Kamil Duszenko Award for outstanding achievements in Mathematics

April 12, 2024

The winner of Kamil Duszenko Award in 2023 is Lei Chen.

Lei  Chen  is  Assistant  Professor  of mathematics at the University of Maryland.  She obtained her BSc in mathematics  from  Peking  University and  PhD  from  the  University of Chicago under the direction of Benson  Farb.  She has done pioneering work on the structure  of  mapping  class groups, braid groups, configuration spaces, and the homeomorphism groups of manifolds with special focus on the  interactions  between  such  objects.  For example, Chen has a series of major results (joint and solo) on the generalized  Nielsen realization problem, asking whether  mapping class groups and braid groups can be realized by homeomorphisms, and an‐ other on the classification of morphisms between braid groups and related section problems.

Her hobby is singing, snowboard and tennis.

May 28, 2023

The winner of Kamil Duszenko Award in 2023 is Nick Salter.

Nick Salter received his PhD in 2017 at the University of Chicago, under the supervision of Benson Farb. He was an NSF postdoc at Harvard and Columbia, and Ritt Assistant professor at Columbia. He is currently Assistant Professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Nick is working at the interface of geometric group theory and complex algebraic geometry. Among his achievements are answering a question of Donaldson on which simple closed curves can be vanishing cycles for nodal degenerations of smooth curves in the complete linear system for an ample line bundle on a toric surface, and confirming a conjecture of Griffiths-Schmid that the monodromy group of an algebraic family of complex varieties is arithmetic for Atiyah-Kodaira manifolds. He also solved a series of well-known open problems on the topology of the spaces of abelian differentials and versal deformation spaces. A unifying theme in his research is that of monodromy groups.

Nick likes to cook a lot. He is especially big fan of the cookbooks of Yotam Ottolenghi and J. Kenji Lopez Alt, and once took an Indian cooking class from Ranjana Bhargava, who is Manjul’s aunt. His wife and he also brew beer.

May 28, 2021

The winner of the Kamil Duszenko Award in 2021 is Jingyin Huang.

Jingyin Huang received his PhD in 2015 from the Courant Institute at New York University under the supervision of Bruce Kleiner. He has held postdoctoral positions at McGill University and at the Max Planck Institute in Bonn, and is currently an Assistant Professor at the Ohio State University.

Jingyin has made impressive contributions to quasi-isometric rigidity of various kinds of groups with some form of nonpositive curvature. He has extensively studied right-angled Artin groups via CAT(0) cube complexes, large-type Artin groups via systolicity, and finite type and FC-type Artin groups via the Helly property. More recently he has been interested in measure equivalence, further expanding the scope of his research. His achievements and promise in geometric group theory were recognized with a 2022 Sloan Research Fellowship.

As a hobby he composes classical Chinese music.

We would like to congratulate awardee on his remarkable work and wish him many successes in the years to come. 

May 28, 2019

The winner of the Kamil Duszenko Award in 2019 is Kathryn Mann from Brown University.

Kathryn Mann received her PhD from the University of Chicago in 2014 under the supervision of Benson Farb, and is currently a Manning Assistant Professor of Mathematics at Brown University. Previously, she held a Morrey Visiting Assistant Professorship at UC Berkeley, a postdoctoral position at MSRI, and a visiting position at the Institut de mathématiques de Jussieu. 

Among her accolades is an Alfred P. Sloan Foundation Fellowship (2019), an NSF Career Award (2019), and the Mary Ellen Rudin young researcher award (2017). 

Mann has developed a broad research program which concentrates on homeomorphism and diffeomorphism groups of manifolds, especially in low dimensions. Among her major achievements is a characterization of geometric representations of closed surface groups into homeomorphisms of the circle. Geometric representations come from embeddings as lattices in Lie groups.  Mann proved that geometric representations of closed surface groups are globally rigid, meaning that their dynamics do not change under any deformation.  
In joint work with Maxime Wolff, she established the converse to this theorem, showing that rigid representations of closed surface groups are geometric.

Kathryn Mann is a renowned educator, deeply engaged in involvement of undergraduate and graduate students in topology, and she is involved in a large number of outreach activities. She has given many talks, including several directed at a general audience. 

Among her hobbies she is an avid cyclist.  

We would like to congratulate Kathryn on her excellent work and superb achievements ad wish her many successes in the future.

May 20, 2019

The winner of the Kamil Duszenko Award (2017) THOMAS KOBERDA will give a public lecture Turing machines, complexity theory and cryptography

IM PAN, Warszawa, 8 Śniadeckich Street
Friday, 24th May, 13:30, room: 321

Instytut Matematyczny UWr,
Wrocław, 2/4 Grunwaldzki Square
Saturday, 1st June, 12:45, auditorium HS

Sept. 16, 2017

On the 16th September 2017 Kate Juschenko, the winner of the second edition of the Kamil Duszenko Award visited Wrocław, where she gave a public lecture "The Banach-Tarski Paradox". The event took place at the Institute of Mathematics, Univeristy of Wrocław.

Before the lecture the Mayor of Wrocław, Rafał Dutkiewicz, came to meet Kate and congratulate her on winning the award. He was deeply interested in the topic of her talk.

Abstract:

The Banach-Tarski Paradox is the famous "doubling the ball" paradox, which claims that by using the axiom of choice it is possible to take a solid ball in 3-dimensional space, cut it up into finitely many pieces and, moving them using only rotation and translation, reassemble the pieces into two balls the same size as the original. Or short: the ball is equi-decomposable with two copies of itself. For the ball, five pieces are sufficient to do this; it cannot be done with fewer than five.  There is an even stronger version of the paradox: Any two bounded subsets (of 3-dimensional Euclidean space R3) with non-empty interior are equi-decomposable. In other words, a marble can be cut up into finitely many pieces and reassembled into a planet. We will discuss how exactly to do this.

May 29, 2016

Thomas Church (Stanford University), the first winner of the Kamil Duszenko Award (2015) for outstanding work in the field of mathematics will be visiting Poland in June 2016. 

During his stay Tom is going to present public talk „The cap set problem” which is designed for pupils and students of high schools/secondary schools and does not require special mathematical background:

• on Monday 6th June 2016 at 12:15 at the Institute of Mathematics Polish Academy of Sciences, room 321 in Warsaw ( Śniadeckich Street 8)

• on Wednesday 8th June 2016 at 14:00 at the Institute of Mathematics University of Wrocław, room HS, Wrocław (Grunwaldzki Square 2/4)

Feel invited, join us and enjoy maths!

May 28, 2015

Chair of the Award Committee, professor Tadeusz Januszkiewicz, has announced the winner of the Kamil Duszenko Award 2015.

The Award goes to Thomas Church from Stanford University.

Professor Tadeusz Januszkiewicz congratulated the winner on his outstanding success and expressed his word of gratitude to the members of the Committee, members of the Jury and the Nominators for their excellent work.

Information about granting the Award can be also found at the websites of Stanford University, University of Wrocław, Institute of Mathematics of the Polish Academy of Sciences, Mathematical Olympiad and the Wrocław Mathematicians Foundation. You may also check at the Geometric Group Theory website.