FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
4 Plus 1, Raised to a Higher Power
American Mathematical Society Names 5 NYU-Poly Mathematics Faculty to Inaugural Class
of Fellows
NEW YORK, December 20, 2012 – The American Mathematical Society (AMS) selected four
of the five full professors in the Polytechnic Institute of New York University (NYU-Poly)
Mathematics Department to its inaugural class of Fellows of the AMS. An NYU-Poly professor
emeritus was also selected.
The Fellows of the AMS designation recognizes members who have made outstanding
contributions to the creation, exposition, advancement, communication and utilization of
mathematics. Among the goals of the program are to create an enlarged class of mathematicians
recognized by their peers as distinguished for their contributions to the profession and to honor
excellence.
The NYU-Poly professors chosen for the honor are Department Head Erwin Lutwak, Deane
Yang, Yisong Yang and Gaoyong Zhang, as well as Professor Emeritus Lesley M. Sibner.
“NYU-Poly’s faculty and students take special pride in the scholarship of Professors Lutwak,
Yang, Yang, Zhang and Sibner,” said NYU-Poly Acting President and Provost Katepalli R.
Sreenivasan. “By being named 2013 Fellows of AMS, their peers formally recognize them as
accomplished mathematicians. This honor demonstrates that exceptional scholarship can be
fostered in small departments such as the Mathematics Department at NYU-Poly. I congratulate
them on this honor.”
Three of the professors – Lutwak, Deane Yang and Zhang – are widely recognized for their
collaborative scholarship on convex geometric analysis and its connections to electrical
engineering. They regularly publish peer-reviewed research in not only mathematical journals
but also electrical engineering ones – which is rare for pure mathematicians. Reconstructing the
shapes of three-dimensional CAT-scan images is just one of the ultimate applications of convex
geometric analysis.
Yisong Yang's areas of research are partial differential equations and mathematical physics. His
contributions include construction of vortices in supersymmetric field theory, which are essential
for the quark confinement mechanism, derivation of universal growth laws relating energy and
topology for knots arising in a quantum field theory model in arbitrary dimensions, and existence
theory for cosmic strings, which are responsible for matter accretion and galaxy formation in the
early universe.
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Sibner works on nonlinear partial differential equations and gauge field theory. She constructed
the original version of a nonlinear, non-regular Hodge theory. She has many results about
removing point singularities in Yang-Mills connections. She showed the existence of nonminimal solutions to the Yang-Mills equations over the four sphere. More recently, she has
shown the existence of singular connections on the four sphere with holonomy. She recently
demonstrated the existence of hyperbolic Higgs monopoles with arbitrary mass at infinity, which
may have connections to the illusive Higgs boson. She also organized scientific meetings as
associate secretary of AMS.
The AMS is the world’s largest and most influential society dedicated to mathematical research,
scholarship and education.
About Polytechnic Institute of New York University
Polytechnic Institute of New York University (formerly Polytechnic University), an affiliated
institute of New York University, is a comprehensive school of engineering, applied sciences,
technology and research, and is rooted in a 158-year tradition of invention, innovation and
entrepreneurship: i2e. The institution, founded in 1854, is the nation’s second-oldest private
engineering school. In addition to its main campus in New York City at MetroTech Center in
downtown Brooklyn, it also offers programs at sites throughout the region, around the globe and
remotely through NYUe-Poly. NYU-Poly is an integral part of NYU Abu Dhabi, NYU Shanghai
and the NYU Center for Urban Science and Progress (CUSP) in downtown Brooklyn. For more
information, visit www.poly.edu.
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Note to editors:
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Contact:
Kathleen Hamilton
718-260-3792 office
347-843-9782 mobile
hamilton@poly.edu