2011 André Aisenstadt Prize Recipient
Joel Kamnitzer (Toronto) [ français ]

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The 2011 André Aisenstadt Prize is awarded to Joel Kamnitzer of the University of Toronto. Dr. Kamnitzer obtained his Bachelor in Mathematics at the University of Waterloo in 2001 and his PhD at the University of California (Berkeley) in 2005, under the supervision of Allen Knutson. He held a prestigious AIM Five-Year Fellowship as well as post-doctoral postitions at MIT, MSRI, and the University of California (Berkeley). He has been a professor at the University of Toronto since 2008. Dr. Kamnitzer has made substantial and deep contributions to the field of geometric representation theory and related topics.

We mention here three of his more important contributions, on rather different topics.In his thesis, recently published in the Annals of Mathematics, he relates formulae developed in representation theory by Berenstein-Zelevinsky to the theory of Mirkovic-Vilonen polytopes as introduced by Anderson; in the process, he elucidates a number of enigmatic features of these important topics.

A second impressive body of work is joint work carried out mainly with S. Cautis but also A. Licata; it has appeared in Inventiones Mathematicae and the Duke Mathematical Journal. This work is part of a program to pursue the categorification of Khovanov's knot invariants. It sheds light on the potential categorificaton of the geometric Satake equivalence and is also related to mirror symmetry problems.

Finally, together with P. Etingof, A. Henriques, and E. Rains (in a contribution recently published in the Annals of Mathematics), he has explored the algebraic topology of the real locus of the moduli space of stable curves of genus 0 with marked points. In particular, this article computes the rational cohomology of this space as well as the 2-local torsion in its cohomology.

The André Aisenstadt Prize will be awarded to Dr. Kamnitzer at a ceremony to be held at the CRM on February 18, 2011.