30/11/2023

Robert Morris is an award recipient from the American Mathematical Society.

IMPA researcher Robert Morris was awarded theLeroy P. Steele Prize for Seminal Contribution to Research this Thursday (30) , which recognized the article, “Independent sets in hypergraphs”, published in the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (2015) as a work of extreme importance for the area of probabilistic combinatorics. The article is also signed by researchers József Balogh (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) and Wojciech Samotij (Tel Aviv University).

The distinction is awarded annually by the American Mathematical Society to work of fundamental or lasting importance in areas such as Analysis/Probability, Algebra/Number Theory, Applied Mathematics, Geometry/Topology, and Mathematics/Discrete Logic.

“The authors independently introduced the hypergraph container method and helped solve long-standing open problems in probabilistic combinatorics, additive number theory, and discrete geometry. The method had an immediate impact on the study of enumerative and extremal problems in random environments and provided a powerful new tool for constructing counter-intuitive combinatorial objects,” highlighted the society, which also awarded the paper “Hypergraph Containers,” published in Inventiones Mathematicae, by David Saxton, a former postdoctoral researcher at IMPA, and Andrew Thomason.

Robert Morris explains that the article has already received awards on other occasions and "shares" the recognition. "We dedicate this prize to a large group of mathematicians who have found many applications for the technique. Indeed, there are many applications, and we would like to dedicate this prize to everyone who has contributed to its development over the years."

Marcelo Viana, director-general of IMPA, highlighted Morris's importance to science. “Morris is a leading global figure in the crucial field of combinatorics. This award, like many others he has received, is a fitting tribute to his spectacular scientific contribution.”

Throughout his career as a researcher, Morris has received numerous awards, including the MCA Prize, the UMALCA Recognition Prize, the SBM Prize, the Elon Lages Lima Prize, the Fulkerson Prize, the George Pólya Prize in Combinatorics, and the European Combinatorics Prize. He was an invited speaker at the ICM 2018 and in 2022 was elected to the Brazilian Academy of Sciences.

This year, the IMPA researcher, along with Marcelo Campos (PhD from IMPA and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford), Simon Griffiths (PUC-Rio), and Julian Sahasrabudhe (Cambridge), stirred the international community by sharing the results of a new algorithm capable of improving the limit of Ramsey's Theorem . This advancement, the most significant in the field since 1935, earned special recognition at the 34th CBM.