The CRM Advisory Committee recommended the awarding of two André-Aisenstadt Prizes for the academic year 1996-97. These went to Henri Darmon and Lisa Jeffrey, both of McGill University.

Henri DARMON (McGill)

 

HIS WORK: Henri Darmon was cited for his remarkable work in the area of elliptic curves, particularly for his refinements of the famous Birch Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture. He has also made significant contributions to research on variants of the Fermat equation. In addition to his superb research contributions, Professor Darmon is a splendid expositor and a recent paper explaining the subtleties of Wiles' work on the Shimura-Taniyama conjecture has been widely celebrated.

 

HIS STUDIES AND AFFILIATIONS:
Professor Darmon obtained his B.Sc. in Mathematics and Computer Science at McGill University in 1987 and his Ph.D. in Mathematics at Harvard University in 1991. He then spent 4 years at Princeton University before coming to McGill University where he is currently an associate professor. He has also held various visiting positions at such institutions as ETH in Zurich, the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute in Berkeley, and IHES in Paris. Henri Darmon has published more than 26 research papers and won numerous awards, among them an Alfred P. Sloan Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and an Alfred P. Sloan Research Award.

Lisa C. JEFFREY (McGill)

HER WORK: Lisa Jeffrey was awarded the André-Aisenstadt Prize for her distinguished research contributions in Symplectic Geometry and various aspects of the relation between Topology and Physics. In particular, in joint work with Frances Kirwan, she obtained a complete description of the cohomology ring of the moduli space of vector bundles on a Riemann surface solving an important conjecture of Witten. Techniques invented in the course of this work have proved useful in solving other significant problems as well.

HER STUDIES AND AFFILIATIONS:
Professor Jeffrey obtained the A.B. at Princeton University, the M.A. at Cambridge University and the Ph.D. at Oxford University in 1992 under the direction of M.F. Atiyah. She then held positions at the Institute for Advanced Study, Cambridge University, and Princeton University before coming to McGill University in 1995 where she is currently Associate Professor of Mathematics. Professor Jeffrey has written over 21 research papers and numerous review articles. Among the honors she has received are the Kusaka Memorial Prize in Physics from Princeton University and the Smith Prize from Cambridge University.

The two André-Aisenstadt prize winners gave lectures on their work at the CRM on February 28, 1997. Professor Darmon's lecture was entitled "Faltings plus epsilon et l'équation de Fermat généralisée" and Professor Jeffrey's was entitled "Flat connections on Riemann surfaces."