
November 2003 From The Clay Mathematics Institute The Clay Mathematics Institute 2003 Annual Meeting A celebration of the universality of mathematical thought On Friday, November 14, 2003, 2 pm, the Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) will hold its fifth Annual Meeting at MIT, featuring presentation of the Clay Research Awards, a talk by Richard Hamilton on Ricci flow, and a talk by John Morgan on Grigori Perelman's work and progress towards the Poincar� conjecture.The Clay Research Awards will be announced by CMI President James Carlson and will be presented by CMI Directors Landon Clay and Lavinia Clay. The awards will go to Richard Hamilton (for his seminal work on Ricci flow) and to Terence Tao (for his work in real harmonic analysis and the geometric theory of partial differential equations). Award recipients will be named as Clay Research Scholars for one year, and will receive a bronze replica of the CMI icon by sculptor Helaman Ferguson. Former recipients of the Clay Research Award are: Andrew Wiles, Laurent Lafforgue, Alain Connes, Stanislav Smirnov, Edward Witten, Oded Schramm and Manindra Agrawal. In his talk, Richard Hamilton of Columbia University will discuss his work on Ricci flow, a system of differential equations that are somewhat like those that govern heat flow in physics. However, the Ricci flow concerns not heat, but geometry, in a manner analogous to Einstein's description of gravity in General Relativity. Although very different in character, both Hamilton's Ricci flow and Einstein's field equations share a non-linear aspect that makes them extremely difficult to solve. It is therefore all the more remarkable that in 1982, Richard Hamilton used Ricci flow to show that a positively curved space of dimension three evolves to a final state of constant curvature. This seminal result was a key step in Hamilton's vision of a research program for proving both the celebrated Poincar� conjecture (1904) and Thurston's geometrization conjecture. Later work by Hamilton also treated the case of four dimensions. This program has led to spectacular advances through the recent work of Grigori Perelman. Perelman's work will be the subject of the second talk by John Morgan. "This year's meeting will honor mathematicians who have made landmark contributions to mathematics. Each of the awardees has produced results that have redefined their field," said James Carlson, President of the Clay Mathematics Institute. "We are pleased to be hosting talks on a subject of such great current interest as the work of Hamilton and Perelman." The meeting is open to the public and will take place at the MIT Media Lab, 20 Ames Street, Cambridge, Massachusetts. (T-Station: Kendall on the Red Line) Program (Bartos Auditorium, MIT Media Lab) - 2:00 Presentation of the Clay Research Awards
- 2:30 Talk by Richard Hamilton: The Ricci Flow
- Break & Refreshments
- 4:00 Talk by John Morgan: Perelman's work on the Poincar� Conjecture and Geometrization of 3-manifolds
The video recording of the CMI Annual Meeting will be available in streaming video on the Institute's website (www.claymath.org) a week following the event. About Clay Mathematics Institute The Clay Mathematics Institute (CMI) is a private, non-profit foundation, dedicated to increasing and disseminating mathematical knowledge. CMI attempts to further the beauty, power and universality of mathematical thought through a series of programs. To learn more about CMI, please visit www.claymath.org. Contact: James Carlson, (857) 928-0491, [email protected] | |