NEWS AND HIGHLIGHTS

Professor Richard M. Schoen joins as Chair of the 2021 HLMA Scientific Committee

Hang Lung Mathematics Awards (HLMA) is honored to have Professor Richard M. Schoen — 2017 Wolf Prize Laureate in Mathematics, and Distinguished Professor of Mathematics and Excellence in Teaching Chair at the University of California, Irvine —join as Chair of the 2021 HLMA Scientific Committee, the academic and adjudicating body of the competition.

Professor Schoen is a world’s top mathematician in differential geometry and general relativity. He received his PhD in 1977 from Stanford University. In 1979, together with his former doctoral supervisor, Professor Shing Tung Yau, he proved the fundamental positive energy theorem in general relativity. In 1983, Professor Schoen was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship, and in 1984, he obtained a complete solution to the Yamabe problem on compact manifolds. For his work on the Yamabe problem, Professor Schoen was awarded the Bôcher Memorial Prize in 1989.

In 2007, Professor Schoen, along with Professor Simon Brendle, proved the differentiable sphere theorem, a fundamental result in the study of manifolds of positive sectional curvature. He has also made fundamental contributions to the regularity theory of minimal surfaces and harmonic maps.

Professor Schoen is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences as well as the National Academy of Sciences, and he is also a fellow of the American Mathematical Society. He was awarded the Lobachevsky Medal and Prize by Kazan Federal University in 2017.