IMPA researcher Robert Morris receives SBM prize
Robert Morris, a researcher at IMPA, was the recipient of the Brazilian Mathematical Society (SBM) prize of 2017. The ceremony ended the second day of activities of the 31th Brazilian Math Coloquium (CBM), that is currently being held at the headquarterers of IMPA, in Rio, until next friday, august 4.
The last five days were laureate for Morris, who is a specialist in the field of combinatorics and probability. On thursday, july 28, he won the MCA award at the Mathematical Congress of the Americas, held this year at Montreal, Canada, in recognition of his work, The SBM award was set for the article “Independent sets in hypergraphs”, published in 2015 in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society. The researcher will receive an endowment of 20 thousand Brazilian Reais and an invitation to do a future lecture at CBM.
“ It´s a great honor to receive this distinction. It makes me feel more brazilian”, said Morris, a north american citizen that, since 2010, is a researcher at IMPA.
The SBM prize was created in 2013 and is held every two years, coincinding with the colloquium, and has the objective of distinguishing the best original math article recently published by a young researcher that resides in Brazil. Morris wrote the article with other two fellow mathematicians that are not working in the country: József Balogh and Wojciech Samotij.
The articles are peer reviewed by a jury that takes notes on originality, relevance, depth and potential impact in the area. The comittee is composed by fellow and renowned mathematicians, such as Artur Avila (IMPA), Carlos Kenig (Chicago University), Noga Alon (Tel Aviv University), Richard Schoen (Stanford) e Shigefumi Mori (President da International Mathematicians Union and Kyoto University).
Before handing the award, Avila, president of the comitee, revelead that it was pleasantly difficult to avaluate the papers due to their high quality. ” It wasn´t easy because it was necessary to choose only one. Also, the articles submited revealed the diversity of themes presented, as well as their origins, scattered through out Brazil.”
Prestige
The General-director of IMPA, Marcelo Viana, broke protocol to make a keen observation. “Every fellow mathematician awarded was invited speakers at the International Congress of Mathematicians. This is a sign we are headed in a good path.”
Being extremely rigorous and competitive, the SBM award has prestige in the math community. The Extraordinary Researcher Artur Avila was the first recipient in 2013 for his paper “On the regularization of conservative maps”, published in the Acta Mathematica 2010. The next year he won the Fields Medal.
Umberto Hryniewicz (UFRJ) and Pedro Salomão (USP) were awarded in 2014 for their work “A Poincaré-Birkhoff theorem for tight Reeb flows Reeb flows on S3”. Both will be lecturers on geometry during the ICM 2018 in Rio de Janeiro. Robert Morris will also present his work at next year event on the subject of Combinatorics.
