EMS Newsletter June 2010 - European Mathematical Society ...

MacPherson receives the prize from the ETH president.
effort to compute and to predict reality, you very quickly
run into serious problems. The mathematics just does not
behave as you would expect. But you need not be a mathematician
to experience what can happen. Just swim into
such a turbulence in the stream or into a wave in the sea
and see how you get yourself into problems.
Singularities can be studied in different ways using
analysis, or they can be regarded as geometric phenomena.
For the latter, their study demands a deep geometric intuition
and profound geometric insight; this is what MacPherson
masters in a most striking and extremely artful way.
He combines geometric visions with algebraic rigidity.
If you study his work you see that it is glowing with elegance
and profound in depth. He was consistently ahead
of his time, developing new ideas and new approaches
– ones often not shaped by the main streams of mathematical
thought of the day but rather characterized by
great vision. Repeatedly, the mathematical community
came to embrace, extend and apply his ideas and results
as they caught up with that vision.
MacPherson very often collaborated with quite distinguished
co-authors, amplifying the spectrum of his
mathematical charisma. These collaborations include:
• Fulton-MacPherson (1976–1995) Intersection theory,
characteristic classes, enumerative geometry, singular
spaces.
• Goresky-MacPherson (since 1977) Intersection homology,
stratified Morse theory.
• Borho-MacPherson (1981–1989) Nilpotent orbits,
characteristic classes, resolution of singularities, representation
theory of Weyl groups.
MacPherson’s connections with the Swiss mathematical
community date back to 1983 when he participated in and
significantly contributed to the famous Borel seminar, a
joint seminar organized by several Swiss Universities, including
ETH Zurich, Lausanne, Geneva, Bern and Basel.
The seminar was initiated by Armand Borel, one of the
most distinguished Swiss mathematicians of the last century.
The topic of the seminar was the Goresky-MacPherson
intersection homology and its use for the cohomol-
News
ogy of arithmetic groups, one of the main research areas
of Armand Borel. In this connection, mention should be
made of MacPherson’s papers written jointly with Harder,
which have a similar mathematical context.
This illustrates only a small proportion of the work
of MacPherson, for it spans a wide spectrum of contributions
in a wide range of different areas:
• Algebraic geometry and topology.
• Algebraic groups, group actions and representation
theory.
• Enumerative geometry and combinatorics.
• Locally symmetric spaces, L2-cohomology, arithmetic
groups and the Langlands program.
This list is certainly not complete and is only a representative
selection of his contribution to mathematics. He influenced
a whole generation of mathematicians by giving
them new tools to attack difficult problems and teaching
them novel geometrical, topological and algebraic ways
of thinking.
It is no surprise that MacPherson was and still is an
admirer of music and in particular of Johann Sebastian
Bach. A strong commonality exists between the work of
Bach and the work of MacPherson: simplicity, elegance
and beauty. Some people have said that he studied parts
of Bach’s work more intensively and carefully than mathematical
papers – another example of the very intimate
relationship between mathematics and music!
Abel Prize 2010
The Norwegian Academy of
Science and Letters has decided
to award the Abel Prize for
2010 to
John Torrence Tate
(University of Texas at Austin)
for his vast and lasting impact
on the theory of numbers.
The President of the Norwegian
Academy of Science and Letters, Nils Christian
Stenseth, announced the name of the 2010 Abel Laureate
at the Academy in Oslo on March 24 th . John Tate
will receive the Abel Prize from His Majesty King Harald
at an award ceremony in Oslo, Norway, May 25 th .
The Abel Prize recognizes contributions of extraordinary
depth and influence to the mathematical sciences
and has been awarded annually since 2003. It carries a
cash award of NOK 6,000,000 (close to 730,000 Euros
or US$ 1 mill.)
For more information consult the Abel Prize website
www.abelprisen.no/
EMS Newsletter June 2010 23