2014-12-94

NewsAndré Lichnerowicz Prize in PoissonGeometry – 2014Rui L. Fernandes (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA)The André Lichnerowicz Prize was established in 2008to be awarded for notable contributions to Poisson geometry.The prize is awarded every two years at the “InternationalConference on Poisson Geometry in Mathematicsand Physics” to researchers who have completedtheir doctorates at most eight years before the year ofthe conference.The prize was named in memory of André Lichnerowicz(1915–1998) whose work was fundamental in establishingPoisson geometry as a branch of mathematics. In2014, it was awarded by a jury composed of the membersof the scientific and advisory committees of the biennialPoisson Conference. The prize awarded 500 USD toeach recipient, the funds provided by the host institutionof the conference, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.***The 2014 prize was awarded toDavid Li-Bland and Ioan Mărcuţon 4 August 2014 at the University of Illinoisat Urbana-Champaign.***David Li-Bland received a PhD in mathematics at theUniversity of Toronto in 2012 under the direction ofEckhard Meinrenken. He is currently an NSF PostdoctoralFellow at UC Berkeley. Li-Bland has made importantcontributions to Dirac and Poisson geometry. In histhesis, he introduced and studied the infinitesimal counterpartsof Courant groupoids and Dirac groupoids. Incollaboration with Severa, he developed a theory ofmoduli spaces of flat connections on “quilted surfaces”,with varying structure groups for different regions ofthe surface. They found that these moduli spaces havenatural quasi-Poisson structures, and suggested a universalquantisation scheme applicable in this setup. Otheraccomplishments of Li-Bland include an integrationprocedure for exact Courant algebroids (with Severa),a classification of Dirac Lie groups (with Meinrenken)and the linear “derived” symplectic category (withWeinstein).Ioan Mărcuţ received his PhD in mathematics fromthe University of Utrecht in 2013, under the supervisionof Marius Crainic. He is currently a Postdoctoral Fellowat the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.Mărcuţ has made fundamental contributions to the globalgeometry of Poisson structures, most notably through his(semi-)local forms and rigidity results. Such results rangefrom generalisations of Conn’s linearisation theorem toexplicit computations of moduli spaces of Poisson structures.First of all, he extended the geometric approachof Crainic-Fernandes, proving a generalisation of Conn’stheorem around symplectic leaves. He also clarified andsimplified the original analytic approach of Conn, makingit available for the study of other geometric structuresand allowing him to prove a much more general rigidityresult (around Poisson submanifolds); as an application,he provided the first explicit computation of a non-trivialPoisson moduli space. Other accomplishments of Mărcuţinclude a direct geometric proof of the existence of symplecticrealisations (with Crainic), the study of obstructionsand deformations of log-symplectic structures (withOsorno Torres) and the study of transversals in Poissongeometry (with Frejlich).150th Anniversary of the LondonMathematical SocietyStephen Huggett (University of Plymouth, UK)On the 16th January 1865 the London Mathematical Societyheld its inaugural meeting, at University CollegeLondon. Augustus De Morgan was elected its first President.The Society grew rapidly, and quickly acquired ahigh reputation abroad: for example, in 1870 MichelChasles commented approvingly on it, and encouragedmathematicians in France to follow suit. (Here we shouldalso note that the Moscow Mathematical Society wasfounded one year earlier, in 1864: happy anniversary toour Russian colleagues!)There were monthly meetings at which papers wereread, notably by people such as Cayley, Sylvester, Clif-8 EMS Newsletter December 2014