The University of Chicago’s Ngô Bao Châu and Dam Thanh Son are among the 13 mathematicians, theoretical physicists and theoretical computer scientists who have been selected as 2013 Simons Investigators.
The Simons Foundation will provide each investigator with $500,000 of support over the next five years, enabling them to undertake long-term study of fundamental questions.
Ngô, a 2010 Fields medalist, is the Francis and Rose Yuen Distinguished Service Professor in Mathematics. Son is the University Professor of Physics.
The foundation’s announcement of its 2013 investigators noted, “Ngô’s proof of the fundamental lemma, a deep conjecture of Langlands, inaugurated a new geometric approach to problems in harmonic analysis based on arithmetic geometry. His ideas have already inspired work in many areas, including mathematical physics and geometric representation theory.”
The announcement further stated, “Dam Thanh Son is one of the rare theorists whose work has deep impact across several subfields of physics. He has written important papers in quantum chromodynamics, theoretical nuclear physics, condensed matter physics and atomic physics. Perhaps the most significant of his many contributions concern the duality between black holes in anti-de Sitter space and strongly interacting fluids.”
—Prof. Jacqueline Stewart
