IMS Founding Director Xiuxiong Chen has been honored with the rank of Distinguished Professor by the State University of New York Board of Trustees in November. The honor caps off an extraordinary year for Professor Chen. He received the Oswald Veblen Prize in Geometry by the American Mathematical Society in January, together with Simon Donaldson and Song Sun, for their resolution of a long-standing conjecture on Fano manifolds. This was followed by an award from Simons Foundation in June as a 2019 Simons Investigator, a prize that carries $100K of research funds per year for five years and renewable for another five. In addition to the aforementioned work on Fano manifolds, considered to be the biggest breakthrough in differential geometry since Perelman’s work on the Poincaré conjecture, Professor Chen, together with B. Wang, confirmed the Hamilton-Tian conjecture on the Kähler-Ricci flow; and with J.R. Cheng, found a groundbreaking a priori estimate for Kähler metrics, under assumptions on the scalar curvature, which led to the solution of the fundamental Donaldson geodesic stability conjecture and the properness conjecture.
The distinguished professorship at SUNY is conferred upon faculty having achieved international prominence and a distinguished reputation within the individual’s chosen field through groundbreaking research and exemplary scholarship. This is SUNY’s highest and most revered academic ranking of distinction. The honorees of the rank are role models for students and faculty on all SUNY campuses and their work are of such character that it has the potential to elevate the standards of scholarship of colleagues both within and beyond their academic fields.
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