foster awareness and
appreciation of mathematics.
