Fernando Codá Marques, a Princeton University professor of mathematics, was awarded the American Mathematical Society's 2016 Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry for his part in resolving the Willmore conjecture, a long-time mystery in geometry about the nature of surfaces. Marques and André Neves of Imperial College London were recognized for their "remarkable work on variational problems in differential geometry," including their published proofs of the conjecture first proposed in 1965 by mathematician Thomas Willmore. The $5,000 Veblen Prize is awarded every three years for notable research in geometry and topology; the 2016 prize will be awarded in January at the Joint Mathematics Meetings in Seattle.
