Providence, RI---David Jerison of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John M. Lee of the University of Washington have been awarded the 2012 Stefan Bergman Prize, the American Mathematical Society announced today. Jerison and Lee will each receive US$12,494, which is half of the 2012 income from the Stefan Bergman Trust.
Jerison and Lee are honored for their pioneering works on the CR Yamabe problem, which led to finding canonical metrics in a given conformal class, for strictly pseudo-convex manifolds. This problem was introduced by Jerison and Lee in their landmark paper in the JOURNAL OF DIFFERENTIAL GEOMETRY in 1987. In settling a large part of this problem, Jerison and Lee developed a myriad of important tools in the subject.
David Jerison received his Ph.~D. from Princeton University in 1980, under the direction of Elias M. Stein. After a year as an National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Chicago, he joined the faculty of MIT in 1981, where he is professor of mathematics and MacVicar Faculty Fellow. In 1985, he received an A.~P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship and a Presidential Young Investigator Award. In 1999 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
John M. Lee received his PhD from MIT in 1982, under the direction of Richard Melrose. He spent five years as a Benjamin Peirce Assistant Professor at Harvard University before taking his present position as a professor of mathematics at the University of Washington in Seattle. Previous awards include a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research Fellowship, an AMS Centennial Research Fellowship, and the Joseph R. Levenson Prize for excellence in teaching at Harvard.
Established in 1988, the Bergman Prize honors the memory of Stefan Bergman, who was best known for his research in several complex variables, as well as the Bergman projection and the Bergman kernel function that bear his name. A native of Poland, he taught at Stanford University for many years and died in 1977 at the age of 82. He was an AMS member for 35 years. When his wife died, the terms of her will stipulated that funds should go toward a special prize in her husband's honor. On behalf of Wells Fargo Bank of California, the manager of the Bergman Trust, the AMS assembles committees to select recipients of the prize.
The official announcement of the prize, including the full citation and a list of previous recipients, appears today in the Notices of the AMS, http://www.ams.org/notices.
Founded in 1888 to further mathematical research and scholarship, today the more than 30,000 member American Mathematical Society fulfills its mission through programs and services that promote mathematical research and its uses, strengthen mathematical education, and foster awareness and appreciation of mathematics and its connections to other disciplines and to everyday life.
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