Congratulations to Dr. Arend Bayer on winning the Adams Prize

Cambridge University has announced that this year's Adams Prize was won jointly by Dr. Arend Bayer of our School of Mathematics and Dr. Tom Coates of Imperial College London. The Adams Prize is one of its oldest and most prestigious prizes. The Adams Prize is awarded jointly each year by the Faculty of Mathematics and St John’s College to a young (normally under 40 years of age), UK-based researcher doing first class international research in the Mathematical Sciences. This year’s topic was “Algebraic Geometry”.

Professor Raymond Goldstein, Chairman of the Adams Prize Adjudicators, said:

“Arend Bayer has made outstanding contributions to spaces of stability conditions on derived categories. His work has novel applications in key areas of modern algebraic geometry, including spaces of Bridgeland stability conditions on derived categories of Calabi-Yau threefolds, wall-crossing and the minimal model program in the birational geometry of moduli spaces."

“Tom Coates's work answers many fundamental questions in Gromov-Witten theory, quantum cohomology, mirror symmetry and birational geometry. These include the quantum Lefschetz hyperplane section theorem, the crepant resolution and wall-crossing conjectures, and the modularity of the generating function for Gromov-Witten invariants of Calabi-Yau threefolds.”

The Adams Prize is named after the mathematician John Couch Adams and was endowed by members of St John’s College.  It is currently worth approximately £15,000.  It commemorates Adams’s role in the discovery of the planet Neptune, through calculation of the discrepancies in the orbit of Uranus.

In 2010 the Adams Prize was awarded to Professor Jacques Vanneste of the School. In 2008 the Adams Prize was awarded to Professor Tom Bridgeland of Sheffield University, who obtained his Ph.D. in Edinburgh.